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I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

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Re: I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

#51
Jason Kottke writes:

When I heard the news, my immediate reaction was not positive. [...] No one I know is filled with joy when using Adobe products...mostly the opposite. Typekit is a great service; I hope Adobe keeps it that way.

(http://kottke.org/11/10/adobe-acquires-typekit)

This sums up my reaction, as well: I use Adobe products because I have to, not because I want to.

I assume you'd disagree with folks like Jason and I about the joylessness of Adobe products, but I'd guess that we'd all agree of the importance of keeping TypeKit simple and elegant.

So what safeguards, if any, have you been able to put in place to ensure that TypeKit maintains its je ne sais quoi as it becomes an Adobe product?

Re: I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe has shown no contempt for HTML5, while HTML5 pundits continually rip Flash. Adobe has repeatedly stated that their Flash product and their Web products serve different goals and markets, and they are in the business of providing cross-platform solutions wherever there is a demand. If you watched the keynote today, you would have seen that Adobe itself is creating some of the best HTML5 / CSS3 dependent applicat…

I am paying attention, trust me, but I am a little dubious, too, considering Adobe's past. If Adobe tries to throw money at bringing down HTML5, I surely hope this is not the beginning of that. May Typekit continue to thrive and improve without the bloat and closeness that Adobe likes to incorporate into its products.

What part of Adobe's past are you referring to? The part where they support open web standards? Or are you merely referring to Flash, that component that was doing more for "standards" back when browsers weren't.

How quickly people forget.

Re: I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

#53

Oh. HN/AMA, long time coming I'd say. Q: Say I have a product or a service that I think might be a very good fit for Adobe, including a realistic, well thought out business side of things. Is there a way to pitch it to the people of your position if I have absolutely no connections in Adobe? This is a hypothetical question, just trying to understand options for seeding initial acquisition interest. Thanks.

Yes, go to Mars Bar (7th and Brannan) and start buying people beers.

Re: I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

#54
[EDIT 2: I deleted my first posting of the following comment, out of concern that it might not be appropriate. But darned it, it was a frustrating enough experience -- and one that others should not have to go through -- that I'm reposting my comment. My apology to anyone (other than Adobe) whom this may irritate.]

[EDIT: I'm hesitant to use HN for what might -- perhaps legitimately -- be seen as a rant. But this may be my only opportunity to make someone at Adobe having any degree of authority or ability to communicate with the relevant management, aware of this problem. Further, we are all at the mercy of Adobe technical support, to the degree we need it. And this applies, in this specific context, to the many students and staff on this site who might face issues in particular with regard to academic licensing.]

OT, but I recently spent in aggregate 7.5 hours [1] getting one your tech support to walk over to a manager and convince them to generate a correct license code for a thoroughly documented academic purchase, after the third-party licensing vendor who was supposed to do so failed to and then only, finally responded to an Adobe tech support rep, whom they told that they had no clue what license the Adobe tech support rep was talking about.

Said license generation and delivery took only 10 minutes, once Adobe tech support -- AFTER 7.5 HOURS of phone calls -- finally did it directly, themselves -- and for the first time, finally, did it correctly after also following my instructions as to what specific type of license was needed. (Rhetorical: What is wrong with this picture?)

Briefly put, someone needs to straighten out the delivery of secondary CS 4 license codes for support of academic purchasers of CS 5.x who are running Win XP 32 bit (said support being clearly described on the product package and in its marketing).

I realize that, officially, you are not the correct party to address, but since you're the only member of Adobe management who is likely to even see a comment on my part, let me just say that in this case your technical support, while always polite on the phone, sucked in terms of results and follow-up; you took several hundred dollars from the person I was helping while failing for over a month to deliver the product (license code) and support that was clearly described on the package; and on this basis I, personally, [changed to calm my tone down] cannot wish your company well.

(I was tempted to send your corporate HQ an invoice for my time, but I figured they'd be too obtuse and/or dismissive to get the point.)

