More on FM on OS X

["Thomas Michanek" <thomas.michanek@xxxxxx>]

Taken from a MacWorld interview concerning Mac OS X releases of
Adobe products, with Susan Altman Prescott, vice president of
marketing, cross-media publishing:
http://www.macworld.com/2001s/news/0709-adobeandapple.html

No Dates Announced

But when pressed for specific release dates, Adobe stuck to its policy 
of declining to comment, citing competitive concerns. Adobe also 
declined to follow the lead of other companies that, while not 
announcing specific release dates, have given general time frames for 
when they expect to come out with products.

Illustrator's major rival, Macromedia FreeHand, began shipping as an OS 
X-native application this spring. Quark, which makes the layout 
application that InDesign competes with, plans to concentrate on 
readying QuarkXPress 5 for release in the next six to nine months, 
before it develops an OS X-native version.

"We recognize that a lot of users would like us to articulate dates, but 
for competitive reasons, we can't do that," Altman Prescott said. 
"There's been a lot of discussion about the right way to handle this . . 
. but right now, we're adhering to our policy."

Altman Prescott confirmed that three Adobe products will not be seeing 
OS X updates anytime soon -- Adobe Type Manager Deluxe, PageMaker, and 
FrameMaker.

Citing the extensive development work that would go into creating an OS 
X-native version of ATM Deluxe, Adobe has recommended Mac users adopt 
other companies' font-management tools as alternatives. PageMaker just 
saw a major update last month. Adobe says it won't commit to making 
PageMaker OS X-native, whether it be in the next major release or at all.

As for FrameMaker -- the subject of heated debate on the Macworld.com 
forums -- the next major release of the publishing application won't run 
natively in OS X because it would require extensive work on the 
software's 15-year-old code base. While Altman Prescott didn't rule out 
a future version of FrameMaker for OS X, she said Adobe would have to 
move cautiously because of the older code.


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Thomas Michanek, Technical Writer
IAR Systems AB, Sweden: http://www.iar.com
mailto:Thomas.Michanek@iar.se
Tel: +46 18 167800, Fax: +46 18 167838
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