Here Comes Windows 11....

[Bobby Henderson]

Well, Nitro PDF goes for about EUR 220 without update license... Maybe you consider that a cheap app, but at least it isn't free...

Most competing PDF file generating/editing applications are cheap and/or limited with what they can do compared to Adobe's full version of Acrobat DC. In the US the Nitro PDF application costs $159, which is less than Adobe Acrobat DC. Adobe's product supports all the PDF levels (PDF/A, PDF/E, PDF/X) whereas Nitro supports PDF/A. Acrobat runs on more platforms, imports and exports more file formats. Most important: it works alongside the latest versions of Adobe's other print-oriented graphics applications.

I've never been a Freehand user, so I can't really comment on that, other than that I've heard a lot of complaints back in the day. I guess it was clear from the beginning that Adobe simply wanted to get rid of any competition and didn't want to maintain two code bases for essentially the same product.

Freehand was a very solid application until the version 10 release. I started using FH back when Adobe was doing its Mac-only dance with Illustrator. Just like Illustrator in the 1990's Freehand was a Postscript-based application. It worked just as well with Photoshop as Illustrator did. Freehand could even copy AICB vector paths to the clipboard for use in Photoshop, just like Illustrator. No other rival drawing programs, such as CorelDRAW, were able to do that.

Freehand had a pretty dedicated following of users, particularly on the Mac side. Obviouly they were pretty mad when Adobe chose to kill off Freehand. But that was the more obvious outcome (rather than fantasies of Freehand replacing Illustrator). It was still a pretty nasty move on Adobe's part to remove file open/import support for Freehand art files in Illustrator. That just added insult to injury.

It's interesting that you mentioned the short-lived Adobe LiveMotion, as it has the possibility to export to Flash and that's exactly what I've used it for in the past. I found most Adobe UXes to be more intuitive as those offered by Macromedia and it took quite a few years to somewhat homogenize them, one of them was Dreamweaver, among Flash probably the only Macromedia product I regularily used.

Macromedia application interfaces were sort of all over the place in terms of design language. Adobe has been more consistent, although some applications (such as Illustrator) have room for improvement due to how some related commands are scattered around in different menus. At least the UI is consistent across platforms (which currently is not the case for CorelDRAW).

I liked LiveMotion and considered it easier to use for visually building Flash-based animations. It had a timeline very similar to After Effects, just not quite as complex.

There was no such thing as automatic updates back then, but the shop I worked for was a licensed Adobe distributor, we had quite a bunch of rather high-profile customers, including most local newspapers that mattered back then. We had pretty much direct access to the higher tier support at Adobe, which often ended up with the actual developers, those in the credits, being involved.

The actual developers do talk to users these days. And you don't have to work at a major company buying many licenses to get that access. I don't work at a major company, but I've been able to get my comments and suggestions through to the right people easier in recent years than in the past. I feel I can take credit for a couple recent feature additions to Adobe Illustrator; I had back and forth discussions with them, giving them visual examples of the feature requests. They get tons of such requests all the time. Many are often pointless or examples of a user not knowing a similar feature was already in the software. Good requests do get considered. Adobe can't just sit back and keep collecting money on the same old version of software. They have to keep improving it somehow. Listening to what users need to get their work done easier and faster is a good way to go.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Most competing PDF file generating/editing applications are cheap and/or limited with what they can do compared to Adobe's full version of Acrobat DC. In the US the Nitro PDF application costs $159, which is less than Adobe Acrobat DC. Adobe's product supports all the PDF levels (PDF/A, PDF/E, PDF/X) whereas Nitro supports PDF/A. Acrobat runs on more platforms, imports and exports more file formats. Most important: it works alongside the latest versions of Adobe's other print-oriented graphics applications.

