RE: FrameMaker 2005 Chautauqua -- November 7-9, Raleigh NC USA

[Bill Briggs <web@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 1:06 PM -0700 6/6/05, Martha J Davidson wrote:
> > It still has one of the most odd UI of any of the major 
> > applications I use on a daily basis
>
> You know, I've been hearing people say this for years, and I still 
> don't know what they mean. Maybe it's because I've been a Frame user 
> since version 1.11b, in early 1986; I don't know. I use lots of 
> other applications and I am really curious what people mean when 
> they say that the Frame UI is "odd," or outdated.
>
> Any takers?

 You've got me. I feel the same way. I have several issues with bugs, 
missing features, and broken features in FrameMaker, but I have no 
issue with the UI. It's fine. The guts of the application and the 
solid behaviour is _THE_ most important thing.

 I was at the Adobe booth in San Francisco at Macworld a few years 
back (the one time they had a postage stamp sized space with 
FrameMaker present) and some old fart walked up the Adobe person 
there and said "When are you going to modernize the FrameMaker user 
interface so it's like a normal application?"  And I thought "What? 
There's nothing particularly unmodern about it now." So I asked the 
Adobe person if I could take this question and then I challenged the 
guy. I asked him if he wanted all of those annoying little Adobe 
pallets floating all over the place - ones you can't even read if you 
have your screen resolution set high. Turns out he wanted the UI to 
be more like Word!  Eeeeegad!  Needless to say I pissed on that idea 
in a hurry.

 FrameMaker doesn't have to look like some spiffy new thing from 
Apple with inspectors and all manner of visually interesting candy 
crap. It's like the big muscle bound work horse you keep locked up in 
the barn till you  need work done, but when you hitch the bugger up 
to the plough, you know it's going to get the job done. Maybe it's 
just the 12 years of using FrameMaker that has made me immune to such 
talk, but I just don't care about that. I want the stuff that 
FrameMaker has now - the robustness, the features, the 
predictability, the lack of annoyances. But most of all I want Adobe 
to wake up and stop treating FrameMaker like it was some kind of 
bastard child. Oh, and put it back on the best desktop OS on the 
planet, please.

- web

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