Can I Get a Hallelujah?

[Roger Howard]

On Fri, December 15, 2006 1:04 pm, steve harley wrote:
> they whom i call Roger Howard wrote:
>> Don't know about the Windows controls though... again, the platform
>> seems
>> more like the Adobe Virtual Machine than OSX or Windows to me.
>
> and so it has been for several years -- the way i think of it is
> Adobe has made a platform out of its apps, and that platform
> happens to be hosted by Windows or Mac OS X at the moment; the
> idea being that should Windows and Mac OS X both fail, Photoshop
> could live on ...
>
> this is most visible in all the custom controls used, but a lot
> of the underlying technology, too, is custom (e.g. the font
> loading & rendering engines); in the last 5 years, though, Adobe
> has been slow to add core UI features to various apps; e.g. on
> InDesign CS, there aren't contextual menus for items in palettes,
> and in Acrobat 6 shift-scroll doesn't horizontally scroll (these
> are the versions i use, so i'm not sure what might have changed)

Exactly. :) And I guess maybe it's semantics, but this is why I don't
think it's lowest common denominator, as they aren't depending on anythign
common... it's all custom. And I expect even if it was a Mac-only product
they'd take the same approach.

Then again, I'm still wondering what *can't* be done on Windows, with
respect to Adobe products, that can be done on OSX? Or are we just talking
UI? As much as it's unpopular in some parts to admit, Windows can support
all the same basic services as OSX that would be relevant to such a
product. It's not like Windows can't use PostScript fonts, or has no
display color management, or is still stuck in 8.3 filenames!