MAX mashes mix

The "mix" is whatever is meant by RIT - the Rochester Institute of Technology. They recently launched a website - Print in the mix - to show the effectiveness of print as part of something including other media. This is a welcome development and shows a firm grasp of reality.

One problem is that the mix keeps changing. My impression of Adobe is that they may have lost interest completely in what was Adobe Classic, Postscript and PDF - the sort of thing the print industry can relate to. MAX, the conference coming up this weekend, is more or less Macromedia trading as Adobe. A couple of stories show an emphasis on Flash.

eWeek reported Kevin Lynch at Flashforward as saying that Adobe is intent on helping developers and designers plan, acquire, produce, manage, publish, deliver and play back video content.

We're really focused on video technology and helping you create experiences.

PC Magazine reported that the Adobe Media Player was used to show some video. It seems possible that announcements about betas will be made during MAX. The video web is now the main focus for Adobe. The print software is now seen as not very interesting or in need of development discussion. Maybe it will become much easier to use as part of an open source approach driven by widely available standards. But Adobe has no obligation to spend on marketing to explain this.

The RIT Print In The Mix site links to an article by Barney Cox from Printing World. It will be interesting to see how Haymarket publishing policy changes over time. There is a new and improved Printweek website but the emphasis still seems to be on printed magazines.