[Framers] FM 2017 Feature Request: Restore color and scaling to menu icons

[Peter Gold]

​With all due respect, Stefan:

You're pointing out Adobe's longest-running lame excuse for denying
development resources to FrameMaker. Other Adobe products adjusted to
high-resolution screens long ago.

There's always been the sense in replies to user requests, that users who
ask for product improvements and enhancements are whiners who aren't
satisfied with an already-great product.

One of the fundamental issues that have crippled FM development, going back
to the 1990s is it's original engineering architecture. Over the years,
it's been patched in many truly genius ways, to be able to provide more and
newer features. However, the more complicated the patchwork has become, the
more difficult it has become to evolve.

When InDesign was introduced, one of its claims was that the engineering
model - a core engine that hosts plug-in and add-on modules for
independently-designed features- would make it simpler to maintain and
evolve. Even with this more-advanced engineering concept and design,
software development demands resources to move ahead in a timely way to
remain competitive, and even to leap ahead of competitors. It's a hope; the
reality is that product advancement is slow, demanding, and expensive.

Even with the Creative Suite engineering model - applications that share
common user interface appearances, some common features and operations, and
some underlying engineering - evolving the CS products remains demanding
and difficult.

Over the years, ID's book-publishing features have gone from non-existent
to nearly-equal to FM's book features. ID's electronic-publishing features
have evolved greatly because of intense competition.

The point is that, even with a sufficient development budget, advancing
ID's more-flexible engineering model, takes resources, and takes time.

Adobe's long-time resistance to re-engineering FM's underlying technology,
so it can evolve more efficiently, is more than disappointing. Repeating
the same old "we don't have the resources to honor these requests" really
means "we don't have the will to invest any more than the minimum in
development." It really means "we really don't believe in the product.
We're amazed that it's survived this long. We're willing to keep it alive
during its expected decline."

I participated in FrameMaker, InDesign, and Acrobat pre-release programs
for many years. These industry-leading tools have helped form and change
the technical-communications and publishing industries.

Early-on, before Adobe bought Frame Technology, FrameMaker running on UNIX,
was adopted by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, for
their documentation. These are the folks whose work led to the discovery of
the Higgs Boson, one of the universe's fundamental particles. Over the
decades, thousands of world-class corporations, research and educational
institutions, and governmentally-regulated industries have relied on
FrameMaker for creating and maintaining the information repositories they
develop and exchange across the world community.

The countless technical authors and communicators who have used FrameMaker
to create this priceless collection of information deserve respect when
they suggest and request improvements in the product they rely upon daily
and know intimately.

Perhaps it's time, within Adobe, to give FM the world-class recognition its
earned over the decades, give it the development budget it deserves, and
retire the obsolete engineering model, as well as the obsolete lame excuse.

One reality to consider is that, if there are no compelling features in the
new release, Adobe's making a good case for customers not to upgrade. Why
pay more and get less? It's a downward spiral: Lost sales mean less revenue
which means less money for future development.

​Just my opinion.​

Lin Sims <ljsims.ml at gmail.com>
8:04 AM (39 minutes ago)
to Stefan, Frame
OK, I think I misunderstood what you were trying to tell me, for which I
apologize.

Let me see if I understand now.

Adobe had to put a lot of effort into redesigning the menu/toolbar icons so
that they'd work properly on high-resolution screens. It didn't have the
resources to create those icons in both color and the Adobe "unicolor"
standard if it wanted to add other features and to fix bugs, so it decided
to go with the corporate standard interface so that those resources could
be applied to adding features and fixing bugs.

Do I have it now?

If so, I'm going to have to heave a heavy sigh of disappointment, because I
can't really argue with the decision. I'd put bug fixing at the top of the
list of priorities myself. I'm just sorry I don't currently have the
opportunity to take advantage of the high resolution icons. (My home laptop
is 6 years old, but I got a top of the line gaming rig so it isn't
practical or necessary to replace it yet.)

If coloring the icons turns out to be too much effort, is it possible to
allow users to choose to use icons from the larger sets rather than the
ones that would show up based on the screen resolution? Or would that just
get weird?

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 9:12 PM, Stefan Gentz <gentz at adobe.com> wrote:

> I understood this, Lin.
>
> That's why I wrote:
>
> We will discuss this over the next weeks internally and explore the
> possibilities to satisfy the wishes from both user groups – those who like
> the colored icons and those who prefer uni-colored icons.
>
> The change to make FrameMaker compatible with high-res / high-dpi,
> scalable screens was a very heavy, but necessary and unavoidable
> investment. And the decision for the icons was to focus on one "theme",
> based on Adobe internal requirements, extensive market research, customer
> interviews and user feedback and involved UI and UX experts.
>
>
> Also, please understand, that due to huge the amount of icons (and every
> single of them in multiple sizes) providing both uni-colored and
> multi-colored would have been a substantial effort. Due to the changes in
> the UI technology all icons had to be created from the scratch.
>
> And after all we need to carefully balance between "cosmetic" dicersity
> and other all the other important wishes and requirements from the
> community.
>
>
> We all know how it is: When we invest now in colored icons because 33
> users have voted on a bug report that it is important for them, thousands
> of other users will come and say: What the heck, why are you wasting your
> efforts on the color of icons instead of bringing us feature a, b, c, d
> that we are asking for since xy?
>
>
> But don't get me wrong now, please. As I said, we appreciate the feedback
> from the frameusers community. And we heard you loud and clear. And as I
> said we will discuss it internally over the next weeks and explore what we
> can do to make you as our core group of users happy :-)
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> *Stefan Gentz*
>
> Global Evangelist, Technical Communication