Can Quartz crack Adobe?

Matthew Rothenberg AnchorDesk

Published: 26 Jun 2001 16:07 BST

In a nutshell, I said that I've found Adobe mighty uncommunicative about its plans for Apple's next-generation OS and hoped aloud that the preeminent developer of Mac graphics software will start articulating its Mac OS X roadmap more clearly.

Judging from the responses I've seen from graphics and design pros in the audience, there are many of us whose decision to upgrade to Mac OS X hinges on the arrival of Carbonized Adobe apps -- or equivalent Mac OS X-native offerings from Adobe's competitors. (Just to explain the royal "we" in that last sentence: I don't even play a graphics pro on TV, but my lovely wife has depended on Adobe's Mac products for her illustration work since the mid-'80s.)

To their credit, a number of Adobe staffers have stepped up to the plate since then to reaffirm what the company has already stated publicly: that most of Adobe's core graphics applications will be Carbonized in their next major revs. (At the same time, they disabused optimists in the crowd of the notion that those revs will arrive in time for July's Macworld Expo in New York; citing budget constraints, the company this week acknowledged that it is breaking precedent and skipping the show.)

However, I still haven't heard an answer to my deeper question: Will the combination of Mac OS X and Adobe software confer special advantages on the Mac as a graphics platform? And if so, why aren't we hearing more about it?

It's a question I've been asking since late 1996 (when Apple announced that it was acquiring OpenStep, which featured imaging technology based on Adobe's Display PostScript) and kept asking after Apple announced that the shipping version of Mac OS X would feature Quartz, an imaging layer based on Adobe's Portable Document Format. (Nota bene: Apple rolled Quartz itself from the public portable document format (PDF) spec, reportedly because Apple and Adobe were unable to agree on licensing terms for Adobe's version of the format.)

Considering that Apple's new, rock-steady, Unix-based, modern OS is built on Adobe technology, it would seem that Adobe is in a prime position to wring unprecedented potential out of graphics packages developed for Mac OS X.

After all, PDF is the connective tissue linking together Adobe's extensive product roadmap. PDF is the lingua franca enabling Adobe's ambitious Network Publishing scheme for multipurposing content for a welter of platforms and networking technologies. It's the centerpiece of the company's plans for publishing workflows unified under the Adobe banner. And it's the universal solvent Adobe proposes for every conceivable situation involving the dissemination of text and images.

Isn't an OS built from the ground up to display PDF a dream come true for Adobe?