I am torn on InDesign. On one hand, it is an amazing tool with support for ... everything. It does everything. And that's the downfall. Adobe has tried but failed, I think, to present InDesign's capabilities in a way that is approachable and discoverable. The sheer size of the app's UI is daunting. Endless dialog boxes stuffed with long lists of checkboxes, little thought given to how the user perceives the options before them... I've been using DTP software for decades and while I'm glad that we have such sophisticated tools, I wish they would find a way to make it all make better sense on the screen. This truly is a UI designed for an expert user that somehow misses; it obfuscates rather than explicates, generates friction where it isn't needed.

You'll have plenty of time to save your pennies for that bottle, I think. It's true that some of the entry-level market is being threatened by small competitors – Pixelmator, acquired by Apple a while ago, was really starting to look like a credible threat to Photoshop. And the various Affinity apps are certainly competent at what they do in the various graphics arts niches they serve.

However, the reason I'm skeptical is that these alternatives have a long way to go in terms of the proven track record that the Adobe ecosystem has in the prepress field. The Adobe apps work together really well: files from one app seamlessly integrate into documents of another app; color settings sync across the entire platform; there's a uniform predictability to it all, which is exactly what you want in prepress; fewer surprises. And the preference for Adobe in the prepress field feeds back into the layout artists, production artists, designers, photographers, etc. who eventually send their files for output. When your client's output house says they want InDesign files, you provide them InDesign files.

Now, there's a gaping hole in this theory: online content, where prepress isn't a thing and open, flexible display frameworks accept a wide variety of standard files (JPG, SVG, that sort of thing). Any app that can blurt out a JPG can integrate into a system like this, and the stakes are a lot lower; ain't no embedded fonts in a JPG, and nobody cares as much about color accuracy online because it's fundamentally a lot less achievable than it is in print. So now you've knocked down several of Adobe's key advantages and these alternative tools are suddenly looking more viable.

And then you start to get customers who are new to the branding game, working on a shorter timescale with a less developed strategy, who just need their thing printed – and you can get away with certain compromises in terms of quality and accuracy – and now you're just sending a rando PDF to a web form to get it printed on some poorly maintained digital duplicator and it's Good Enough®, and who cares where the PDF came from because it will never get used again. Maybe the customer eventually changes course and seeks out better quality output and ends up back in the Adobe sphere, and maybe they don't.

In the end, the real danger to Adobe's dominance really is Good Enough®: when accuracy, quality, and wider compatibility aren't important factors, an adequate tool will be a better value proposition than the comprehensive battle-tested tool, and the adequate tool has nowhere to go but get better over time. However, Adobe has at least a decade's lead on these tools and untold amounts of buy-in from their userbase, and despite evidence to the contrary, Adobe is not a stupid company. There's good odds they will maintain their market position for the foreseeable future.

No. But if it works – and I realize that's a big "if" – they will.

PLENTY of companies big and small spy on their employees. I've seen it first-hand. However, it is more commonly framed as a corporate security measure – keep customer data private, protect intellectual property, etc. – and doesn't typically take the form of monitoring employee activity down the granularity of each keystroke (although some systems do this) and pointer movement (much more rare, because the data is so decontextualized; how do you know what they're pointing at unless you're also recording the screen?).

That said – this could be the tip of a horrifying iceberg. It's likely that many employment agreements or company handbooks allow this sort of monitoring *without notice to the user*. We may at some point in the dystopian future look back on this public statement by Facebook as refreshingly honest.

It might be a red flag if you want them to be focussed on babysitting the probabilistic code generator, but if you want an actual developer who can think through a problem on their own, a lack of AI usage in their studies is a huge benefit.

"There will always be a need for true experts, good designers, but the writing is on the wall, AI IS REPLACING all junior functions at this time."

