Microsoft plans to give some pirates a break

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I'll grant you games for the most part.

However, productivity software? What do all of the following have in common?

• Microsoft® Word™
• Microsoft Excel™
• Aldus® (later Adobe®) PageMaker™
• Adobe Illustrator™
• Adobe Type Manager™
• Macromedia® (now Adobe) Director™
• Macromedia FreeHand™
• Terran® (later Media 100®, now Autodesk® but formerly under their acquired Discreet® label) Media Cleaner™ (now just Cleaner)
• and many more

Answer: All of them existed on the Mac OS prior to Windows. Yes, even Microsoft Word (ever wonder why Word 2000 exports to Word 2.0 for Windows and Word 6.0 for Windows, but not to Word 3.0 through 5.0 for Windows? Answer: there were never any such versions!) and Excel! And MultiPlan™ before Excel! Granted, Word and MultPlan both existed as MS-DOS programs either before or roughly concurrent to being Mac OS programs, but the first GUI versions of each were definitely for the Mac.

There were even incompatibilities and glitches in the earlier Windows versions of many of these programs caused by poor porting technologies used to port them from the Mac! For instance, Macromedia Director 4.0 for Windows would crash on a Windows system with more than 128 fonts installed if you so much as clicked on any text manipulation tool or menu item. That was because Macs could only have 128 system fonts without a font utility, so the programmers of the original Mac version had built the font menu buffer to hold 128 fonts. This limit was ported to the Windows version. I myself found this bug and reported it to Macromedia and even figured out the cause, which lead to the 4.04 bug-fix release specifically to fix that problem.

(Then-)Discreet Cleaner 5 for Windows (and presumably earlier versions as well) had serious problems caused by attempts to use Macintosh file-naming conventions (in other words, not using file name extensions for file type info: a very bad idea that Windows and DOS carried over from older OSes such as CP/M: the user should not be able to change something so fundamental and intrinsic as the type of a file as seen by the OS just by renaming it! But I digress…). Finally, Autodesk gave up, scrapped the whole thing, and wrote a whole new Cleaner from the ground up for Windows, called Cleaner XL.

There are also majorly powerful and unique productivity apps that to this very day exist only on Mac OS. One outstanding example is Synthetik® Studio Artist® 3.5. While versions 1.x and 2.x were finally ported to Windows, 3.0 has never been, let alone 3.5.

Studio Artist is so far and away above anything available for Windows that I challenge you or anyone here to go to their website and view the sample gallery of video effects that it can do, pick any one of them, and duplicate the same effect over your own source footage using any software or combination of software available to you on Windows. Anything at all, in any combination, used any way you want: Adobe AfterEffects™, Corel® Painter™, even the powerful professional Hollywood-class software from Discreet originally written for the powerful SGI IRIX workstations (flame*, flint*, smoke*, combustion*, etc.) And yet I’d be willing to bet that using any or all of those, you cannot feasibly duplicate any of the effects from their gallery done by one of their professional users (not counting the cheesy samples done by the programmers or marketers).

I’ll be blunt: if you do graphics design, and your competition has Studio Artist 3.x and you don’t, you might as well move to another market or get out of the business. You will only get whatever dull, unimaginative business the other guy lets you have because he doesn’t want to waste his Studio Artist skills on boring stuff. It’s that good. And only available on the Mac.

Posted by: Joel R   Posted on: 11/01/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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