Re: Competing with Word

[Bill Briggs <web@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2:12 PM +1100 16/03/99, Michael Richards wrote:
>1) bundling the product with as many scanner manufacturers as they could
>get on
>board. (I wonder what blandishments Adobe used?  Any resemblance to the
>>Olympics ........)

One wonders, what would they bundle Frame with?


>2) Deliberately not documenting the interesting bits of the user interface
>so the the Graphics Arts Community (always at the time referred to in
>hushed capitals) could discover these and pass them around as esoteric
>guru-disciple fodder.
>
> ... Snip ...
>
>COULD A SIMILAR
>STRATEGY BE THE REASON WHY THEY TOOK SO MUCH OUT OF THE FRAME MANUALS AT
>5.5.x?

Software manuals are shrinking all over the place.  Look at what happened
to the manuals for Windows and the Mac OS.  They've all but disappeared
into a flimsy help system.  New users, if they like to learn by reading,
are forced to buy some hefty third party publication of 1000+ pages.  Some
of them are excellent, but they put the expense of a manual directly on the
user.  And the price of the OS upgrade has not come down.  It's US $30 to
$50 out of your pocket (and the exchange challenged like me pay more).
On-line help is fine for some purposes, but I'll take a printed manual any
day.


>And now, the good news (this is where Frame comes in, folks!):
>
>We old Photoshop hands remember the terrible time when Photoshop migrated to
>version 2.5. This, although numbered as if a minor upgrade, was actually a
>complete rewrite in C++ (or whatever) to allow for cross-platform
>compatibility.
>It was a bug-ridden disaster of the first magnitude. The fixes came thick and
>fast and good old Photoshop is now pretty stable -- especially in
>comparison to
>one of the older versions.

If I'm not mistaken, they have already moved Frame to a common code base,
which almost surely caused problems.  To this jaded soldier, thick and fast
wouldn't really describe the recent history of fixes.

- web

... who likes to read well written software manuals - really!



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