According to this article called "Adobe discontinues FrameMaker for Macintosh at MacCentral, Adobe is in the process of putting the only professional documentation tool, FrameMaker, to rest on the Macintosh, at least. There are still builds for Solaris and WinDOS.
There are a couple of things to clarify here:
- Adobe bought FrameMaker Inc. a couple of years ago because people making a living by creating technical documentation laughed at the other tools available at the time. Ever tried to write tech-docs with PageMaker or Quark? If your preference isn't Masochism, chances are, you didn't. After a while, a limited set of features popped up in their InDesign product. If the usual cycle continues (buy competition - recreate some features - kill the bought product), FrameMaker will be dead in a couple of years, because it simply doesn't make sense to develop two products, not to dissimilar from each other, for a longer time. Another choice gone.
- Adobe tries to tell us "more and more of our customers are using WinDOS" while still keeping the Solaris version of FrameMaker alive and kicking, translates to "we're pissed about the fact Apple dared to create competing products to ours". Let's face it, there are more Macs in technical documentation than Solaris boxes.
- The pricing for FrameMaker in Europe is ridiculous. While working for a company that created Videogames, we calculated that buying a couple of Solaris licenses and X11 clients for the Workstations, we could save more than 50% compared to a mix of single Solaris, Mac and WinDOS licenses. The suits at Adobe didn't understand that FrameMaker is/was the best product to do collaborative work on documentation, instead they tried to focus on milking customers that used to live happily with the floating license scheme the original product had.
OTOH, since all Macs running OS X come with an X11 server, the option of putting a smaller Solaris box in the office and connect to it via X11 is the best bet; for the time being, that is. So don't tell anyone, get the Solaris box if you are using FrameMaker on a Mac.
10:01:56 AM 
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Tuesday, March 23, 2004
