Glossary of CSE Part 2 - Image Processing and Multimedia

Glossary of Computer Science and Engineering Part 2 - Image Processing Software and Multimedia | HackThatCORE

Image Processing Software

In the mid-1980s Adobe’s founders realized that they could further exploit the knowledge of graphics rendition that they had gained in developing their fonts. They began to create software that would make these capabilities available to illustrators and artists as well as desktop publishers. Their first such product was Adobe Illustrator for the Macintosh, a vector-based drawing program that built upon the graphics capa- bilities of their PostScript language. In 1989 Adobe introduced Adobe Photoshop for the Macintosh. With its tremendous variety of features, the program soon became a standard tool for graphic artists. However, Adobe seemed to have difficulty at first in anticipating the growth of desktop publishing and graphic arts on the Microsoft Windows platform. Much of that market was seized by competitors such as Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress. By the mid-1990s, however, Adobe, fueled by the continuing revenue from its PostScript technology, had acquired both Aldus and Frame Technologies, maker of the popular FrameMaker document design program. Meanwhile PhotoShop continued to develop on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms, aided by its ability to accept add-ons from hundreds of third-party developers

Multimedia and the Web

Adobe made a significant expansion beyond document processing into multimedia with its acquisition of Macromedia (with its popular Flash animation software) in 2005 at a cost of about $3.4 billion. The company has integrated Macromedia’s Flash and Dreamweaver Web-design software into its Creative Suite 3 (CS3). Another recent Adobe product that targets Web-based publishing is Digital Editions, which integrated the existing Dreamweaver and Flash software into a powerful but easy-to-use tool for delivering text content and multimedia to Web browsers. Buoyed by these developments, Adobe earned nearly $2 billion in revenue in 2005, about $2.5 billion in 2006, and $3.16 billion in 2007. Today Adobe has over 6,600 employees, with its headquarters in San Jose and offices in Seattle and San Francisco as well as Bangalore, India; Ottawa, Canada; and other locations. In recent years the company has been regarded as a superior place to work, being ranked by Fortune magazine as the fifth best in America in 2003 and sixth best in 2004

References:

• “Adobe Advances on Stronger Profit.” Business Week Online, Decem­ ber 18, 2006. Available online. URL: http://www.business- week.com/investor/content/dec2006/pi20061215_986588. htm. Accessed April 10, 2007.
• Adobe Systems Incorporated home page. Available online. URL: http://www.adobe.com. Accessed April 10, 2007.
• “Happy Birthday Acrobat: Adobe’s Acrobat Turns 10 Years Old.” Print Media 18 (July–August 2003): 21.