The irony in this statement is so rich: where do you suppose true experts and good designers come from? They're made, not born, and the source material for an expert developer is a junior developer. Using AI to eliminate entry level developer positions is NOT a sustainable course. But it does serve the hypercapitalist masters who have created AI to serve their own selfish goals, so it has that going for it.

The issues weren't with usability – Apple Maps has always been decently usable. It's the poor quality of the data and navigation, even today, and the post-apocalyptic nature of their 3D imaging when it was first released: buildings were rendered as melted gooballs or bombed out structures. And their navigation and data quality still lags behind Google; just this past year, Apple Maps tried to take me on a pointless trip around a block on a straight-through path down a street. And I can't count the times throughout the years where Apple Maps has outright taken me to an obviously wrong address.

All that said, I still use it for basic stuff because Apple has a much better privacy track record than Google. If I have doubts, I double-check against Google Maps, but use Apple for everything else.

To get a sense of the challenge Adobe faced, consider that Photoshop and other Adobe apps were originally engineered using Apple's MacApp development framework – originally released in 1985, last updated by Apple in the last 90s/early 2000 – and that Adobe was STILL using a heavily modified version of MacApp for their apps as late as 2025, *including their iOS apps*.

https://daringfireball.net/lin...

Tell me you don't us Adobe products on the Mac without telling me you don't use Adobe products on the Mac.

Adobe might have gotten their start on the Mac with Photoshop, Illustrator, et. al. but you'd never know it by using their apps today. Nothing about their user interfaces follows anything resembling platform standards; they are very poor platform citizens in many ways. And the notion that Apple and Adobe might work closely to produce silicon and code that are optimized for each other is laughable. The relationship between them frosted over when Steve Jobs refused to let Flash onto the iPhone and has never really recovered.

You're just a tad off on your timeline. 25 years ago is 2001 and Apple is roaring back, with the success of the iMac under its belt and the iPod just months away from release. Jobs has been back at Apple for 4 years and was already making significant progress at turning the ship around. OS X has been released and exists alongside System 9 on shipping hardware; System 9 is actually *more* stable and usable than the first few versions of OS X, which lacked significant functionality that pro users were accustomed to.

This comment for the win. It's important to remember that a hell of a lot of amazing advances were made in the 20th century when the population started out at about 1.75 billion in 1900 and ended at about 6 billion in 2000. I really doubt there's an advantage to having 8 billion instead of 6, or even 4 - it doesn't drive markets or innovation any faster, except that perhaps people are suffering *more* due to malnutrition and inability to access medical services; but those calamities don't appear to be driving innovation at all, so perhaps we'd be better off with a lot fewer suffering people and a healthier ecosphere?

Big difference: the $20K cost per student is paid by Apple; the students pay nothing and in fact receive hardware and a modest stipend. No ripping off of the gullible and foolish here.

I'd say the situation is more that the tools and frameworks are available, it's just that they are now platform-specific. One of the reasons the QuickTime file format was adopted for the MP4 container format is that QT was engineered to be cross-platform and endlessly flexible – it didn't include any platform-specific garbage like a lot of the formats coming out of Microsoft at the time. This continued for a long time as QT offered plugins and players for multiple platforms, but eventually Apple realized that maintaining a cross-platform framework as complex as QuickTime wasn't a winning strategy for the long term and didn't really serve their platform (see also OpenGL).

Since then, QuickTime has slowly been sidelined in OS X and replaced with a newer framework that is OS X-only. The new framework is more performant on modern hardware, naturally, but outside of supporting modern codecs, I'm not sure it actually improves or expands upon QuickTime's overall capabilities, and of course it omits support for the more esoteric interactive media types. QuickTime was very mature and largely solved the problem space it occupied.

It is a shame that there isn't today a single pipeline for interactive media where you can just define a view in your app or webpage that can present almost any kind of media, from audio to video to 3D models to interactive flythroughs. However, one could argue that we're better off having multiple options that breed innovation, and specificity is often better than generality.

You magnificent bastard.

What are you ranting about? AirDrop is on the Mac.