The Death of Macromedia...The Birth of a Monster

On April 18, 2005, Adobe announced that it was buying Macromedia, thus marking the beginning of a merger between the two dominant players in web graphics technologies. For decades now, Adobe has been a goliath in professional graphics for print and to some extent for the web. However, since Macromedia's reorganization around web technologies in the late 90's, many, I daresay most, professional web developers have come to rely on Macromedia's innovations in web content creation. Macromedia's Dreamweaver was the first professional-grade WYSIWYG HTML editor to create clean code. Fireworks still leads the industry in the creation of animated GIF's, better GIF and JPEG optimization algorithms, and a slew of productivity innovations such as "image slicing"...features which Adobe has been trying to duplicate without much success until recently, by shoehorning all the additional features into the Photoshop add-on program know as ImageReady. And Macromedia's Flash Player, had already become the most widely distributed piece of software in history before Adobe even started thinking about vector graphics for the web. So by the time they released Adobe LiveMotion to compete with Flash, there was a loyal and vast following for Flash. SVG, the XML-based file format proposed as the output format for LiveMotion, seemed like a pathetic and poorly disguised attempt to sneak their own SVG format into international web standards when I watched Adobe's presentation at FlashForward 2000. John Warnock was lucky not to have been booed off the stage during his presentation. I interviewed some of the people Adobe had hired to build demo projects for the Adobe presentation, and they admitted to having used Flash to build the LiveMotion presentations. I lost alot of respect for Adobe that day. Adobe still continues to develop LiveMotion, but they have consistently failed to get content creators to use the SVG format. Why? Because everyone is quite happy with Flash. So, Adobe is now buying Macromedia and effectively destroying their only competition. For all of us content creators, this is a very bad sign. Combined with the coming browser war between Firefox and Explorer, this could literally plunge us right back into the dark ages of web design. Of course, Peak Oil is going to do that anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter anyway. None of us are going to have jobs in 10 years when nobody can afford the electricity to power their computers. Too bad.

The last person of decency in the Republican party?

Could John McCain actually qualify as a decent person despite being a member of the treacherous, treasonous, villanous, evil-doing Republican party? I doubt it, but check this shit out:

[excerpt from MoveOn.org mailing list]
Last Friday MoveOn members placed more than 40,000 calls to Congress opposing the "nuclear option," and two days later Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) announced his opposition to this radical plan to break the rules and ram through extreme judges. McCain is now the third Republican senator on record against the "nuclear option."

Now I don't know if MoveOn.org had anything to do with McCain's decision, in fact, I kinda doubt it. Either way, I'd now like to give a big shout out to Senator John McCain for consistently breaking with the Republican party's ass-fucking-of-modern-civilization whenever it seems both rational and possible to do without destroying his own career. He has often towed the party line and swallowed his tongue at times when any man of decency should have been screaming bloody fucking hellfire and damnation to his constituents, but sometimes he has the courage to stand up to those ignorant mouth-breathing fucktards, and that's worthy of some kudos. That's why today, as I whack off (again), I won't be thinking about that blonde chick that pours a pitcher of milk into her cunt and then gets fisted. No, today, I'll be daydreaming of John McCain going on a shooting spree during his next visit to the white house. Johnny, get your gun. Oh wait, he's not invited to the White House anymore, I forgot. They nixed McCain from the list of potential White House visitors back when he wouldn't go along with the Swiff Boat Veterans bullshit about John Kerry's Vietnam war record. I still have a hard time believing that during the last election, the Democrats were hurt by a group of (white) cocksuckers, who set about criticizing John Kerry, someone who actually did his duty and went to Vietnam, while working on behalf of George Bush, a candidate who clearly dodged the war. That one still makes my head spin. That's why I've given up on groups like MoveOn.org. They are Democrats. They can't win when they are dealt aces. They should have fucking buried the Bush campaign during the last election, but they didn't count on a voting population that was completely uninterested in reality...but I digress.

Now where the hell did I put that Vaseline?