Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Adobe – the makers of a wide range of industry-standard tools for web, graphic and video development announced today its 3rd Quarter results for 2010.

According to the company’s press release, Adobe achieved record revenue of $990.3 million, compared to $697.5 million reported for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 and $943.0 million reported in the second quarter of fiscal 2010.  This represents a 42% year-over-year revenue growth.  Adobe’s third quarter revenue target range was $950 million to $1 billion.

“Strong performance in each of our major businesses contributed to record revenue and strong earnings in Q3,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe.  “We remain bullish about Adobe’s long-term role in enabling the transformation of content and applications across industries.”

Adobe, the powerhorse of the image and video processing software industry is the absolute king of the market. Any developer worth their salt is using one or more Adobe applications for the PC or the mac to produce, create and process digital imagery and motion video.

While the world of art can still utilize analog media such as paint, celluloid or the humble drawing board, the world of creative has turned digital and there is no turning back from this change to the all-Digital Era that we live in.

The massive earnings of Adobe also signify great sales for Creative Suite 5 (CS5) that brought a plethora of updates to a series of established tools. New versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver, InDesign and Flash, and rewritten Adobe Premiere and After Effects entered the 64bit application market; there is no-one else that gets even close to the Adobe products.

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In all honesty, I can’t recall how it all started with web development; I vaguely recall using Wordpad on Windows 3.11

Maybe because I’m about to push mid-4o’s or perhaps because it doesn’t really matter. There are things that one fails to register, for good.

At some point, however, I started using Arachnophilia, a brilliant HTML editor by programmer and world traveler, Paul Lutus. That was around 1996 but the editor is still being supported. Check the guy’s web site out, you will gain a lot from his philosophy in life.

During the same time, I used Paint Shop Pro at an era that Photoshop did not support layers. Adobe invested more in development and version 3.x introduced layers, something that took Photoshop a giant leap away from the competing software of its time.

Design skills are acquired by observing the trends around you and by using the tools at your disposal to emulate these trends. In other words, as a designer you don’t always try to be unique in your creativity. You are also bound to emulate, to reverse-engineer, to improvise on territory already explored.

A few days ago, the owner of the DNXpert blog talked down on tools used in the web development industry, specifically Dreamweaver, as opposed to ‘hand typing your code‘.

I laughed at this comment, only because I too had the same approach 15 years ago - when I used non-WYSIWYG editors. But I soon realized what a fool and a tool I had been; these tools saved me time and effort for a simple reason: I had full knowledge of the theory behind it all, using the right tool was simply an extension of my mind, my imagination, my vision.

Let me explain.

To this day, very few monkeys use tools: rocks to break nuts and sea-shells and sticks to poke bugs and bees out of their nests. These tools are essentially extensions of their own hands, arms, of their brain and intelligence. The ones that don’t use tools often depend on these tool-yielding monkeys for food.

If I were using Wordpad to type HTML and XML code today, I’d be a starving monkey.

Adobe is about to unleash the beast that is called CS5. In just four days from now, on April 12, the biggest bitchfest of tools dedicated to the serious web developer is about to be officially presented to the general public.

My goal in my professional life as a web developer is to always become better, to improve my skills and my capabilities, to serve my clients and myself better. My software upgrade will be monumental, as I am using CS2 – a tool that in my monkey paradigm would have been a 2-inch stick.

I want to own the foot-long bamboo to reach that pot of honey, and I’m going to get it. Because in web development, you’re only as good as the tools you use.

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