Keep in mind that most people only use PDF/A for day-to-day operations as for most people PDF is just a replacement for "old paper documents" and they're not involved in any pre-press processes. It's mostly invoices, contracts, documentation, etc., it all comes in PDF format those days. Sometimes digital forms come in PDF format. Nitro PDF has proven to work far better for us for that purpose than Acrobat DC, especially when it comes down to the "electronic form" part.

Freehand had a pretty dedicated following of users, particularly on the Mac side. Obviouly they were pretty mad when Adobe chose to kill off Freehand. But that was the more obvious outcome (rather than fantasies of Freehand replacing Illustrator). It was still a pretty nasty move on Adobe's part to remove file open/import support for Freehand art files in Illustrator. That just added insult to injury.

That happens when you kill all the alternatives. A lot of efforts go into import functionality of foreign formats and there will almost always be some form of compatibility issues. Still, not investing in a workable migration path other than to revert to old versions is quite a dick move, but also the typical signs of a very big company, having the power to just do so, without too much fear of the repercussions.

I liked LiveMotion and considered it easier to use for visually building Flash-based animations. It had a timeline very similar to After Effects, just not quite as complex.

It was originally intended to become a Flash killer, together with its own player. The Flash export feature, while probably one of the most-used features, was more like a transitional feature.

While for animations, I'd say the interface was superior to Flash, what Adobe forgot about was the whole ActionScript engine that drove a lot of Flash stuff at the time. That's also the reason why they failed to get any momentum from some of the "hard core" Flash folks at the time.

The actual developers do talk to users these days. And you don't have to work at a major company buying many licenses to get that access. I don't work at a major company, but I've been able to get my comments and suggestions through to the right people easier in recent years than in the past. I feel I can take credit for a couple recent feature additions to Adobe Illustrator; I had back and forth discussions with them, giving them visual examples of the feature requests. They get tons of such requests all the time. Many are often pointless or examples of a user not knowing a similar feature was already in the software. Good requests do get considered. Adobe can't just sit back and keep collecting money on the same old version of software. They have to keep improving it somehow. Listening to what users need to get their work done easier and faster is a good way to go.

I used to partake in lots of beta programs, but I don't really find the time and energy for that anymore. As such, I'm much more a typical user and I often find myself at the receiving end of "features" and "bugs". The process of getting around them is usually highly annoying and involves support desks that usually don't know what they're talking about. It's this process that used to be much more direct. Yeah, I get it, with tens if not hundreds of millions of users, I can't expect my personal problems to get forwarded to the head of development, but my experience with the Adobe support desk as of late aren't all that refreshing... although they're not as bad as those with Microsoft... We're now three weeks in with them, trying to fix my personal mailbox after they nuked it during a "cloud migration"...

[Leo Enticknap]

What's more, if you're OK with not quite the latest version of Nitro, licenses for older ones can be had for $10-30 on third party sites. I have version 10.15 on one of my laptops, bought for $20. About the only drawbacks are that its OCR after scanning handwritten documents isn't nearly as good as that of Acrobat Pro's (I also have version 10 of that, about a decade old now), and an annoying bug whereby it freezes the taskbar, and you need to press the Windows start button to get at it when Nitro is maximized. I'll be interested to see if that bug persists into W11.

[Bobby Henderson]

Some on-topic stuff: Here's an interesting video (from Jarrod's Tech) about Windows 11 running up to 17% slower than Windows 10:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae587GY8AEo

Features like Virtualization Based Security (VBS) and Core Isolation can affect performance in things like gaming. VBS and Core Isolation is built into Win10, but disabled by default. Both are usually turned on by default in Win11 installs. Even with VBS and Core Isolation disabled in Win11 the OS still performed slightly slower on the same hardware than Win10. The differences are bigger with VBS and Core Isolation active. Perhaps upcoming Win11 updates will improve the situation. Anyway, it's all the more reason to hold off with a Win11 upgrade at least until some of those new, hyped features are rolled into the OS.

