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At work the other day, one of my co-workers and I were discussing Adobe’s acquisition of Scene 7. We began looking around at Adobe’s web site and realized that they have a ton of products now.

Neither of us were sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Adobe is obviously the vendor of choice for all of my graphics and interactive development applications. Well, most of them anyway. So if I want anybody to purchase or develop new applications to benefit me, I want it to be them. The three vendors I really trust are Adobe, Apple and Google. Personally, I like Google the best because most of their stuff is free. The only thing better than free food is free computer applications… right?

Our shared fear is that Adobe may be taking on too much and potentially lose focus. Follow the link above and check out everything they have now. They have more applications than ever before and I honestly don’t even know what many of them do. Ultimately, as long as they are able to keep focus and budget where I need it, things will be fine. It should lead to more and more power to the necessity applications, like Photoshop and Flash.

This could lead to less applications and just ultra powerful tools for us interactive folks. Even with Scene7 potentially being added to Photoshop, Flash and, I hate to mention it, Dreamweaver. If this is their plan, acquire strong applications, build them into their current set and then charge us more, I will be very happy and shell out the extra dough. I would rather pay a ton for one all-inclusive application than have to jump between all these different apps.

Stay tuned to Adobe over the next few years… It will sure be interesting to see what they do.

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Wait a Second, Things Look Different…
The site I was so proud of is gone. I had built a custom cms web site for phxcreative with blogger integrated for the blogging solution. Well, that is done. I have completed the transition to WordPress and you are looking at it. If you had my rss feed, please update it now.

Why Did I Make the Move to Open Source?
It’s the right time. I have been playing around with open source apps, including WordPress since 2001, but I was always wanting to build everything custom. With the route my career is going, I don’t have time to keep upgrading and building new features for my site. I can now just add plugins and edit everything in an easy to use cms interface.

What Does WordPress Have to Offer?
WordPress provides a lot of benefits on top of the easy to use plugins. I will spare you all the details. But, you should notice a much better experience. There are more navigation items to help you find the topic you are looking for based on the archives, search and categories. The navigation is no longer image based and can be modified on the fly without any effort on my part whatsoever.

What’s Different?
Each post now has its own page. Posting comments is much easier. SEO-wise, this is a huge improvement (although I already had a supposed 95% SEO score). But most importantly it is forcing me to always work in WordPress and be that much more efficient when somebody wants me to do a site for them. I want to implement some more WordPress sites, not every project will be right for it, but I hope to have a couple.

Final Blah Blah Blah…
Anyway, enjoy the new site. There are still some loose ends I need to tie up, but for the most part, this site is ready to rock. It is still table-less and pixel perfect on all browsers as far as I can tell. It probably won’t validate, I won’t even try. I still believe that being identical in all major browsers is more important than standards. I know some people want to fight me because of that, but until standards are real standards and the browsers have to comply, I bow down to the browsers for the sake of the users… so bleh!

Thanks for coming by…

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I am thinking about dropping the custom built site and moving all of phxcreative into WordPress… any thoughts on that? Overall, I think it is the best move, but curious if anyone has anything to say about that, does anyone even come here?

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I have been using CS3 for a little over a week now and it is certainly nice. The cool thing is that Flash and Dreamweaver are now Adobe products so they are all connected in some way. I tried using Dreamweaver for a project after I read the manual and I was disappointed. I don’t know if I just suck at Dreamweaver now or if it is a Dreamweaver issue, I just personally trust and like looking at hand code much better. It wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do, so I had to resort to hand coding which took me longer to clean up DW’s code then it would have if I just coded it by hand to begin with.

Other than that, everything is cool. All of the apps I have used are just like the last versions, except they are connected more seemlessly and have modified interfaces and a few new tools. I haven’t used anything enough yet to really know how cool they are, but I am definately happy I upgraded.

Two really cool apps that I have used so far are Acrobat and Flash Video Encoder. They are simply smoother and easier than ever before and offer flexibility that makes life more painfree.

As I use the apps more, I will learn more and let you know how it goes. I guess the coolest thing so far is the manual. You will know what I mean when you upgrade. It is a manual like I have never seen before. I am now about 25% of the way through the manual and will actually read the rest, again, you will understand when you upgrade. For now, I don’t know how necessary an upgrade is, I am just happy I did it and will find out even more benefits as I use the apps more.

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