Adobe FrameMaker for Mac OS X

Timeline

March 2001:

Apple releases Mac OS 10.0 (Cheetah). Mac FrameMaker users eagerly wait for news of a Mac OS X native version.

August 2001:

A statement on the Adobe Web site reads:

"Currently, most of Adobe's software products do not offer native Mac OS X support. Adobe plans to support Mac OS X native mode in future releases of our flagship products, beginning with Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0."

Click here (PDF) to see the whole story.

May 2002:

Adobe releases FrameMaker 7.0 for Mac OS 9, not Mac OS X.

Apple releases Mac OS 10.2 (Jaguar). Mac FrameMaker users wait patiently.

Apple releases Mac OS 10.3 (Panther). Mac FrameMaker users patiently wait for news about FrameMaker for Mac OS X.

12 January 2004:

Adobe ships FrameMaker 7.1 for Windows and Solaris, but there's no mention of a Mac version. Adobe says it will continue to sell and support FrameMaker 7.0 for Mac.

Out of the blue, Adobe announces that it will discontinue Mac FrameMaker on 24 April.

Adobe discontinues Mac FrameMaker. Support will be available until 21 April 2005.

Set up the FrameMaker for Mac OS X petition in a bid to persuade Adobe to reconsider its decision.

Over 1,000 people sign the petition in four days—a truly fantastic response and testament to the pent-up demand for FrameMaker for Mac OS X.

Petition count: 1,495 signatures.

Posted eight copies of the petition (48 A4 pages each) to the following Adobe executives:

• Dr. John E. Warnock—Chairman of the Board
• Dr. Charles M. Geschke—Chairman of the Board
• Bruce Chizen—President and Chief Executive Officer
• Shantanu Narayen—Executive Vice President of Worldwide Products
• Ivan Koon—Senior Vice President, Intelligent Document Business Unit
• Jim Stephens—Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations
• James Heeger—Senior Vice President, Creative Professional Business Unit
• Bryan Lamkin—Senior Vice President, Digital Imaging and Digital Video Business Unit

Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA 95110-2704
U.S.A.

Received the following response from Adobe's PR director.

From: xxxx@adobe.com
Subject: Response to Petition
Date: 29 July 2004
To: pfindon@xxxx.xxxx

Dear Paul

Several of our executives were forwarded the petition you organized around a Mac OS X version of Adobe FrameMaker. Thank you for taking the time to voice your concern regarding FrameMaker on the Macintosh platform.

Although we knew this announcement would be a concern to a number of users, the difficult decision to discontinue FrameMaker on the Mac was based on sound business reasons. This decision is unlikely to be reversed. Going forward, the FrameMaker team will focus on developing the next version of FrameMaker for the Windows and Solaris platforms. Your existing collection of FrameMaker documents can be read by FrameMaker on either platform. If you need to edit those documents with another word processor, consider using the "Save As RTF" feature built into FrameMaker.

For more information about this decision, Adobe has made an FAQ available at:

http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/pdfs/fmmac_faq.pdf

Thank you.

The Adobe Team

A disappointing response but a response all the same. The implication that we use FrameMaker on Windows or Solaris is not particularly helpful, as is the suggestion that we save our documents as RTF for use in another word processor. We don't want another platform and we don't want another word processor. All we want is what's been available for the last 15 years, namely FrameMaker for Mac.

Don't be put off by this response. There's still hope. Adobe is simply waiting for enough users to come forward. Sign the petition! Write to Adobe! Write to Apple! I will be submitting an updated petition soon!

Petition count: 2,014 signatures.

Adobe is running a FrameMaker survey until 10 September. Toward the end of the survey you can choose several favorites from a list of possible improvements. A Mac OS X version is an option. To take part in the survey, visit <http://websurveys.adobe.com/invt/>. Act now—before it's too late!

Mac News Network—"Adobe is performing a user survey for FrameMaker, which indicates that the company may be considering further development for Mac OS X (after saying that it had no future plans for the product in January 2004)."

Wrote to the following Apple executives explaining the FrameMaker situation and requesting their help. Included a 50-page print out of the petition already submitted to Adobe.

• Steve Jobs—Chief Executive Officer
• Phil Schiller—Senior Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing
• Avie Tevanian—Chief Software Technology Officer

Apple
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
U.S.A.

Petition count: 2,322 signatures.

