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Mac OS X Version

Participant ,
Mar 08, 2008 Mar 08, 2008

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Seems like it's a broad enough request that it could stand a thread of its own.

I think this weekend I *might* break down and put Leopard on my PowerBook, which means no Classic, and I'd have to use Frame for Windows in one of the virtualization products. Uck.
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LEGEND ,
Mar 09, 2008 Mar 09, 2008

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Tim,

If its a powerbook, then the virtualization products won't work. You
need a Macbook or Macbook Pro. I use Parallels to run FrameMaker 8. What
my fingers miss most is they keyboard commands. You've got my vote for
Mac OS X FrameMaker.

Mike

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Mentor ,
Mar 10, 2008 Mar 10, 2008

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> If its a powerbook, then the virtualization products won't work. You
> need a Macbook or Macbook Pro. I use Parallels to run FrameMaker 8. What
> my fingers miss most is they keyboard commands.

If you learned Mac-only KB commands, this is correct, but if you
learned FM's Escape-key command-key sequences, they are cross-platform
for Mac, Windows, and unix.

> You've got my vote for
> Mac OS X FrameMaker.

Me, too.

Regards,

Peter
_______________________________
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

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LEGEND ,
Mar 11, 2008 Mar 11, 2008

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Peter,

I've got many/most of the usual Escape key sequences that I need.
Started learning them with Frame 4 under Windows, alas, I started with
Frame 3.2 on the Mac and I've always found the the Mac command keys
usually take less keystrokes than the corresponding Escape/Control
keys/sequences. But I am glad to have them than have to use the darn
mouse/trackpad/trackball aw forget it the darn pointer.

Mike

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New Here ,
Mar 28, 2008 Mar 28, 2008

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I first started using FrameMaker 1.0 on a Sun Workstation. The product deserved its popularity and was ported to PC and Mac platforms pretty quickly.

I happened to be working at Adobe when they bought Frame Technologies.
In my opinion, Adobe has to this day not realized what they have in FrameMaker. Basically, they have milked it as a cash cow and just keep selling it to people who are committed to using it for legacy reasons. When Apple took so long to produce a serious modern OS (now, thankfully, Mac OS X), Adobe made the decision not to support Macs, and was on the verge of abandoning Macs on their other products as well.

With Apple's rebirth under the second coming of Steve Jobs, Adobe still refuses to port FrameMaker to Mac OS X. I think it's less of a business decision than sheer stubbornness. FrameMaker is a second-class citizen at Adobe, still not well integrated with other Adobe tools, and likely will continue to be that way. Sad.

--Orisinio

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Enthusiast ,
Mar 28, 2008 Mar 28, 2008

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Or you could assume that porting to an OS that still has less than 10% of the market, is throwing development money away that would be better spend supporting the OSes that have the 90%....

Art

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Contributor ,
Mar 29, 2008 Mar 29, 2008

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IMO the market share discussion is misleading. Why would Adobe develop the Creative Suite for such a minority OS?

FrameMaker as well as the CS applications are tools for professionals and you will not find any of them on the average office worker's PC.

Ironically it is Apple that made the transition from FM/Mac to FM/Win easy with the change to the Intel platform and the rise of powerful virtualization tools. So, who cares?

Better use your energy to ask for first-class citizen features for FrameMaker (independent of OS): native PDF output, full color support, right-to-left language support,... just to name a few.

- Michael

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New Here ,
Mar 30, 2008 Mar 30, 2008

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Glad to see some Mac users still visit this forum :)

Another vote for OSX.

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Participant ,
Apr 19, 2008 Apr 19, 2008

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I cannot accept the argument that it wouldn't make financial sense. Frame is not a cheap product. Let's say it averaged $750 -- do they not believe that even a mere 10,000 would be sold? That's $7,500,000. Of course there is more expense than the programming team, but I think I could put three programmers in a room with source code, and I'd could pay them a heckuva lot less than $7 million for a Mac & Linux version.

As a matter of fact I would bet dollars to doughnuts that with the right product announcements, Adobe could sell 3000 copies at full $800 retail in one week for $2,400,000

Michael Mueller-Hillebrand: You want to know who cares? As a purchaser of a Mac and one who prefers the OS X-native application, I care a lot. Resorting to virtualization is completely missing the point. I moved away from Windows for a reason, and other than Frame, I'm glad I did.

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LEGEND ,
Apr 20, 2008 Apr 20, 2008

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> with the right product announcements,

I don't believe Adobe has ever marketed FrameMaker appropriately. If
they did it would have a much higher market share than it does on all
platforms. People know of Word, Publisher, Quark, and ID. Frame is still
Adobe's unloved stepchild.

