Aral Balkan

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!

3. You will only have to buy one suite of applications: Creative Suite all the way!

4. Flash video will have its heyday.

5. Microsoft can't buy Adobe (even in George Bush's America, the regulatory authorities wouldn't let that happen.)

6. Product integrations: Flash with the AE timeline would just plain rock as would the ability to output Flash directly from Photoshop, After Effects, etc. FlashPaper from Acrobat? Yeah, baby!

7. The RIA/Smart Client showdown between Adobe and Microsoft will provide endless hours of amusement.

8. User group members will get new t-shirts and pens.

9. I will finally have a genuine reason to cover Photoshop and After Effects at user group meetings.

Comments

• After Effects and Premiere direct export of FLV...oooh (what about WildFlix, shame).
  
  LAUG doesn't quite have the same ring as LMMUG, but still, hit us with the Photoshop!
  
  How long till a fully featured desktop export product appears (XAML/MXML etc), I'm counting...

  by RL on 2005-04-18 17:19:35

• How about LAUGH -- London Adobe User Group Hellyeah!
  
  Is hellyeah a word, goshdarnit?

  by Aral Balkan on 2005-04-18 17:39:06

• 8. User group members will get new t-shirts and pens.
  
  Gosh, that's a tough one. Hey ADBE/MACR, I want my new tshirt+keychain+stickers+random papers! :D

  by zeh on 2005-04-18 17:47:18

• "The poor souls on the Fireworks development team will finally get to work on a product that gets appreciated"
  I'm thinking the poor souls on the Fireworks development team are going to be working on their resumes right now. :)

  by Keith Peters on 2005-04-18 17:47:34

• "I'm thinking the poor souls on the Fireworks development team are going to be working on their resumes right now."
  
  I'm thinking a lot of MM/Adobe employees will be working on their resumes, will there be room for 2 marketing departments, 2 sales forces, 2 account teams etc? There's bound to be some overlap of roles...

  by DannyT on 2005-04-18 18:35:55

• Regarding #3: Yes, you will only have to buy one suite - but it will be 4 times as much because there are now no longer any serious competitors.
  
  Ben

  by Ben Wong on 2005-04-19 03:39:22

• There really never were any serious competitors to Flash so I guess we're just not used to such things :) Complimentary products, like Swish, etc., yes, but nothing able to replace the Flash IDE. I guess in a way that may be changing in the coming weeks and months with NeoSwiff and Xamlon but those are more in competition with Flex than Flash. I wouldn't, for example, wish it upon my worst enemy to create a frame animation using NeoSwiff alone :)

  by Aral Balkan on 2005-04-19 09:32:32

• Im also thinking swf export from PS, currently its only flash 4 i think, the last open player to live motion. What Im really interested in is getting all copy to retain its formatting, fonts etc. Definetly more powerful flv exports and maybe even batching from AE. Not sure about freehand getting the toss. If your going to talk PS at mmug, i may just pitch up, Im one of 2 alpha testers on PS in the UK, and an avid flasher :)
  
  MaTT

  by matt on 2005-04-19 10:06:44

• Aral,
  I have a new name for ya.
  
  www.macradobe.com :)
  
  
  

  by Darren on 2005-04-19 16:30:33