Tosser:
PS would be better for Apple if it were in their hands. Maybe not a better application, but from a business perspective, it would be better for Apple and the Mac system.
Oh, I see your point: You began by arguing that it sucks that PS on the mac lacks behind the windows version. But that is not your real concern. No, it's about Apple as a corporation would benefit
Still, I don't think that's necessarily true, given that they might be too slow to update, have way too many bugs and so forth, and therefore open up for other companies (Adobe, mainly) to make a similar application.
I don't think Apple's creative days are over. They're still loaded with innovation - things like Visual Voicemail, which are so simple, yet never been done before (in mainstream products. There was some patent allegation with VV). There's also great things like .Mac/MobileMe synchronisation of setting in Logic Studio, which you won't see on any other platform.
Visual voicemail is yet another lowest-denominator bloat-feature. And frankly, .Mac/MobileMe is hardly "innovative" - the only innovative part og Mobile Me is the marketing and how said marketing can make people buy into such tie-ins along with buying crippled hardware.
Also, how on Earth could you call Pages bloated? Pages is as simplistic as you can get. It doesn't have half the useless crap the Word has.
That doesn't mean it isn't bloated (I'm not talking feature bloat). It simply means that for what it does, it's bloated.
In fact, it doesn't have half the useful crap that Word has (anybody here use equations?)
Nope. I don't use equations. I use Bean and text edit mostly. Yes, you're allowed to laugh, but it's quick, effortless and just what I need 95 percent of the time.
Word is bloated too. Not necessarily because of the features (although they could pare it down, quite frankly), but because a text editor shouldn't be so slow that it sometimes lags when typing at my speed on a 2GB 2.33GHz computer. Word needs some serious work. I can't stand writing in that thing: It should react just as fast as typing in the boxes here on MacRumors (on just about any browser, it's instantaneous).
I wouldn't call Aperture bloated either. It's quite difficult to use, but it's not 'bloated' as such - it doesn't contain unnecessary features that make it prohibitively slow. Perhaps it's not the industry-leading software that it once was, but I don't see any reason Apple can't bounce back with Aperture 3.0.
Anything is possible, I guess. The question to me is: How likely is that scenario?
But again: I'm not talking about "too many features". I'm talking about having too much code or whatever it is that makes so many Apple apps so slow and cumbersome.
I really can't have a discussion with someone who's main argument that something doesn't suck is "Well, they might bounce back in the next version".
I also wouldn't say that Apple dumbs down it's pro applications. My friend is a graphic designer for quite a large studio/firm. I went down there once, and asked a few people what random buttons did (I use photoshop occasionally. I always wondered if anyone knew what half the buttons did). Surprise, surprise - most of the designers there, despite working for large corporate customers and winning several design awards, didn't know what a lot of the buttons did. At least if Apple took hold of PS, things would be better documented with a cleaner interface.
I'm not quite sure what you're really arguing here. On one hand, you seem to disagree with me, only to agree they would dumb it down by making a "cleaner" interface.
What do you mean by "better documented"?
Also, Apple have something like $20Bn in cash. Adobe as a company isn't worth much more than that. If Apple wanted it badly enough, they could take Photoshop.
Are you suggesting they could make a hostile take-over, not of the company, but of one of the company's apps?
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you see a joint Apple-Google takeover of Adobe in the next 5 years. Apple taking control of the creative software, and Google taking their web technologies and opening lots of their proprietary platforms.
And you're baseing that on?
Secondly, how does that help your argument that it would be better if Apple took over Photoshop?
I can't see that I'm adding anything in any desperate attempt to prove anything. Adobe want Flash to proliferate. Apple has one of the biggest web-enabled platforms that doesn't have flash under it's wing. It's safe to assume Adobe are quite bitter about that, and that any attempt by Apple to strengthen their partnership would require Apple to make concessions on the iPhone w.r.t flash. Google has always been opposed to flash, and Apple's adoption and development of SproutCore (a.k.a. Cocoa for the web), makes it seem like they agree with Google.
Flash? And this has what to do with what we discussed previously?
