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Does Adobe finally understand developers?

designshack.net

1–10 of 29 posts

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#2
I really don't understand this article style

>Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.

>“Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.”

They write a sentence then quote themselves in big text with highlight. Is this a standard way of presenting an article?

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#3
Wouldn't the more obvious conclusion be that Adobe believed 10 years ago that the way to make money was to cater to those that don't want to program and just want something that "works" and now they've decided that there is a large enough user base of people that are willing to pay for tools to help with real programming?

I don't think these products would have been at all successful 5 or 10 years ago, the web "wasn't ready".

> Adobe has been steadily building steam in this area for years, but they have never marketed their efforts so well as they are today.

If Adobe have been building these products for years that would mean they haven't been "not understanding developers": they just didn't guess 5 years in advance this is where the web would be. Silly contradiction.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#4

I really don't understand this article style >Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders. >“Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.” They write a sentence then quote themselves in big text with highlight. Is this a standard way of presenting an article?

It's called a pull quote, and yes, it's pretty standard for long magazine articles and their webby counterparts as an aid to skimming.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#5

I really don't understand this article style >Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders. >“Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.” They write a sentence then quote themselves in big text with highlight. Is this a standard way of presenting an article?

It's a style of presentation that's very common in magazine articles.

The big boxes are there to give an idea of the most interesting, most important, or most attention-grabbing things in the article, for rapid skimming. (In magazines, I think they're there to grab your attention as you leaf through trying to find something worth reading. That doesn't apply in quite the same way to an article on the web.)

So the intended use is that (1) you skim quickly over the article, looking only at the stuff in the boxes, to decide whether it's worth reading, and/or (2) you read the article normally, basically ignoring the boxes.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#6

I really don't understand this article style >Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders. >“Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.” They write a sentence then quote themselves in big text with highlight. Is this a standard way of presenting an article?

It's called a pull quote , and yes, it's pretty standard for long magazine articles and their webby counterparts as an aid to skimming.

Correct but the article would have been a better read if the author didn't put the exact same words he used in the article in the quote and than place the quote behind the original text.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called a pull quote , and yes, it's pretty standard for long magazine articles and their webby counterparts as an aid to skimming.

Correct but the article would have been a better read if the author didn't put the exact same words he used in the article in the quote and than place the quote behind the original text.

If you don't quote, it's not a pull quote, it's a heading or an aside. The example given is a bit of a miss, yes, because the same words appear quoted immediately; normally you'd pull something a little deeper in the text (like from the middle of a paragraph).

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#9

I really don't understand this article style >Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders. >“Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.” They write a sentence then quote themselves in big text with highlight. Is this a standard way of presenting an article?

It's called a pull quote , and yes, it's pretty standard for long magazine articles and their webby counterparts as an aid to skimming.

Usually, though, they're quotes from other people, not the author's own writing (maybe possibly if you have an editor, like in a magazine, it's not so bad). Doing it with your own quotes seems kind of pretentious.

And it's usually not placed directly below the actual line of text where it appears in the article.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#10

Wouldn't the more obvious conclusion be that Adobe believed 10 years ago that the way to make money was to cater to those that don't want to program and just want something that "works" and now they've decided that there is a large enough user base of people that are willing to pay for tools to help with real programming? I don't think these products would have been at all successful 5 or 10 years ago, the web "wasn'…

Up until a few years ago I was a full time Flash developer, working in ActionScript3 which is a strictly typed, fully OO language which conforms completely with the 4th edition of ECMAScript. I used a great IDE (FlashBuilder) that had full code introspection, static analysis, amazing auto-complete and all sorts of great features built in. Unit testing was not uncommon, as was continuous integration, automated build processes and version control. I, and many others, were doing "real" programming on the Flash platform and felt totally understood as a developer by Adobe.

I'm not going to defend Flash's continued relevance on the web because like most people I think it's had its day but from about 2003 to 2010 the Flash developer community was massive and thriving, people were doing serious programming and Adobe was doing a pretty good job of understanding them and supporting them. It's this wealth of experience that I hope Adobe brings to bear on its HTML5 developer tools.

I feel like the relevance of Flash (and Adobe) is really quite poorly understood. A lot of the expertise and good practises from the more serious elements of the Flash community flooded into the JavaScript community and I feel this is one of the reasons JavaScript has developed so quickly. What's more, a lot of the "web2.0" style dynamic and interactive elements of websites that we take for granted now are watered down (and much better) versions of ideas that were conceived during those frenzied years of UI experimentation in the Flash community.

Granted those years of Flash threw up some UI abominations, but it was also a melting pot of ideas and creativity, the like of which we don't really see anymore, which is a shame in a way. Even though Flash was my livelihood I was happy to move on because I could see it was for the best, but if you ignore Flash your understanding of the last 10 years and the current context of web development is impoverished.

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