***

Keep in mind that most people only use PDF/A for day-to-day operations as for most people PDF is just a replacement for "old paper documents" and they're not involved in any pre-press processes. It's mostly invoices, contracts, documentation, etc., it all comes in PDF format those days. Sometimes digital forms come in PDF format. Nitro PDF has proven to work far better for us for that purpose than Acrobat DC, especially when it comes down to the "electronic form" part.

What works better for you does not necessarily apply to everyone else. Acrobat DC is a more professional-level product, having to work alongside Adobe's other pro-level graphics applications. Dismissing Acrobat as "bloated" is really a bunch of crap. I understand not everyone needs a professional-level product. I have no problem recommending affordable graphics programs like Affinity Designer and Vectornator or even free ones like Inkscape to amateurs who want to D-I-Y some of their own graphics. There's no need for them to blow $650 on a Creative Cloud subscription, or $249 for a CorelDRAW subscription for that matter. That situation in no way makes a budget app like Affinity Designer superior to Illustrator or even CorelDRAW.

That happens when you kill all the alternatives. A lot of efforts go into import functionality of foreign formats and there will almost always be some form of compatibility issues. Still, not investing in a workable migration path other than to revert to old versions is quite a dick move, but also the typical signs of a very big company, having the power to just do so, without too much fear of the repercussions.

Just about every big tech company has "dick move" moments in their respective histories. The Freehand vs Illustrator rivalry was kind of a nasty one, given the two vector drawing applications were very similar to each other. Even many keyboard shortcuts were similar. I think Adobe saw Freehand as a pretty unique threat. In some ways it was a superior drawing application to Illustrator; many of its fans preferred the user interface. There were some unique features in Freehand's bag of "Xtra" functions. When Adobe deleted .FH file open/import capability from Illustrator it kind of felt like a final coup de grace strike to a dying application's body.

Freehand was just one of a multitude of vector drawing applications that have come and gone since the 1980's. To me it appears like there are more vector drawing applications available now than ever before. There is certainly far more in the way of cheap and free alternatives. That makes it even more baffling that so many home-brewed "logos" from small businesses are generated as dopey pixel-based JPEG images. I see it on a routine basis in my work. They figure it's enough that the logo is "digital." There's more to digital than that.

While for animations, I'd say the interface was superior to Flash, what Adobe forgot about was the whole ActionScript engine that drove a lot of Flash stuff at the time. That's also the reason why they failed to get any momentum from some of the "hard core" Flash folks at the time.

It has been so long since I've used LiveMotion I can't remember the full range of its capabilties, like if it had any scripting support like Flash. If it wasn't already there, Adobe could have built in ExtendScript like what exists in After Effects. They styled the animation time line based on After Effects. Why not grab the scripting engine too? Once Adobe bought Macromedia it didn't make any difference. Apps like GoLive and LiveMotion were causalities of that deal. Damn, that just reminded me of another failed Adobe web app: PageMill. Remember that? I think it got killed by GoLive.

I used to partake in lots of beta programs, but I don't really find the time and energy for that anymore. As such, I'm much more a typical user and I often find myself at the receiving end of "features" and "bugs". The process of getting around them is usually highly annoying and involves support desks that usually don't know what they're talking about. It's this process that used to be much more direct. Yeah, I get it, with tens if not hundreds of millions of users, I can't expect my personal problems to get forwarded to the head of development, but my experience with the Adobe support desk as of late aren't all that refreshing... although they're not as bad as those with Microsoft... We're now three weeks in with them, trying to fix my personal mailbox after they nuked it during a "cloud migration"...

Often people at "help desks" are just receptionist types trained to answer calls, not get deep into technical support issues. I've found interaction in a user community forum more helpful, especially if developers are taking part in the discussion. The latter will happen much more often in a forum dedicated to beta users. I probably wouldn't take part in beta testing certain applications if I didn't have a vested interest of seeing certain specific improvements made to them.

