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Comment by samsolomon | Hacker News Reader

I have to worry every time Adobe makes an acquisition. Seldom do the products improve.

Perhaps even more troublesome, seems Adobe is buying out a company that provides or could develop competing software. Judging by discussions here there's been a lot of dissatisfaction with Adobe's retrenchment to "cloud-only" SaaS policies, and alternatives are sparse.

Likely it's not accidental that there's essentially no competition in the professional graphics software arena where Adobe products dominate. This acquisition gives the appearance of Adobe trying to maintain its monopoly, and I'm inclined to think it's not really a healthy development.

Flash Professional improved. Typekit improved and I would say Behance has improved. I know it's cool to crap on Adobe but they've gotten a lot better in recent years.

EDIT Changed Illustrator to Flash Professional. Forgot which was an acquisition.

You mean Photoshop, not Illustrator, improved? The latter was Adobe's first app and lovingly crafted by Warnock and crew.

(I know, because I saw them with my own eyes. ;-)

Ah yeah, I don't know why I said Illustrator. I might have been thinking of the Flash Professional program, which has improved but Flash itself is on its way out.

Fireworks is dead,dreamweaver almost ... and no Fireworks isnt the same product as Photoshop or Illustrator.As for flash they are removing drawing tools that are "redundant" with Illustrator.So no,everything hasnt been a lot better in recent years...

Though the adoption has fallen, ActionScript 3 was a near strict improvement over 2, and it was released a good while after the Macromedia acquisition.

It was primarily developed at Macromedia, if you don't count that Waldemar Horwat and others greatly influenced its design via the whole JS2/ES4 situation in the years prior. That's why AVM2's IR used to be called the Macromedia Intermediate Representation, for example.

There were public betas available about 6 months after the acquisition, which didn't leave Adobe much time to change anything. Even the main APIs, like those in playerglobal.swc, almost all have a copyright stamp of 2005 in them.

I don't think they've screwed up Typekit at all.

Is that a joke? For me, it's now intrusive: I can't turn off Typekit notifications and suggestions, even though I use Suitcase Fusion.

COSA After Effects has come a long way!

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