Mike

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Mentor ,
Apr 20, 2008 Apr 20, 2008

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Tim:

Products that a manufacturer sells through distribution-channel resellers are sold for less than the full retail sales price. Unless Adobe sells the 10,000 licenses in your example directly from its Web site, as single copies, so that there are no volume-license discounts, the gross revenue would be less than the $7,500,000. Then, besides the development costs, there are the site-maintenance costs.

IOW, there's less fat on the cash cow than one might guess.

More important, however, is the issue of breaking from Windows. Other current Adobe applications are either Windows-only, or their Macintosh versions lack some important features only available in the Windows version. I'm only aware of those in the Technical Communications Suite (TCS) - RoboHelp 7 and Captivate 3 are Windows-only; Acrobat 8's LiveCycle Designer, and I think some other Acrobat modules, are Windows-only.

Technical writers who need to create help systems, and forms developers who need these tools, currently have no alternate sources for tools like these. The applications in the TCS are efficient because they're integrated smoothly. For this market segment, Windows is the only game at the moment.

I agree that Adobe's neglected marketing FrameMaker well, from the acquisition, and for too long afterwards. That's changed radically with the FM8 release. As much as I'd love a native OS X version of FrameMaker, to be truly useful for the tech-writing industry, the whole TCS family would have to be brought over. It's likely that this much-larger investment is a major factor in what appears to be a FrameMaker-only decision.

Regards,

Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

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New Here ,
Apr 23, 2008 Apr 23, 2008

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Mike, I couldn't agree more. Just look at how deeply you need to dig in the Adobe website to even find out that FrameMaker exists as a product.

It seems to me that translating from a Solaris port to a MacOS port shouldn't be so very difficult -- it's all unix under the hood, right? It must be the user interface issues that are difficult.

Best solution, in my mind, would be to open-source the product and let us all contribute to the ports we want to see. But I don't think Adobe is ready to adopt the open source model quite yet.

--Orisinio

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Participant ,
Apr 23, 2008 Apr 23, 2008

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Peter:
The 10,000 was kind of my point: It would be trivial to sell those straight-away with little or no effort. I never claimed Frame was cash cow, only that investment in it would be paid for and then some. Not to mention that it would be a positive message to the Mac community who feel Adobe has abandoned them for the Windows platform.

Regarding the tech-writing industry: There is a significant percent who use nothing more than the DTP application, an image editor like Photoshop, and occasionally a vector-type app like Illustrator. (Indeed, many use only Word and PowerPoint!) I've been writing since the 80s, and I used Captivate for one 2-month project in 2003 or so and I used RoboHelp from 2000 to 2001. My customers, big corporations, have legions of writers who produce absolutely nothing but text with a logo in the corner. In the building I'm in at the moment there are about 4000 people and about 200 Frame licenses, and perhaps 10 have anything more beefy than Frame and PowerPoint.

Finally, don't forget that there are plenty of Frame users who are not tech writers. They could be writing financial docs, or scientists writing reports on their laboratory tests who can't stand Word on any platform.

The point is that there is a major market for a reliable Macintosh document application that can put a numbered list where you want it.

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New Here ,
Apr 23, 2008 Apr 23, 2008

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I used Macs early in my career, up until the point that the applications I needed were no longer available. But just to offer a contrarian opinion on the subject, heres an interesting exercise. Pretend for a moment that youre a developer interested in developing for the Mac and Windows market. Log on to the Microsoft and Apple web sites and take inventory of the various programming languages available for both platforms, as well as the availability of supporting technologies, documentation, and sample projects. Im sorry, but Apple has long taken an elitist attitude, whereas Microsoft has gone out of its way to offer a variety of languages and ample resources to support developers.

The game was tilted in Microsofts favor back when they released Visual Basic. Suddenly anyone could try their hand at Windows development.

You need applications to sell computers and operating systems. I would think that Apple would be giving away its compiler by now.

Martin

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Participant ,
Apr 23, 2008 Apr 23, 2008

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> I would think that Apple would be giving away its compiler by now.

They do -- the GCC. The developer tools are on the install DVD.

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Mentor ,
Apr 24, 2008 Apr 24, 2008

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Hi, Tim:

> The point is that there is a major market for a reliable Macintosh document application that can put a numbered list where you want it.

Numbered lists in InDesign CS3 are the equal of FM's, though cross-references are lacking without a third-party tool.

As long-document features in ID continue to improve, It's not a stretch to think of it as a FM replacement for those who don't need to create help systems from a single source.

Regards,

Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

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Participant ,
Apr 25, 2008 Apr 25, 2008

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> As long-document features in ID continue to improve, It's not a stretch to think of it as a FM replacement

If it ever comes to pass that InDesign is the replacement for Frame ... well, I hope to be retired by then. Either that, or InDesign will have been written in Assembler, because compared to Frame, InDesign in a computer feels like a battleship in a bathtub.

