[thelist] Image ready 3 on mac waaaaay slow?

David Wagner dave at worlddomination.net
Wed Jan 17 16:20:34 CST 2001


> And, no, I didn't mean anything other than what I had said. Adobe has a weak
> product set when it comes to designing for the web - the problem with the
> tool is the tool.

Oops... just deleted the last post to this thread, but I don't think this
will be _too_ redundant. Just had to chime in, as well as (try to) bring
this discussion back around to the original subject line:

1. Photoshop is an excellent product. It's been around for about 1 billion
years, has a massive user base, is updated regularly, is produced by a
company that helps run the industry (and does a decent job of it), runs
effectively on multiple platforms, and on top of all that, it does what
it's supposed to do and then some. It also costs more than 2 months of my
rent, which can be a problem for some.

2. Fireworks is also an excellent product. I haven't used it nearly as
much, but it appears to be quite effective, also has the backing of an
industry leader, and has great functionality.

It's also an _entirely_different_product_ from Photoshop/ImageReady. They
do different things, and meet different needs. The key here is to define
your needs, and evaluate software based on those needs. Assuming that
either we're past that point, the decision has already been made, and
nobody wants to switch anytime soon:

3. ImageReady is still, unfortunately, a young product, and it appears to
be a hastily rebuilt Photoshop at its core. This could mean that the
problem is with the product itself.

However, my Mac intuition (which is occasionally accurate) tells me that
it's just as likely to be an overextended system causing problems. If you
have gut-level utilities or extensions doing things to the filesystem,
then any application which writes to disk may have problems. If you're
using any virtual memory at all, a memory intensive program like
ImageReady will choke heavily. If you're using extensions that have
anything to do with images, graphics, or video output (and here my
expertise turns to bullshit), that might cause problems. If your hardware
is poorly designed, then no matter how much RAM you have, it'll still be
slow. (I've seen Macs that are supposed to be beefy little boxes, with
impressive speeds, that simply can't perform some basic tasks because they
weren't thought through very well.)

All of these problems can probably be overcome without resorting to new
software or banging one's head repeatedly against the screen while waiting
for simple tasks to be performed.

If the original poster (now lost in the mists of time and a haze of
overzealous deletions) would like more help with this, feel free to email
me directly with more specific information, and we'll work through some
possible solutions.

-- 

David Wagner
dave at worlddomination.net





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