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

Fri Mar 17 11:09:30 PDT 2017

Hi Peter,

thanks for your honest feedback! Please allow me to answer a little bit more comprehensive (sorry, if it became a little bit long …)

> 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.

I cannot comment on the past as I joined Adobe just a little bit more than a year ago (and personally never made this experience), but I can say for sure that not a single one of my colleagues in the Adobe TechComm team as it is today has in any way an attitude like this. In the contrary. We are all very passionate about the product, actively listen to the users and take every feedback and suggestion very seriously. I know this sounds very much like marketing blah-blah, but that’s exactly how it is. Since I started at Adobe I had virtually hundreds of one on one conversations on conferences around the world actively collecting feedback, channeling it and bringing it into the system. A huge amount of this went into the 2017 release.

> 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.

Absolutely! I could not agree more on this. And you can be sure that everyone in the Adobe TechComm team has exactly this attitude and appreciation of the community. Again, I cannot comment on the past, but both the product management and myself listen very carefully to all the suggestions and requests for improvements.

We do listen to the community and in both the 2015 and 2017 release we have implemented a lot of requests from the community. Some things are very small and might not even get noticed. But in both releases there are several thousand (!) smaller and bigger changes and improvements based on exactly such feedback.

E.g. some users wanted FrameMaker to remember the “Find/Change” history. Done in 2017. Others told us, that the organization of entries in the find/change drop downs is chaotic and not logical to access. Fixed in the 2017 release. Others wanted to get the behavior in the “Files save as” dialog changed to stay in the same file format of the currently open file and change the file extension automatically when you change the fle format in the drop down. Done in the 2017 release. Others wanted get a faster and more easy way to insert graphics. Done in the 2017 release. Others wanted to get several dialogs resizable. Done in the 2017 release. Others wanted to get the spelling checkers better and behave differently (not so “over-aggressive”). We updated them to the latest engines available on the market in the 2017 release and changed the behavior to match the writing process better. Others wanted to get a better overview in the conditional tags pod by seeing the colors of the conditions. Done in the 2017 release. Others wanted to get text tabs back in the designer pods and get rid of the icons. Done in the 2017 release. Others asked us to finally get rid of the old, wired console window and make it a pod. Guess what? Done in the 2017 release. Others strongly requested to make dynamic content feature available for DITA based in attributes. Done in the 2017 release. Several DITA authors asked us to show the current element position in bread crump like path. Done in the 2017 release. Others complained about several issues when authoring DITA (like the behavior when you click return in a list item). Done in the 2017 release. Others wanted to make us the HTML5 output Section 508 compliant. Done in the 2017 release. Or improve the way CSS are generated and managed. Done in the 2017 release. Others demanded support for high-dpi screens. Done in the 2017 release. Others wanted to have the setting for borders and text symbols a “global” setting and finally no longer a “by document” setting. Done in the 2017 release. And so on. In total there are over 1,300 smaller and bigger changes in FrameMaker 2017 and most of them are based on feedback from the users.

> 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.

In the 2015 and 2017 releases a huge amount of work went into the core of the product. In Fm 2017 the font engine was completely reengineered (to make FrameMaker compatible with RTL languages (like Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew) and complex script languages (ike Thai). Today you can author virtually all languages in the world with FrameMaker. In the 2017 release a huge part of FrameMaker was reengineered to make FrameMaker’s user interface technology fit for the future. Beside this a lot of ground work in the code was done to set the foundation for future developments.
Most of this is not visible to the end-user, but it was necessary ground work in the background that had to be done. In many aspects FrameMaker 2017 is a much more modern product today “under the hood” and in many aspects the foundation is set for the future. It might not be “visible”, but we had to do this and you can be sure, that we will continue to make FrameMaker the best tool for technical writers.

> 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.

Oh yes! Believe me, everyone in the Adobe TechComm team would love to get a bigger budget. And we’re fighting for it everyday competing with other business units J

But to be realistic … just look at every normal company. I guess more or less all of you have made this experience: How big is the budget of the marketing department? And how small is the budget of the tech comm department? Right. And guess what? Adobe has excellent tools for creatives and marketing … and excellent tools for TechComm. I guess you get the idea J

Regards,
Stefan Gentz
Adobe Worldwide TechComm Evangelist
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From: knowhowpro at gmail.com [mailto:knowhowpro at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Peter Gold
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2017 15:42
To: An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker software. <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Cc: Stefan Gentz <gentz at adobe.com>; Lin Sims <ljsims.ml at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Framers] FM 2017 Feature Request: Restore color and scaling to menu icons

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<mailto:ljsims.ml at gmail.com>>

8:04 AM (39 minutes ago)
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[https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif]
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to Stefan, Frame
[https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif]

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<mailto: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
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