Attended the Mac Expo 2005, London, wearing my "FrameMaker for Mac OS X" T-shirt. Not long after entering I was surrounded by other Mac FrameMaker users all asking where they could get hold of FrameMaker for Mac OS X. Like me, they are still using Mac OS 9 and have no intention whatsoever of switching to Windows.

Launched the FrameMaker for Mac OS X Mailing List as an easy way for supporters to keep up to date with the petition's progress and discuss Mac FrameMaker-related issues.

On behalf of the petition's 2,725 supporters, posted FrameMaker for Mac OS X Christmas cards to Adobe and Apple executives.

Petition count: 2,775 signatures.

Apple announces a new word processing/page layout application called Pages. Not a FrameMaker replacement, but it does have some interesting features nonetheless. No doubt it'll mature over time.

Submitted petition supplement #1 with 1,411 additional signatures to the following Adobe executives:

• Dr. John E. Warnock—Chairman of the Board
• Dr. Charles M. Geschke—Chairman of the Board
• Bruce Chizen—Chief Executive Officer
• Shantanu Narayen—President and Chief Operating Officer
• Ivan Koon—Senior Vice President, Intelligent Documents Business Unit
• Jim Stephens—Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations
• Bryan Lamkin—Senior Vice President, Digital Imaging and Digital Video Business Unit
• Russell Brady—PR Director.

Also sent copies to the following Apple executives:

• Steve Jobs—Chief Executive Officer
• Phil Schiller—Senior Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing
• Avie Tevanian—Chief Software Technology Officer
• Tim Cook—Executive Vice President, Worldwide Operations
• Bertrand Serlet—Senior Vice President, Software Engineering
• Sina Tamaddon—Senior Vice President, Applications Division.

In February, I wrote the following letter to iCreate magazine. It was published in issue 17 (April 2005).

Subject: We've been framed
From: Paul Findon

In your Upgrade your Mac article in issue 15, you say most software companies are ditching their OS 9 products and encouraging users to switch to Mac OS X. Adobe has indeed ditched the Mac OS 9 version of FrameMaker, but has decided not to produce a version for Mac OS X.
Adobe says we should ditch our Macs and switch to Windows, but we're 99% Mac, 99% FrameMaker and we do not want to switch to an inferior platform. However, we need FrameMaker to do our work and currently there is no alternative. I say "we" because almost 3,000 other disenfranchised Adobe customers have signed a petition asking Adobe to develop FrameMaker for Mac OS X.

In case you're wondering, FrameMaker is a vertical app for producing long, technical documents. FrameMaker is used by manufacturers around the world, including IBM, Intel, and Microsoft Press. Adobe uses it and is shifting from Mac to Solaris. Apple uses it and, like the rest of us, is currently running it in the Classic environment. The iPod shuffle user guide was made with FrameMaker 6.0 running in Classic.
As you can see, Adobe has left us in a predicament. You can read more about our plight at <www.infopage.net/fmforosx>.

iCreate's response:

We're sorry to hear about your FrameMaker dilemma, Paul. It's a real shame that a company with such a long pedigree of developing software for the Mac should decide to discontinue a valuable app. Maybe Apple has plans to step into the void with a similar application? What do other readers think about Adobe's curmudgeonly treatment of FrameMaker users?

You can now read my letter to Macworld magazine, which appeared in the Feedback section of the March 2005 issue. It was in response to an item in a earlier issue titled "XPress versus InDesign," in which Adobe InDesign group product manager Will Eisley took a swipe at Quark for not valuing its customers.

Apple announces that it's switching to Intel processors starting in 2006. The new Intel Macs will not support Mac OS 9 or the Classic environment so it will be impossible to run FrameMaker.

A member of the FrameMaker for Mac OS X mailing list recently posted a message quoting Michael Hu, FrameMaker Product Manager at Adobe, as saying "you will be happy to hear what we have to say at the November conference" and "Adobe has now reevaluated it's portfolio and is REINVESTING in FM." The conference he's referring to is the 2005 FrameMaker Chautauqua. Whether there will be any good news for Mac FrameMaker users remains to be seen.

Macworld UK reports that three Adobe executives (Ivan Koon, Bryan Lamkin, and Theresa Townsley) will leave when the Adobe/Macromedia merger concludes and five executives from Macromedia will join Adobe. One of the five is Kevin Lynch, Executive Vice President and Chief Software Architect, Macromedia. This is the guy who designed the user interface and developed the first Macintosh release of FrameMaker for Frame Technology all those years ago. Perhaps he, as a soon to be Adobe executive, will be able to get FrameMaker for Mac OS X development underway?