[Leo Enticknap]

Installed W11 clean from an ISO on one of the Dell laptops yesterday evening. Thoughts:

The PTT/TPM thing turned out not to be a problem - the firmware TPM (what the BIOS calls Platform Trust Technology) in the CPU was accepted as a TPM by W11.

Setting up dual boot also turned out to be relatively easy, but there were a few gotchas. The necessary procedure was to start with a totally clean system drive, enable UEFI in the BIOS, boot the W11 ISO USB, and then have the W11 installer initialize and partition the drive; not to do that in Ubuntu/GPartEd before booting the WIndows stick, which had been my previous method of setting up a new computer. When the first partition is created, the W11 installer will write a GPT partition table, plus the EFI partition and one other small system partition at the start of the drive, as well. I then created the partition for Windows, the partition for Ubuntu, and the Linux swap partition, telling it not to format either of the latter two.

One gotcha is that if you are installing W11 Home, you are required to log in with a Microsoft account - it won't let you just create a local account during the installation process. Pro will. I don't know if upgrading (as distinct from clean installing from a boot stick) W10 Home to W11 Home imposes this requirement as well.

After completing the Windows installation, I then booted an Ubuntu (20.04 LTS) USB stick, formatted the two partitions left alone by the Windows installer, and installed Ubuntu, with the grub bootloader actually on the Ubuntu partition. Thereafter, the BIOS determines which of these two boots by default. To choose the other, I simply need to press F12 after power on and select it. This is much easier than I was led to believe that setting up dual boot under UEFI would be. Given that the choice of partition to boot from is now handled by the BIOS rather than the bootloader, I guess it will vary from computer to computer how easy a dual boot setup is to accomplish. But Dell BIOSes, at least, make it pretty straightforward.

The front end of W11 is significantly different from that of W10. I'd heard reports of this, which is why I wanted a chance to get my hands on it ASAP after release. It's only a matter of time before one of my customers goes out and buys a PC with it preinstalled, and calls me for help when they can't drive their projector with it. Essentially, they've tried to make it look and feel like an Apple device, including the taskbar icons in the center (though you can move them to the left in settings > personalization). The start menu is also iPhone-like, with no categories for the app icons - just bare rows of them. There is also the usual annoying moving of stuff around: one particular irritation is that Administrative Tools has now been renamed Windows Tools, within which the old school control panel is now buried.

I haven't noticed any speed penalty so far, but there again I don't play games on my computers, and am not likely to use this one for video editing or rendering (the only processor intensive task I regularly do). All the computers I own or regularly use have Intel processors, and so aren't affected by the reported AMD issue. All the regular cinema apps installed without complaining: Barco Communicator, all three NEC communicators (Series 1, Series 2 v1, and Series 2 v2), Q-Sys Designer, the certificated versions of the Dolby equipment-specific apps, etc. etc.

For now, at any rate, so far, so good.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Thanks for those updates, especially the dual boot ones. I've not yet done a clean install, just a bunch of upgrades, which went fine so far. On one machine I used the TPM workaround, which also works fine and updates also keep coming in.

In the Pro version, you can still get around a Microsoft account, both if you're part of a domain and also in stand-alone mode, although the latter one really makes it hard on you to find that option...

As for the speed penalties, I also don't really notice any particular speed penalties in everyday use. Even applications like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator seem to perform normally, I'll have to benchmark them with Windows 10 to see if any real differences. Maybe rendering something with Premiere will give a more conclusive answer later on.

There seems to be more trouble ahead though, especially if you're running on AMD's Ryzen CPUs, as the latest update seems to negatively affect the performance even more:

AMD and Microsoft found two issues with Windows 11 on Ryzen processors. Windows 11 can cause L3 cache latency to triple, slowing performance by up to 15 percent in certain games. The second issue affects AMD’s preferred core technology, that shifts threads over to the fastest core on a processor. AMD says this second bug could impact performance on CPU-reliant tasks.

Source...

