Adobe Blogs

Annual Performance Reviews is one of the reasons why I chose to be a consultant. Really. I always have a smile on my face when my boss announces the dreaded annual review time in a meeting and then looks at me and goes "Not you of course". Love the feeling that I don't have to worry about that crap.

You may not like Adobe for many reasons but this move is definitely worth a welcome. It is high time companies stop this madness of "annual performance reviews" which really does not mean much.

""The aim is to give people information when they need it rather than months after teachable moments have passed,"

Exactly. You just cannot sit down one fine day (read: end of the year) and discuss the performance for the entire year. Just does not work for human beings like that. We are good and bad on different days. Some days, we are ultra productive, some we just slack off. I would rather have my team/manager talk to me more often about what I am doing right when it actually happens. Same with what I did not do well at the time when it happened. This gives me the opportunity to learn quickly.

The end of year discussion in reality is more like "I do not really know the details of what you did exactly but I know you were ok for the most part. Here is a couple of things you can change, blah blah. You get a satisfactory rating blah. " That's for most of us. A few unlucky ones get the shorter end of the stick "We have to fire the bottom 5% and we thought you are one of those. Not much…

Adobe's core business is not developing platforms, but developing the editors and tools for designers. Graphic design, web design, vector, raster, doesn't matter.
They make money selling their software, not deploying flash all over the web.

Here you have a link to a comment I made a few months ago, about Adobe's shifting strategy regarding Flash:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503774

I'll copy here some parts, so I can edit a little, mostly to adjust for current trends:

------------

Their business is to make and sell amazing Editors. CS is their main product. They bought Macromedia, just to own much of the market of Designer-oriented applications. And Macromedia filled a Gap.

But from now on, they are investing heavily in building tools for HTML5.
-You can see them building Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools. [1] (this link is almost a year old, so I'd expect them to have something much more advanced by now).
- They are building HTML5 Editors [2]
- They stopped developing Flash Player mobile. [3] In the same post where they state that they will stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, they state: Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5.
Ok, ok, they also state that they will keep working in Flash for desktop. But it's like when any software company says: "We'll drop X, Y, Z so we can focus on A". That's something said to please their shareholders, so it doesn't sounds like "As our products are no longer needed, we'll just kill them".

If you are a…

That's very cool! I'd like to see more about how the debugger works. Are there any video demos available, please?

I love Glenn Reid's book, Thinking PostScript. It's like the Thinking Forth [1] of PostScript! ;) I always thought of PostScript as a cross between Lisp and Forth [2], but more in the Lisp camp, since it's so easy to write a metacircular evaluator [3] or a quine [4] in PostScript:

{{[ exch /dup load /exec load ] cvx} dup exec}

Do you remember Glenn Reid's "Distillery" [5]? It's a PostScript program that optimized other PostScript programs, which you prepended before your PostScript print file, sent to a printer, and it partially evaluated the PostScript code in the print file. It then echoed back another highly optimized flat PostScript program that printed the exact same pages, all in one coordinate system, with superfluous graphics state changes removed. That glorious hack, based on John Warnock's idea of redefining the imaging operators, eventually evolved into PDF! [6]

Glenn also wrote a delightful "Font Appreciation" app for NeXT called TouchType [7], which decades later has only recently found its way into Photoshop.

I wrote a visual interactive PostScript debugging tool for NeWS called the PSIBER Space Deck [8], and the PseudoScientific Visualizer [9] for drawing PostScript data structures like NeWS object and class dictionaries or a network map of ARPANET IMPs, and a paper [10] about them. It was most useful for debugging itself, which was…

I haven't used AE myself, but I use many of the other Adobe products and I know that many (perhaps all or close to all) of them have scripting support, so I decided to do a quick Google search for AE scripting guides.

A couple of results came up, one is an official PDF about scripting AE CS6, the other a website about AE scripting. I assume most of the stuff from the AE CS6 PDF applies to AE CC as well.

https://blogs.adobe.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/48/files/2012/06/After-Effects-CS6-Scripting-Guide.pdf?file=2012/06/After-Effects-CS6-Scripting-Guide.pdf

https://docs.aenhancers.com

From the PDF:

> When you use Adobe After Effects, you create projects, compositions, and render queue items along with all of the elements that they contain: footage, images, solids, layers, masks, effects, and properties. Each of these items, in scripting terms, is an object. This guide describes the ExtendScript objects that have been defined for After Effects projects.

I think it might be worthwhile to look into whether scripting might be used in order to randomize effects and effect parameters. My immediate guess would be that yes it would be possible. I didn't look into it closely, and if it turns out to be a dead end then I apologise for that but anyways I figured I might mention this in case it might be useful to you. Also, of course since I didn't look into it closely I can not make any guesses as to how much work it would take to get the type of functionality that you want.

"CVE counting" is not necessarily a good proxy for "security". The practice of drawing conclusions from various CVE statistics has been variously debunked over the years. I strongly recommend reading this 6-year old(!) resource from @lcamtuf:

https://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/05/vulnerability-databases-and-pie-charts.html

My own personal favorite anecdotes of why CVE counting is fail:

1) Adobe used to tour around presenting a chart of how their CVEs were decreasing over time. But then @taviso did a bit of simple fuzzing and found almost 100 issues. So it turns out the Adobe CVE count was low simply because no-one was looking hard. In fact, Adobe assigned a single CVE to all the issues, in this waffling blog post:
http://blogs.adobe.com/security/2011/08/how-did-you-get-to-that-number.html

2) Google Chrome has lots of CVEs because of the monetary incentives to go and find and report them. A quick comparison of CVEs for Chrome vs. some browser without a decent rewards program might lead you to incorrect conclusions.

3) Historically, Microsoft did not publicly disclosure or assign CVEs for issues found internally by employees. This contrasts with Chrome and Firefox, which have a greater culture of openness, where internal security discoveries are documented publicly. Quasi-arbitrary decisions like this bend the numbers all over the place, from vendor to vendor and product to product.

I use Mac, not Windows, so I'm sure I see them rendered quite differently than you, but I prefer Source Code Pro.[1][2] They are extremely similar and I agree nothing else comes very close.

It's the lower-case 'i' that does it for me.[3]

Fewer serifs in general allow me to read more quickly, I feel. 'i' has 1 to Consolas' 3, while lower case 'l' (L) has 2 to Consolas' 3.

One negative is that I much prefer Consolas' 0-with-slant to Source Code Pro's 0-with-dot.

By the way, the first link below is from a very cool resource I just found with votes and comparisons of many of the most popular choices: http://www.slant.co/topics/67/~what-are-the-best-programming-fonts (It seems the web has become more informative on this topic than the last time I surveyed all the font options.)

Finally, this is what the designer of Source Code Pro, Paul D. Hunt, had to say about the two[2]:

> Consolas is narrower than most monospaced fonts at 55% of the Em square, where I stuck with 60% for Source Code. If the narrowness is a top selling point for you, then Consolas is definitely king.

[1]: http://www.slant.co/topics/67/viewpoints/5/~what-are-the-best-programming-fonts~source-code-pro

[2]: http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro.html

[3]: http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/files/2012/09/Confusable_Chars.png