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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

It did make sense. Adobe creates authoring tools and the web is a target platform. Think of Dreamweaver.

More like used to. There is like what, a single app for prototyping which is more on the mobile side. and the rest (Dreamweaver and co) have not been significantly updated for years. There is absolutely nothing left of the Macromedia era. Creating and fostering creative communities is something Adobe completely failed at. Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks had a vibrant ecosystem of plugins which was their strength.

As for their creative products, Photoshop and In Design are still king in the industry, because formats, but for how long? People in video editing are moving to Final Cut Pro, Da Vinci Resolve and co because of the lack of significant improvements in After Effects or Premiere.

I so appreciate your call out of the loss of the Macromedia ecosystem. The tools they created not only revolutionized the web but in terms of the “creators experience” we have yet to see the parallel of Flash. It makes me sad to think that rather than let the stronger parts of the Macromedia dna infuse Adobe, it seems like Adobe forced Macromedia fit into its larger, which in certain areas has been an as yet unreplaceable loss for creatives.

> …in terms of the “creators experience” we have yet to see the parallel of Flash…

Flash Professional lives! It has a different name and targets multiple standards-based formats (HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, Flash/Adobe AIR, SVG) now: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

Um....not really. It’s barely a shell of what it was.

Flash is no longer supported by browsers. Air is not supported by Adobe. Canvas and Web Gl maybe.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2019/05/30/the-future-of-a...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3403345/where-do-brows...

Over time, I've come to think that the golden age of Flash existed because the Internet itself had not yet become fragmented across app stores, social media and mobile/desktop viewports.

In the golden age of Flash, designers only had one viewport to build for. It was easier to bring attention to them too, as FB and Twitter were relatively new and didn't explicitly favor content created on their own platform (posts + videos).

With the exponential increase in user-generated content (Snaps, YT videos, blogspam, Instagram), there's pretty much no oxygen left for creators that are building things "just because".

Not gonna lie, I got by on Dreamweaver as an amateur web dev in the early 2000s. Made me some money while I was in college studying to be something else other than being a programmer.

Those GUI web layout tools were good. It made it so simple to make a webpage.

I made a site for a car workshop in Netscape Composer for like 20USD that they hosted on the ISP homesites you used to get. A friend made one for his dad's carpentry. We knew nothing about the web or programming.

The web has degenerated as a practical tool for the common man. It is programmer and SaaS lock-in nowadays.

>The web has degenerated as a practical tool for the common man. It is programmer and SaaS lock-in nowadays.

That's not really true. I can still use Notepad to create an HTML only document (remember learning HTML?), and host it on any site, and everyone can still view it on any platform. Don't even need Dreamweaver to slice an image up to do a layout in a table. Don't even need 100s of KBs of JS libraries to download to display it.

Just ignore the hype of whatever JS library is the fad darling, and go with what you know. The end user of the website probably won't care. Only other techwheenies on the internet will chide you for using such an antiquated method, and make fun of you for not being part of the cool kids.

I rather liked Dreamweaver for static sites that needed to be user-modifiable without some complicated backend. You could establish templates with clear descriptions of the content and turn it over to the end-user relativily easily. Now, I have no idea - I wouldn’t want to try and explain markdown to a church secretary.

They also had HomeSite (originally by Allaire, then bought by Macromedia), which is also a text editor. However, it seems that they abandoned it right after acquisition of Macromedia.

originally by Allaire

Originally by Nick Bradbury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite

Yes, ColdFusion was the Allaire brothers. J.J. now does RStudio.

Ah the memories.

Homesite was great. Early versions of it were small enough you could carry it around on a 1.44mb floppy.

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