What's more, if you're OK with not quite the latest version of Nitro, licenses for older ones can be had for $10-30 on third party sites. I have version 10.15 on one of my laptops, bought for $20. About the only drawbacks are that its OCR after scanning handwritten documents isn't nearly as good as that of Acrobat Pro's (I also have version 10 of that, about a decade old now), and an annoying bug whereby it freezes the taskbar, and you need to press the Windows start button to get at it when Nitro is maximized. I'll be interested to see if that bug persists into W11.

OCR remains a bit of a problem child for handwritten stuff, though anything written "mechanically" is almost flawless in the latest versions of Nitro Pro. Acrobat Pro is surprisingly good at OCR. I'm not sure if it's true, but someone told me that Adobe's OCR now is "cloud backed", as in they seemingly send some stuff back to Adobe's servers to do the OCR... I've done some Googling, but nothing conclusive turns up.

What works better for you does not necessarily apply to everyone else. Acrobat DC is a more professional-level product, having to work alongside Adobe's other pro-level graphics applications. Dismissing Acrobat as "bloated" is really a bunch of crap. I understand not everyone needs a professional-level product. I have no problem recommending affordable graphics programs like Affinity Designer and Vectornator or even free ones like Inkscape to amateurs who want to D-I-Y some of their own graphics. There's no need for them to blow $650 on a Creative Cloud subscription, or $249 for a CorelDRAW subscription for that matter. That situation in no way makes a budget app like Affinity Designer superior to Illustrator or even CorelDRAW.

I really think Adobe should split their Acrobat offerings. Right now, they're simply neglecting the average office user. One of the problems is that in enterprise settings, it often does it's own thing, it doesn't listen to enterprise update policies for example and their "Remote Update Manager", quite frankly, is a mess at the moment. For most people in those organizations, it's really just printing their Word, Excel or PowerPoint to PDF and maybe digitally sign a document or two. Combining multiple PDFs into one is probably the most complex thing most of them ever do.

Adobe used to have "Acrobat Elements", which was perfectly suited for just those tasks. For those users, all the other features in Acrobat Pro are just "bloat" and they often lead to confusion. Not every user is an IT professional or works in professional graphics, yet PDF has become a defacto standard for digital "portable document transfer".

It has been so long since I've used LiveMotion I can't remember the full range of its capabilties, like if it had any scripting support like Flash. If it wasn't already there, Adobe could have built in ExtendScript like what exists in After Effects. They styled the animation time line based on After Effects. Why not grab the scripting engine too? Once Adobe bought Macromedia it didn't make any difference. Apps like GoLive and LiveMotion were causalities of that deal. Damn, that just reminded me of another failed Adobe web app: PageMill. Remember that? I think it got killed by GoLive.

Yeah, I do remember PageMill, though I never really used it. I was a Dreamweaver user back then and despite its convoluted UI, I found it to be more powerful than PageMill, especially if you wanted to integrate "dynamic HTML" and we actually used stuff like ColdFusion (the horror) and Lasso combined with FileMaker back then...

It was indeed replaced by GoLive, which I used for some small projects, because we got an early beta back then. It had some things going, like it made building web pages more like a PageMaker experience, but the resulting HTML was pretty abysmal. Probably fine if nobody ever needed to integrate anything with it, but pretty useless for bigger web projects. I think GoLive got killed off and entirely replaced by Dreamweaver somewhere around CS2 or 3.

Often people at "help desks" are just receptionist types trained to answer calls, not get deep into technical support issues. I've found interaction in a user community forum more helpful, especially if developers are taking part in the discussion. The latter will happen much more often in a forum dedicated to beta users. I probably wouldn't take part in beta testing certain applications if I didn't have a vested interest of seeing certain specific improvements made to them.

