Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch Joining Apple as VP of Technologies

[Rogifan]

"At Apple, he’ll have a much less senior position, but potentially an important one, where he’ll be tasked with coordinating the company’s hardware and software teams."

Oh, great.

http://allthingsd.com/20130319/adobe-cto-kevin-lynch-headed-to-apple/

Not sure what this means. Is he the liaison between Federighi/Ive and hardware engineering?

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Or, perhaps Apple finally realized that iOS needs Flash Player?

I think sales of iOS devices say otherwise.

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Well, Scot Forestall wasn't doing nothing at Apple, and Ive can not do all the software stuff. They sure need some help on the software engineering side.

Um, what does Craig Federighi do then?

 

[mozumder]

Honestly, Aperture 3 for me works fantastic. Sure, it is missing some of the basic things that Lightroom has like distortion correction, but I use plugins for the missing things anyways. With that said, I'd still love to see what Aperture 4 has to offer.

Indeed. Aperture is largely perfect as is, with perhaps some modern workflow improvements left to build.

This announcement is more about long-term (4+yrs) future software products, maybe an Apple version of inDesign, Illustrator, etc... This is not about Flash, since Flash is dead anyways, and even Adobe is moving towards HTML5 apps.

They could go back to their "desktop publishing" roots.

 

[DesterWallaboo]

Sorry, just wishful thinking on your part. All of Apples "Pro" software is "Prosumer" and will continue to be because there's more money in it. The question is whether Prosumer is good enough for Pro's. I think it can be and will be.

Well... as an owner of a production studio with a dozen animators, editors, producers and additional staff.... I'd say otherwise. We gave Final Cut Pro X a good 90 day run and it's definitely not fit for a pro environment.

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The features necessary for final cut to be a pro tool again have already started to show up in earnest over the last two updates. Randy Ubillos, also a former Macromedia employee, is all over it.

There are still a lot of critical features missing in Final Cut Pro X that will keep us from returning to it any time soon. Which is unfortunate, as our studio was a FCP studio since 2.0

 

[TennisandMusic]

That was my first thought as well. We use CS6 at the school where I teach, and it's a mess on our Macs. It crashes frequently (no matter if it's Photoshop or Flash) and outside of a new color scheme hasn't changed much since it was introduced. Sometimes I think Adobe spends more time developing its splash screens than the actual applications.

CS6 works incredibly well on Windows. Cross platform audio software works better on Windows too. Maybe it's not Adobe per se...

 

[Ed A.]

Yeah... my first thought was "Final Cut Pro..?"

But apparently I'm the minority here with that one.

Being a video editor, that was my first thought too.

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Well... as an owner of a production studio with a dozen animators, editors, producers and additional staff.... I'd say otherwise. We gave Final Cut Pro X a good 90 day run and it's definitely not fit for a pro environment.

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There are still a lot of critical features missing in Final Cut Pro X that will keep us from returning to it any time soon. Which is unfortunate, as our studio was a FCP studio since 2.0

Whatever works for you. I'll stick with Apple's vision of the future of video editing. I've owned and used Premiere, Media Composer and FCP 7, and my choice for editing broadcast and commercial video is now exclusively FCP X.

 

[ProVideo]

Considering he was at Macromedia when they first created Final Cut Pro, I hope he sees bringing it back to a respected position within the industry as a priority. Apple and Final Cut lost a lot of respect among editors and producers after FCPX was released and everyone I know has either moved to Avid or Premiere or they are still using FCP7. The few updates haven't seemed to shake it's current reputation for the most part.

Speaking of Shake, I'd like to see Motion get an overhaul to bring it up to professional standards for compositing or motion graphics as well. I'm not going to get my hopes up on that though.

 

[lilo777]

I think sales of iOS devices say otherwise.

How? Flash-enabled devices (Android) sell way better.

 

[ijohn.8.80]

Whenever someone mentions Adobe to me, I always think of Fireworks, probably the best program they ever done made....

 

[skottichan]

How? Flash-enabled devices (Android) sell way better.

How many Android devices actually have Flash? Since even Adobe abandoned mobile Flash.

