Switched On: Apple’s brash Flash clash rehash

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

For all the attention on the love-hate relationship between Apple and Microsoft, there’s another software superpower with which Apple is increasingly butting heads. Apple was an early investor in Adobe and an early supporter of PostScript, which drove the first LaserWriters and launched the desktop publishing market. When Steve Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, that company used Display PostScript as the imaging engine for the company’s black boxes.

Photoshop and other members of Adobe’s Creative Suite remain some of the most popular creative tools on the Mac. For years, Photoshop made cameos at Apple keynotes as the company argued the superiority of the PowerPC architecture.

But the relationship has been strained at times as well. After going on lots of minor quests involving the slaying of forest creatures, Adobe released PostScript Level 2. But Apple surprised nearly everyone when it partnered with Microsoft in 1989 to position TrueType and the now-forgotten TrueImage as a rival to Adobe’s technology. Apple would later try again to surpass Adobe’s font technology with QuickDraw GX before adopting PDF as the graphics lingua franca for Mac OS X.

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