
Photoshop Product Manager John Nack
spoke about Flash and Photoshop, Adobe/Macromedia integration, and more in an podcast interview with Inside Mac Radio's
Scott Sheppard. The interview took place this week at
Flash Forward
2006, which was the first Flash conference since the Adobe-Macromedia merger.
You can hear the full
interview on the March 2, 2006 episode of Inside Mac Radio [
iTunes Music Store
link ]
Here are key excerpts from the Nash interview:
On his own Flash background:
"It's really funny. Flash is really the reason I came to Adobe. I was working for an agency out in New York
called agency.com. We were doing Web sites in Flash for Nike, and Gucci, and all these big companies. And I really
wanted to build a new experience there and solve some of the problems I was having. So Adobe said, hey we're making a
Flash animation tool. Do you want to come work on that. So I said sure. And they were just about to ship their first
version. So I came out and joined the Live Motion team in 2000. And worked hard, got a bunch of cool things going. But
ultimately we didn't get enough things right fast enough to really make it take off, and the project got canceled. So
about four years ago I left that and came over to Photoshop. Well then you can imagine last April I just about dropped
my cereal on the floor. I was like, what Adobe and Macromedia are getting together. Totally unbelievable. I couldn't be
more excited because a lot of the pain points, the things that just waste people's time and keep them from doing cool
stuff, we can now finally fix. And that's really exciting."
On potential integration of Photoshop and
Flash:
"Mike Downey, the Flash product manager, put up a survey a week or two on his blog and said,
what's the top thing you want to integrate. And I think the top thing was Photoshop and Flash. But of course a lot of
folks are using Illustrator, Fireworks, and they want those to integrate as well. Same with After Effects."
"There are just a lot of really obvious basic things we can make work right--bringing in a layered PSD
file, bringing in a layered Illustrator file--things that are not creative tasks, but things that just should work
better. And it's really great that we can get the teams together and give them access to each others' code and a lot of
knowledge, and make that stuff work. . ."