 

[thekev]

Awesome.... now that we have an Adobe tech exec in there we can REALLY see the bloatware at Apple.

Please keep him away from anything memory-management oriented.... Adobe has never figured that one out.

Heh... it doesn't seem so bad in all of their applications. After Effects is one area where I kind of understand it given the ability to set how many cores to use in rendering and a certain amount of memory per core. In that case it's something highly parallel. A lot of their applications used the system of scratch disks, similar to FCP and others. As memory increased, they relied more on ram instead. It's hard to find an example where such things have been implemented really well. Can you think of any? Raster values do fill up memory pretty fast, although Gimp seems to require less memory than photoshop. If I had to pick some points of irritation, it would be the addition of features for the purpose of adding features. There are areas that could use some refinement in usability that may rely on the time available to the same staff. Photoshop is a good example. CS6 is really quirky in a lot of ways, but the paint functionality of their standard brushes was a huge improvement. Many of the older versions sampled in weird ways, especially when adjusting spacing.

I would like to ask what you feel Apple has done better in terms of software if they have nothing to gain here. Look at Aperture compared to Lightroom. Lightroom requires minimal space to store the required metadata. Aperture's library system always felt clunky to me, and the range of available adjustments wasn't really comparable. I haven't even looked at it in several years, so it could have improved, but everything I've read since suggests otherwise. Do you like anything specific about FCPX over Premiere? What is the basis for the bloatware comment?

No kidding. The first thing I thought of was Photoshop.

I thought of After Effects, then photoshop and indesign.

 

[prowlmedia]

How? Flash-enabled devices (Android) sell way better.

Hey! Well done. Stupid comment of the day. Adobe don't support Mobile flash anymore.. for about 14 months in fact.

Because it's rubbish in mobile browsers. Great for apps tho... where even a lot os iOS apps use it, but you knew that didn't you?

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Whenever someone mentions Adobe to me, I always think of Fireworks, probably the best program they ever done made....

Macromedia made... adobe kinda carried on with it.

 

[Scott6666]

Don't think it's been said yet, but needs to be:

Uh, oh. Apple is doomed.

 

[Rogifan]

How? Flash-enabled devices (Android) sell way better.

Give me sales figures of Android devices that run flash compared to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. No way have they sold more.

 

[RMo]

Great! I can't want to have to install Apple Update updates before I check for and install Apple updates with Apple Update (except the installers will be stubs that launch a custom installer-downloading app that then downloads and installs the app, preferably using a custom protocol open to remote exploits).

 

[prowlmedia]

Considering he was at Macromedia when they first created Final Cut Pro, I hope he sees bringing it back to a respected position within the industry as a priority. Apple and Final Cut lost a lot of respect among editors and producers after FCPX was released and everyone I know has either moved to Avid or Premiere or they are still using FCP7. The few updates haven't seemed to shake it's current reputation for the most part.

Speaking of Shake, I'd like to see Motion get an overhaul to bring it up to professional standards for compositing or motion graphics as well. I'm not going to get my hopes up on that though.

Editors are impossible to change. Apple took a risk and got burnt. It's now way better than at launch but they also need the hardware to back it up *ahem macpro 2013 please*

FCPX is actually fantastic but its a different workflow and confused the old guard. It's so damn quick to use compared to Avid - premiere has a bundle advantage with the CS suite cloud etc. To be honest the new Head of Editing/Post is Autodesk Smoke - Editing and Effects with OFX plugins and Nodes effects! all in a timeline environment for way less than anything comparable....

Also the way Apple dealt with shake was nuts... they OWNED high end post for a while and gave it up - true the tech wasn't up to the latest competitors like Fusion at the time - then Nuke can in and blows them both away(!)

Motion is nice for what it does but it's not NUKE and its not After Effects - both of which do their own thing very well - Nuke is the daddy at image compositing on a shot by shot basis but is rubbish at Motion work but After effects can create whole motion projects and pretty limited by layers...

There was rumors of a shake replacement in 2009 called Phenomenon but that drifted away - or perhaps became motion/fcpx - either way dropping node based workflow was dumb.