An Adobe rep confirms that Adobe is reinvesting in FrameMaker and there is now an actual team of engineers at Adobe, San Jose working on it. Previously, the FrameMaker team had been dissolved and engineers reassigned to the Acrobat project. No news as to how or if these changes will affect Mac FrameMaker users. I guess we'll find out at the 2005 FrameMaker Chautauqua. The first-day keynote will be given by Adobe's Karl Matthews and Michael Hu. They'll be talking about "The Future of Adobe FrameMaker: 7.x and Beyond."

No good news for Mac FrameMaker users from the 2005 FrameMaker Chautauqua, but further confirmation that Adobe is reinvesting in the product is, I guess, good news for all of us.

Adobe said that the number of Mac FrameMaker users is not growing and that's what they have to consider. Since Adobe stopped selling Mac FrameMaker 18 months ago and never even released a version of Mac OS X, that's hardly surprising. How can the market for a product grow if the product is not available?

Adobe went on to say that if the market changes (i.e., more and more Mac users want FrameMaker) and there's an opportunity, Adobe will respond. If you haven't already written to Adobe, you should do so now. Even if you have already written, write again and state your commitment to buying FrameMaker for Mac OS X.

Since Mac OS X's UNIX capabilities make it very appealing to engineers, scientists, academics, and the like, there is every chance that the market will change. Adobe could promote this change by developing FrameMaker for Mac OS X and promoting it aggressively.

Redlex announces Mellel 2.0, saying: "...we're making a significant move to also fill the void left when FrameMaker for the Mac was abandoned by Adobe." It still needs indexing, cross-referencing, hypertext, etc., but at Version 2.0, it's still early days yet. I suggest you download the demo, give it a try, and send your feature requests to the authors. (According to the Mellel discussion forum, indexing, cross-referencing, and XML will be added in 2006.)

Apple introduces new Intel-based Macs at the Macworld Expo, San Francisco. Although these new Macs will run PowerPC apps, Mac OS 9 and the Classic environment are not supported, making it impossible to run FrameMaker.

Apple's Pages app is upgraded to 2.0 but doesn't appear to contain any new features relevant to Mac FrameMaker users.

Thomas Michanek has kindly put together a transcript (PDF) of Karl Matthews' keynote presentation from the 2005 FrameMaker Chautauqua. Karl is Group Product Manager of Publishing Technologies at Adobe.

Petition count: 3,245 signatures.

Launched the new Web site at fm4osx.org, with a total redesign, new PDF form letters for writing to Adobe, search facility, and more.

In addition to the Intel-based MacBook Pro and iMac announced in January, last week Apple introduced an Intel-based Mac mini and discontinued the PowerPC version. If you need a new Mac to run Classic FrameMaker, I suggest that you start thinking about it now, as Apple has already discontinued the 15-inch PowerBook G4 and 17-inch iMac G4. For professional users, the Power Mac G5 will probably be available for a while longer, at least until Adobe releases CS3. PowerBooks, however, may disappear much sooner. Note that some dealers may have stock of discontinued models even if they're no longer available from the Apple store.

Today, I had a call from the head of PR for Apple Europe in response to my letter to Steve jobs. I explained the situation, the petition, and the Web site, and the PR person said that the issue had already been discussed at the upper levels of Apple management and that they are also hoping Adobe will come on board with FrameMaker for Mac OS X. The PR person said they'd flag the issue again but couldn't really do any more because FrameMaker is not an Apple product. I said I understood that and had written to Apple to see if they could put pressure on Adobe to do the right thing and release FrameMaker for Mac OS X.

Several other Mac FrameMaker users who wrote to Apple have received similar calls.

Macworld UK published the following quote by Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen: "...there are some products that we have today that we have not been able to afford to continue to develop to make available on the Mac. A great example being FrameMaker. The majority of FrameMaker users use Windows as an OS but there is a small percentage that want to use FrameMaker on the Mac so they can use Boot Camp."

Nice to be acknowledged, I guess, and one could almost feel sorry for Adobe not being able to afford to port Mac FrameMaker to Mac OS X. But seriously, isn't Adobe rolling in cash? What with record-breaking sales, overhead cuts, and outsourcing to India?