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New Here ,
Apr 30, 2008 Apr 30, 2008

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With the advent of air, I don't see why Frame can't be made to run on Macs. I'd like to see some sort of suite with Buzzword and Frame integrated. I think it would be killer on Macs and PCs.

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New Here ,
May 06, 2008 May 06, 2008

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I, too, vote for a Mac OS X version of Framemaker. As an authoring tool, InDesign is no replacement. My publisher is abandoning Framemaker in favor of LaTeX, because there is no Mac OSX version of Framemaker.

Meanwhile, I need to finish up a project using Framemaker 7 in Classic. I would love to upgrade to Leopard on a new Mac, but I don't want to buy a PC version of Framemaker to use for a few more months. Is there no other choice?

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New Here ,
Jun 14, 2008 Jun 14, 2008

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I'm with you guys (Tim, Joel, Frank). I would love an OS X version of FrameMaker!

I run a separate Windows system just for FM these days. A waste of hardware resources, imho.

FM runs OK in Parallels Desktop on my MacBookPro OS X system in a pinch or on the road, which is great.

But an OS X version of FM that is well integrated with AI and Photoshop would be a vast improvement. I'd pay double price for a Mac OS X version.

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New Here ,
Jun 17, 2008 Jun 17, 2008

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I fifteenhundredth the nomination....Just check out the numbers on the Petition site.

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New Here ,
Jun 18, 2008 Jun 18, 2008

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I find it both amazing and sad that some still cling to the fantasy that Adobe is going to respond to the emotional pleas of a relative handful of OS-X users by investing in a parallel development team for a product that's so clearly on its last legs.

As for me, IF the date when it will finally be accepted that an OS-X version of FrameMaker will never happen could be clearly identified, AND I could find a bookmaker to take the bet, THEN I'd bet a large pile of chips on "It's never going to happen."

No matter how much makeup is troweled over its age lines, FrameMaker is a wheezing end-of-life product. Adobe's grudging support and half-hearted feature additions to the Windows version of FrameMaker are nothing more than the propping up the old cash cow until she finally expires.

Now a twenty-first century FrameMaker replacement that also runs on OS-X -- that's something worth petitioning for. If the odds of that happening sound thin, it's a better bet than an OS-X version of FrameMaker...

Cheers,
RBV

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Participant ,
Jul 08, 2009 Jul 08, 2009

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R. VanDyke wrote:

I find it both amazing and sad that some still cling to the fantasy that Adobe is going to respond to the emotional pleas of a relative handful of OS-X users by investing in a parallel development team for a product that's so clearly on its last legs.

Your metaphor places the blame on natural aging, which living things can patch, for a while, but in the end cannot avoid. 

FrameMaker has been allowed to age, but this aging is the fault of Adobe, not the application. There is no universal, unavoidable natural aging process of software that must push users to move to something else.  If an application works well, it can be adjusted to move along with changes in technology. There is no reason why an application that provides a particular service cannot survive ... well, indeed, forever?  Think of it like this: I need to produce literature with running heads, lists, cross-references, and so on, and not until the day when we have no need for those things will there any good reason to believe that FrameMaker must die.  There could be competitors and other ways to accomplish those needs, but that's not the point and none of those force the death of an application.

But for an application to live and thrive it must be properly maintained.  The day Adobe bought Frame they should have began chunking up the code to allow for cross-platform use and ease of maintenance, but instead they did as you said: They troweled makeup over the cracks and put on some bright red lipstick, took us on a date, then dumped us on the side of the road to walk home. If the code was such a mess that a ground-up rewrite was needed, then so be it.  For a product that size it would have ended up being one of the cheaper application development cycles in history. Why? Because in development, just designing the darn thing -- decided what it's going to do -- consumes a lot of time and money, and that part was done, as were the logic algorithms.

I don't know what drives Adobe into thinking that the Mac and Linux community don't need and won't buy a product like FrameMaker.

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Participant ,
Dec 03, 2008 Dec 03, 2008

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TJ Dalton: Using a Windows version of Frame is what I'm going to have to do as well. In your Parallels situation, if you have an Illustrator file that's in a folder of on your Mac, can you import it into the Windows Frame? Does it not see the Mac files?

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New Here ,
Dec 03, 2008 Dec 03, 2008

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Running Windows Frame under Parallels is not too awful. You can use some Mac keyboard shortcuts (e.g. copy and paste). You also can import Mac Illustrator files directly into a Frame doc, even though the Illustrator file is on the Mac. However, to be able to see the art in Frame, save the Illustrator file in a Tiff format instead of a Mac format (do a Save As and look for the format choices).

I just installed Parallels 4. Seems much slower than 3 when running Frame.

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