 

[shiseiryu1]

Flash needs to die!!!!!

Flash sucks and needs to DIE! It feels like every time I get on my computer now Flash is wining about needing updating. What the heck!?!?!

I only need flash on my computer for hulu and a few other video-related things. I can't wait until HTML5 is fully-fledged, ubiquitous, and I can uninstall Flash player. It's totally unnecessary on iOS as "they have an app for that".

I don't see why Apple needs this dork anyways. Adobe's latest release for the Mac is a joke. You can't get the update which supports retina display unless you have "creative cloud" and the apps themselves don't support core Mac functionality like full-screen mode and versions.

Maybe Apple should use some of their cash to buy Adobe. Then they can kill off Flash, make CS suite Mac-Only and refocus on the Pro market.

 

[tekboi]

First Jonathan Ive as Creative Director and now THIS guy...


Our UI's in the future are going to look a whole lot fancier.

 

[epollyon]

I think it'd be great for him to join Apple as VP for professional creative markets. And let's hope he left Adobe because his disdain for their lack of interest in future technologies, crappy installers, buggy software and feature creep.

This.

Everyone chill. Apple had the sense to avoid implementing VMs and have gone so far as to remove preinstalled javavm from OS X. Good riddance. RIP Flash. Let's hope this guy doesn't turn Apple into what Adobe has become.

OP, I couldn't agree with you more.

 

[Abazigal]

Well,, we already have pixelmator (a cheap, Mac-only photoshop alternative) so I don't see the urgency for a photoshop alternative anytime soon.

And yeah, the first thing That came to mind when I saw a Adobe was...Flash.

 

[Kar98]

Neither am I. I may be in the minority on this one, but I don't see this as a good move at all.

I'm thinking the same. To me it's like the Golden Corral Chief Nasty Pizza Officer getting hired by Jean Georges.

 

[albusseverus]

I'm starting to think Tim Cook has lost the plot. Another hire with entirely the wrong history.

Add to that, he changed to policy on dividends and Wall St halved Apple's share price.

Cook has no spine. And apparently no understanding of what Jobs was doing. This is bad.

 

[cclloyd]

Wow. It's kinda sad that the first thing you people think of when you hear about Adobe is Flash.

I think of the CS. I have the whole CS6.

 

[ijohn.8.80]

Is it just me, or does Safari feel so much snappier now that Mr Lynch is onboard?

 

[64Mario64]

Adobe executives shouldn't be surprised that Apple doesn't like Flash. Flash support for Mac OS X has always sucked, and Flash itself has never been good.

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Wow. It's kinda sad that the first thing you people think of when you hear about Adobe is Flash.

I don't know about you, but Flash is the first thing I think of when I read this:

Lynch had expressed disappointment at Apple's "negative campaigning" against Flash, but the two companies have obviously continued to have a working relationship.

Adobe makes me think of building blocks then Photoshop.

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Exactly! Flash is great for animations and all kinds of interactive stuff that's more than transitions and changing the color of a button when you press it. If it ran just fine 10 years ago on a PC at that time, why can't it run fine on a current iPhone? Surely a phone today has more processing power than a 10 year old PC? Anyway, it's not like Flash should be all over the internet, but for some things it's irreplaceable.

It definitely did not. I used to play Flash games online all the time, and it was a hassle. YouTube too.

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I believe it is a Minecraft thing.

There's nothing in Minecraft that looks like that.

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2014: Apple replaces Preview.app with Photoshop.

;-)

@#$% yeah! Except they'd need to fix the opening time. For some reason, Photoshop got really slow after CS4.

 

[plysat]

Maybe coming in to save Final Cut Pro X from it's prosumer death and return it to a pro tool again?

He doesn't need to. It's already a pro tool. That comment is so last year.

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Well... as an owner of a production studio with a dozen animators, editors, producers and additional staff.... I'd say otherwise. We gave Final Cut Pro X a good 90 day run and it's definitely not fit for a pro environment.

When was this? Recently? it may not be fit for your particular setup, but it's a perfectly valid NLE at this point. Quite awesome actually.