I guess we can't really expect the CEO of a company the size of Adobe to understand how its customers use its products, and suggesting that we use Boot Camp clearly reflects this. Perhaps if we did use only one application, i.e., FrameMaker, to do the job, then rebooting our Macs into Windows with Boot Camp would be a usable, although not very elegant, workaround. Fact is, I normally work with about 10 different applications running simultaneously and am constantly switching between them, and that's how I've worked for the last 10 years. My basic daily toolset consists of:

1. FrameMaker for writing and manual making
2. E-mail app for communicating with clients and transferring small files
3. Web browser for online research, dictionaries, and translation tools
4. Adobe Acrobat for viewing PDF files and searching the archive of manuals and documents that I've created over the years
5. Acrobat Distiller for distilling PDF files
6. Adobe Illustrator tor technical drawings
7. Adobe Photoshop for bitmap and screen shot editing
8. AHD dictionary
9. Excel for client documents (engineers love to use it as a word processor)
10. Word for client documents
11. FTP app for transferring megabytes of data around the world
12. Personal organizer
13. ...to name just a few.

The suggestion that I reboot my Mac every time I need to switch between FrameMaker and another app is simply ludicrous.

It's also worth pointing out that running Windows FrameMaker in Boot Camp in not supported by Adobe. Run into any issues, and you're on your own.

Apple introduced the 17-inch MacBook Pro. The PowerBook G4 has been discontinued, and now the only Mac capable of running Mac FrameMaker is the Power Mac G5.

My new Power Mac G5 Quad and 30-inch Cinema Display arrived last week and I'm lovin' it! Masses of screen real estate, and 4.5 GB of memory means I can have a ton of apps open simultaneously with plenty of room to breath. And, I can run Mac FrameMaker at lightening speed with multilanguage support, including Japanese, Chinese, and Russian. FrameMaker for Mac OS X would be the icing on the cake, but for now, I believe I've got the perfect system. I'm beginning to think Rod Stewart was right when he sang Mac Users have More Fun!

An interesting conversation between Adobe cofounder and Chairman John Warnock and Conrad Taylor has been published on the EPSG (Electronic Publishing Specialist Group) Web site, in which Warnock says, with regard to FrameMaker: "Essentially, the idea is to start migrating features over to InDesign. Unfortunately, the InDesign crowd doesn’t understand the structured document world as well as they need to, and so that migration has been coming along more slowly than I would have liked it to have been."

That was two years ago, so the plan may have changed since then. InDesign CS2, released in April 2005, didn't really add anything to convince me that this was still true, and it could be argued that with Adobe's announcement last year that it's reinvesting in FrameMaker (Windows and Solaris only), there's little hope of InDesign ever being a replacement. I guess we'll have to wait and see what CS3 delivers.

Apple today announced its new Power Mac G5 replacement the Mac Pro, which features two Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors. However, if you scroll down the Apple Store's main page, you'll see that the Power Mac G5 Quad is still available. For how long? Perhaps until Adobe releases CS3, supposedly in the second quarter of 2007.

Sent four copies of the petition—3,673 signatures, 114 pages—to the following:

• Bruce Chizen—Chief Executive Officer
• Michael Hu—Senior Product Marketing Manager for FrameMaker
• Karl Matthews—Group Product Manager of Publishing Technologies
• R.J. Jacquez—Adobe FrameMaker Evangelist

Apple no longer sells new PowerPC Macs, although refurbished units do appear on the U.S. and U.K. Apple Stores from time to time. As of this entry, the U.K. Apple Store is listing refurbished Power Mac G5 Quads and 15-inch PowerBook G4s, both ideal for running Mac FrameMaker.

Adobe announces that it's bringing Premiere, its pro video editing app, back to the Mac. It dropped the Mac version back in July 2003. Apparently, Apple's switch to Intel made it easier for Adobe. This is encouraging news. Hopefully, Adobe will do the same with FrameMaker.

Vivek Jain, Group Product Manager for FrameMaker and RoboHelp at Adobe, launched the Technical Communication blog "to provide interesting, useful info about Technical Communication, FrameMaker, RoboHelp and related issues."

Adobe ships Creative Suite 3, with a new version of InDesign. "Robust long-document support" is one of the new features of InDesign CS3, which, for Adobe, means: "advanced bullets and numbering, running headers and footers, and synchronized master pages." Running headers and footers certainly takes it one step closer to FrameMaker, and there's table and cell styles, text variables, and advanced find and replace, too, but still no cross references. Perhaps CS4 in 2009?