My problem is, if you want to be useful for a beta program, you really need to invest quite a lot of time into it, otherwise you're only committing to a bunch of potential problems for maybe that one feature you were really looking for. If you're into the cutting edge of a particular piece of software then I can understand your commitment, but I guess I used to be much more excited about "new developments" 20 years ago than I'm now, as I just can't find the energy anymore for any of this. The same is true for this whole Windows 11 stuff. Back in the day I gladly test-drove all kinds of Windows test-builds. I still remember the "highly anticipated" Chicago beta builds, which ended up being Windows 95. The only reason for me now to have a look at Windows 11 is because I know it's coming and I want to be somewhat prepared, none of the features in there can inspire any excitement in me...

[Bobby Henderson]

Apparently Microsoft's first patch for Windows 11 made performance on AMD CPUs even worse. They'll try again on the next Patch Tuesday. That news is according to the TechLinked channel on YouTube.

I really think Adobe should split their Acrobat offerings. Right now, they're simply neglecting the average office user.

Adobe isn't going to give away their stuff for free. As for splitting things, they have have two different Acrobat DC tiers: "standard" for $12.99 per month and "pro" for $14.99 per month. Then there are 3 different plans with e-sign (Acrobat PDF pack for $9.99 per month, Acrobat Pro DC with e-sign for $14.99 per month and Acrobat Pro with advanced e-sign for $27.99 per month). A full Creative Cloud subscription ($54 per month) includes Acrobat Pro DC.

As for what the "average office user" needs (or wants), I think many of them are happy just using any sort of default PDF generation capability built into the office productivity applications they're using.

There is plenty of both good and bad with the PDF format reaching a certain level of ubiquity. Many people simply don't understand basic fundamentals of the types of objects they'll put into a PDF container. One of the common use cases we see is clients attempting to give us acceptable quality artwork. For most purposes we want clean, vector-based artwork that can go directly to a vinyl cutter, routing table or be scaled up/down to any size without loss of image quality. PDF is one of several file formats that can contain vector-based objects. The clients often just want to give us the first stupid JPEG image they found on a hard drive somewhere, or copied from a web page. So what do they do? Save the pixel-based JPEG image inside of a PDF wrapper and expect the PDF format to magically convert their low-quality raster graphic into a high quality vector-based one. That situation is not the fault of Adobe or the PDF format.

It was indeed replaced by GoLive, which I used for some small projects, because we got an early beta back then. It had some things going, like it made building web pages more like a PageMaker experience, but the resulting HTML was pretty abysmal. Probably fine if nobody ever needed to integrate anything with it, but pretty useless for bigger web projects. I think GoLive got killed off and entirely replaced by Dreamweaver somewhere around CS2 or 3.

After ditching GoLive Adobe tried again with WYSIWYG web page editors by releasing Muse. That one auto-generated code just about as bad as GoLive. I guess that's just an unavoidable consequence of any web page editor that allows users to visually design pages without having to manually mess with HTML code, CSS, etc. Muse had more capability than GoLive. But it was still daunting to use at creating web pages or web sites that could be tailored for viewing on many different kinds of devices. You could end up manually designing the same single web page in several different versions just to get it working correctly. Of course the same problem exists even without an app like Muse creating horrible looking code. Many people have resorted to altering existing Word Press themes to avoid much of that drudgery.

My problem is, if you want to be useful for a beta program, you really need to invest quite a lot of time into it, otherwise you're only committing to a bunch of potential problems for maybe that one feature you were really looking for. If you're into the cutting edge of a particular piece of software then I can understand your commitment, but I guess I used to be much more excited about "new developments" 20 years ago than I'm now, as I just can't find the energy anymore for any of this.

If a certain piece of software is important to a user's daily work-flow, it can be beneficial to take part in a beta program for it. You not only get to provide feedback on new features that will be released in the next public version, but you also get to direct more attention to any existing problems that have not yet been fixed. That's the key. You're getting more direct access to the development team. You're more likely to get answers on why something isn't working than you would on a customer service phone line or in a standard user forum.