Schwwwing!

Thursday, August 27, 1998 by Dave Winer.

I'm getting ready to split, but there are a couple of important loose-ends.

Leonard's magic 

Leonard Rosenthol, an architect at Adobe Systems, has been emailing with members of the Frontier community on various topics related to content management and scripting in Adobe products.

Leonard is part of our loop, he's been a key contributor in the Frontier community since version 1.0 in 1992. And now that he's been at Adobe for a while, his magic is showing up in their products.

Adobe ImageReady 

A great example is ImageReady, their web graphics program. It turns out that it's very scriptable. Surprise! Leonard has been showing us how it works, and James Allen Spahr, a Frontier developer has hit paydirt, he's got ImageReady and Frontier connected:

http://www.panix.com/~jspahr/instaGif.htm

James and Leonard, thanks! This is truly a milestone. I hope a dozen people start digging in this area. Adobe will be a very valuable partner. You guys are helping to cement that, and for that many many thanks.

Even better: Spahr promises to get something interesting going with Macromedia's DreamWeaver. Once Adobe and Macromedia are connected, all other content tools will follow. This is what I want.

Have you seen Wayne's World? 

Schwwwwwing!

Validation 

In software it's very important who they compare you to. Back when we were a Mac-only developer, we were compared to AppleScript, which was hard to work with because our development and runtime environment is so different from Apple's.

Now that we're cross-platform and have fleshed out our content management features, we're attracting the kind of comparison we want. New Media magazine focuses on multimedia developers, who are, more and more, web developers, and are likely to use either a Mac or Windows machine, or both. They're right in the center of the market we're working in, just like Adobe and Macromedia, so when they write a roundup of our category, it's great that they include us.

http://newmedia.com/newmedia/98/10/labreport/Team_Tools.html

It's a very useful piece, New Media picks up on a lot of the threads, most important the key role that XML will play in this market in assuring interoperability between different team-oriented content management systems and workstation tools like those from Adobe and Macromedia.

That's it 

Hey I'm on vacation now.

See you in September!

Dave Winer

PS: One more thing. I'm on a panel with John Ousterhout, the lead developer of Tcl and Larry Wall (Perl) at Comdex/Enterprise in SF on 9/9. Should be interesting. There's a good collegial atmosphere in this market.