In response to Microsoft's new Silverlight platform, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen repsonded with the following:

"Microsoft, historically, has never demonstrated a commitment to maintaining a cross-platform solution,"

He cited Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer as examples of Microsoft products that are still being developed for Windows but have been ended for the Mac platform."

That's funny. Wasn't FrameMaker a cross-platform solution and didn't Bruce Chizen end the Mac version?

He went on: "Even though they say Silverlight is going to be cross-platform, and maybe the first [version] will be, I'm not sure our customers or the people that are trying to deliver that content will have the degree of confidence that if they go with Microsoft, they'll be able to provide them with a complete cross-platform solution forever."

Just like the thousands of Mac FrameMaker users who no longer have confidence in Adobe to provide them with a complete cross-platform solution forever!

Adobe announces FrameMaker 8 for Windows and Solaris.

Adobe unveils Technical Communication Suite for Windows only. Suite includes FrameMaker 8, RoboHelp 7, Captivate 3, and Acrobat 3D Version 8.

People are still signing the petition, and this Web site remains busy, with an average of 15,000 hits per month. Visitors are coming from all over the world, including (in traffic order): United States, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, Netherlands, India, Austria, Finland, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Sweden, Japan, Spain, New Zealand, Greece, Russia, Belgium, Israel, Paraguay, Former Yugoslavia, Thailand, Argentina, Colombia, Poland, Mexico, Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Turkey, Malaysia, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, Seychelles, Lithuania, Singapore.

The top referring Web sites are: Google (U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and France), Wikipedia, macworld.com, and macuser.de.

The top search terms are: "framemaker mac," "framemaker os x," "framemaker for mac," "framemaker alternative," and "framemaker replacement."

Petition count: 3,893 signatures.

Sterling Ledet of Sterling Ledet & Associates, Inc. has started a new petition to try to persuade Adobe to develop Captivate for Mac OS X. It certainly would be great to have the complete Adobe Technical Communication Suite on the Mac. If you'd like to see Captivate on the Mac, you can sign the petition at
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/capt4mac/petition.html

Adobe announced that CEO Bruce Chizen will step down from his post at the end of this month. Let's hope that his successor, President and Chief Operating Officer Shantanu Narayen, will be a better friend to Mac users, especially Mac FrameMaker users. Read more at:
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/11/12/adobeceo/index.php

http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/11/bruce-chizen-de.html

Having told his audience at Adobe MAX conference in Chicago last month about his reasons for doing what he does, this news comes as something of a surprise. Although he did mention some parts of the job that he's personally not enjoying, such as dealing with the financial community and everybody knowing his salary.

If you use FrameMaker, one name you must know is Steve Skirsch, the man who, along with Charles Corfield, David Murray, and a few others, started the company Frame Technology in 1986 and released FrameMaker 1.0 the following year. The rest, as they say, is history.

While clicking around on this Web site the other day, I landed at <http://skirsch.com/>, where I was shocked to read that Steve has been diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer called "Waldenstrom Macroglobulinemia." He may have only 5 years left, but he intends to try and change the predicted outcome and has set up the Kirsch Fund for Waldenstrom's Research to fund research in to the disease. If you'd like to to donate to his fund, you can do so online at BrightLight: http://www.bringlight.com/projects/show/127

You can read a lot more at Steve's Web site.

Following on from Bruce Chizen's surprise exit announcement, Rick LePage has written a piece titled "Bruce Chizen's legacy." While we may not agree with Rick entirely, he ends with a plea to Shantanu Narayen, Chizen's replacement, to "set FrameMaker free," and a link to this site.

This mock funeral for Mac OS 9 performed by Steve Jobs at the 2002 WWDC is a lot of fun, but the reality is that six years later Apple itself is still using Mac OS 9 to produce its own user guides. Obviously, this ceremony was aimed at developers, for whom it made little sense to continue development of their Mac OS 9 applications, but I bet Steve didn't think Apple would still be using it after all this time. Even the iPhone manual was made with Mac OS 9! If only us Mac FrameMaker users could set a date for such a ceremony. Come on Adobe—make your customers happy!

Wouldn't Shantanu Narayen's Mac Book be so much more useful with FrameMaker for Mac OS X installed?