Macromedia

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Macromedia [ ˌmækɹoʊˈmiːdiə ] was an American software company based in San Francisco , best known for its Flash , FreeHand and Dreamweaver products . On 3. December 2005 Macromedia was designed by the US company Adobe Inc. acquired .

history

Macromedia was founded in 1992 through the merger of MacroMind and Authorware .

In 1995 Macromedia took over Altsys , the manufacturer of the FreeHand graphics program , which Altsys had temporarily licensed to Aldus .

In 1996 Macromedia took over FutureWave from San Diego , which in 1995 sold the vector-based illustration program SmartSketch and the Splash format (file extension “.spl”) to display these graphics in the browser . The player itself is called FutureSplash . The animation program FutureSplash-Animator , the forerunner of Flash, was developed on the basis of SmartSketch . In 2001, the software company was Allaire acquired and its product Home Site in Dreamweaver integrated and continue to be sold separately.

In May 2002, software company Adobe Inc. sued Macromedia for $ 2.8 million. Macromedia had used a user interface concept that Adobe had been claiming for itself since 1995 through a controversial software patent . Shortly thereafter, Macromedia filed several lawsuits against Adobe, which were also based on software patents. The company won this and Adobe's damages payable were nearly $ 5 million. In July 2002, the two companies settled their patent dispute out of court. Nothing was known about the terms that led to the settlement.

On April 18, 2005, the boards of directors of Adobe and Macromedia decided that Adobe should take over Macromedia for 3.4 billion US dollars. The acquisition was completed on December 3, 2005.

Adobe released version 8 of the products "Flash" and "Dreamweaver" under the Macromedia brand, after which a large part of the software portfolio was integrated into the third edition of the Adobe Creative Suite .

Products

Macromedia products included:

See also

Individual evidence

  1. Adobe and Macromedia settle patent disputes - heise online
  2. Adobe takes over Macromedia for 3.4 billion dollars - heise online