Thursday, September 9, 2004

FrameMaker Survey

Adobe is conducting a survey about FrameMaker.

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

Adobe needs death. What about this instead:

http://www.wolfram.com/products/publicon/

"Wolfram Publicon from Wolfram Research makes technical publishing easy - integrating solutions for composing documents in XML and other structured data formats."

Haven't tried it, but it looks promising, and at $149, it's damn cheaper than Frame. Available for Mac OS X, Windows, and soon Linux.

I think that's basically the Mathematica notebook interface without the calculation engine. If so, it doesn't interest me.

I wonder if - somewhere in what passes as a heart of the monster that is Adobe - there's a tinge of regret that they dumped MacFrameMaker just as MacOS X is starting to get more popular in Unix and academic circles again. The cash cow could be good for a another few years yet if it was made native for X.

But I'd really hate it if I found myself giving them more money...

I bet Warnock regrets it a little. He was quoted, a few years back, saying that FrameMaker would never be cancelled on his watch. (He was the one who wanted to purchase it from Frame Technologies in the first place.) Then he "retired" to Adobe's board, and they cancelled FrameMaker for the Mac.

Leave a Comment