1. I would never have spent that kind of time on the endeavor, except for the nature of my relationship with the purchaser.

Re: I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

#55
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those are actually any good. I installed the Travelocity app, and after fighting with the keyboard to select the airport from a dropdown, I got a javascript error that rendered the app useless. PhoneGap does not make good apps.

Phonegap has nothing to do with form inputs, and is used to access native phone functionality (camera, address book, location, device information etc). I'm building mobile app with HTML5/CSS3/Backbone.js/PhoneGap and it's an excellent stack that allows you to build native-like apps for multiple OS's. Everyone I've demo'd the app to has no idea it's not written in Obj-C..

You're absolutely right. I've spent hours debugging strange form input behavior related to quirks in Mobile Safari / UIWebView which are hardly Phonegap's fault. It really comes down to optimization and ironing out all of the wrinkles, though it can be a bit painful since most mobile browser quirks aren't well documented online.

Re: I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

#57

Have you seen any good examples of iOS apps made from HTML5 with PhoneGap that are actually good?

My friends at Nitobi directed me to Xero Touch, which is IMO the best example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6wM5QJhVus&hd=1

While an iOS designer like myself sees a lot of telltale signs it's HTML (the flicker of loading buttons' assets for example) it looks very nice.

Re: I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

#58

Oh. HN/AMA, long time coming I'd say. Q: Say I have a product or a service that I think might be a very good fit for Adobe, including a realistic, well thought out business side of things. Is there a way to pitch it to the people of your position if I have absolutely no connections in Adobe? This is a hypothetical question, just trying to understand options for seeding initial acquisition interest. Thanks.

Yes, go to Mars Bar (7th and Brannan) and start buying people beers.

Seconded. This bar is full of Adobe people just about every single day, but particularly on Thursday and Friday around 5pm.

Re: I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

#59
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to down-vote this question as it makes no sense given everything Adobe has done to the contrary of these concerns over the past year. I'm not a huge fan of Adobe, but I can appreciate their efforts regardless. I advise the author to review the adobe labs and check out what has been done re:HTML5 and CSS3 over the last year. http://labs.adobe.com/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ http://labs.adobe…

"Why would they close the doors?" Very good question, but one that needs a responsible answer. Adobe wants the web to live on using its proprietary formats like Flash while a growing minority is resisting this and switching to HTML5. Adobe's efforts are a good start but have a long way to go. Muse, for example, has good intentions but in practice is a horrible product with extremely convoluted code. I'm not a Flash h…

You have to understand Adobe's view of Flash. The reason they were pushing so hard for Flash support is that they wanted to be the gateway to multimedia and interactivity on mobile devices. For the longest time, Flash was how you played video on the web, and Flash was how you made rich, interactive websites. When iOS came along it threatened that, and Adobe wanted to protect their stranglehold in order to maximize their profits (e.g. of Adobe's flash content creation tools).

They've now realized that this isn't going to happen; people are abandoning Flash Player in favour of more compatible, more nimble technologies. Adobe's a big company, but they know which way the wind is blowing, and they've responded by shifting with it.

The way things are looking, 'Adobe Flash' (the content authoring tool) is going to move to being an HTML5-and-fall-back-on-Flash-Player tool (or vice-versa). Eventually, Flash Player will die the death it deserves, and 'Flash' will just be the name of the authoring tool (along with Dreamweaver or Coda).

Basically, Adobe wanted to lock up (or at least make a lot of money at) the cross-platform mobile dev environment. They realized they can't do it with Flash Player/swf content, so now they're trying to do it with Phonegap Build and HTML5 content. More power to them.

Re: I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

#60
Please for the love of all that is holy - stop buying companies!

It's really just so painful to see good companies sucked into the gaping maw of installer hell, 50MB downloads and bureaucratic 'enterprise' sales that - with exception of Photoshop - seems to be Adobe's main value add.

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