... you are sitting on the beach, staring out into the sea, connected to the Internet via free WiFi courtesy of Pier to Pier :)

1. Goodbye Fireworks! The poor souls on the Fireworks development team will finally get to work on a product that gets appreciated and Fireworks users will finally migrate to a *real* image editing application (*ducks*)

2. Goodbye Freehand! Ditto: Less man-hours spent working on an application just to have a competing product, more man-hours spent improving the already excellent Illustrator!

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... and I buy Microsoft! Muhahahaha! My plans are proceeding perfectly :)

As you've no doubt heard by now unless you were blissfully asleep -- as I was, and it was a good night's rest too thank-you-very-much! -- Adobe has agreed to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion. The news wires are alight with reports of the decision and, of course, hapless reporters are falling over themselves to get key technological facts wrong. Angus Whitney, from London, who writes for Bloomberg, for example, states that Adobe is purchasing Macromedia "to add Flash Web-design programs to its offerings." It's good to know that as a result of this move, Swish and Swift 3D will be added to the Adobe lineup :) The article goes on to state that the Flash Player "displays moving images and sound on Web pages, is installed in more than 98 percent of Internet-connected desktop computers." Moving images and sound (how cool!) and it's good to know that Flash hasn't infected any non-Internet-connected notebook computers (or the Slashdot crowd would really have an aneurysm!) But I digress... oh, they make it too easy to digress...

Clueless reporting aside, the fact remains that we are standing at the end of one era and the start of another.

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I've switched from using Trillian Pro to Miranda IM. When I first ran Miranda, I was a little worried about whether I would end up missing all the features that Trillian had. This was before I discovered the myriad of plug-ins contributed by the Miranda community.

The most important one I've installed so far is the tabSRMM ("Tabbed message dialog") plugin. It replaces the lackluster message dialog that comes with Miranda with a more powerful and configurable tabbed pane. One word of warning though: The installation instructions are misleading: Contrary to what they state, copying the tabsrmm.dll file (or tabsrmm_unicode.dll if you want Unicode support) to the Plugins folder is *not* enough to install the plugin. You have to remove the existing SRMM.dll file and rename tabsrmm.dll to SRMM.dll (this, at least, was how I got it to work on my machine.)

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I sometimes wonder if employees at software companies are required to sit through a class on how best to piss off (and lose) customers. For some reason, the common courtesies that you would take for granted in a face-to-face situation sometimes disappear when it comes to software. In my Best Practices Flash and Flex course, I devote a substantial amount of time to User-Centered Product Development (UCPD) and the importance of usability. In it, I use the butler analogy for how software *should* act. Some of the characteristics of the stereotypical butler in this analogy include "few questions, no complaints", "rarely interrupts, anticipates" and "courteous and respectful." Off the top of your head, how many current applications you use would fit that description?

And it's not just about the application itself anymore. In the Internet Age (tm), we have to take a much wider view of software (or the application.) Software is a service and it transcends the actual bits that make up an application to encompass the *experience* that involves its distribution/download, sale and the handling of updates and the ongoing customer relationship with the product. It appears that certain companies are having a difficult time understanding this and are losing customers because of it.

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