Re: Some comments from inside Xrite.
Re: Some comments from inside Xrite.
- Subject: Re: Some comments from inside Xrite.
- From: Walker Blackwell <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 17 May 2011 23:18:41 -0400
" I speak with folks at Adobe and I have another member of
> the staff working closely with Apple on a number of issues that concern
> everyone on this list, "
It's good to hear directly that Xrite is working with Apple and Adobe on issues related to problems users have brought up on this list.
Are there any specifics that we might be able to look at? I'm thinking of a "roadmap" (to use an open-source term). Call it expectation management on your end: whatever works. Adobe responded a while back announcing that Adobe Color Utility would be forthcoming to fix the patch-printing debacle. This did a lot to calm the waters in the interim.
From what I've seen of the product, it looks usable in a limited fashion when dealing with good LUTs and RGB or straight CMYK profiles . . . . ?? But I'm seeing a lot of concerns about more advanced profiling quality issues.
Regarding the "expectation direction" that much of the world is going in. We are needing updates and support more frequently and with less fan-fare. This is why Google Chrome has under-the-hood full-number upgrades every few months. Firefox just adopted the same workflow model and is already at FF6 in there nightly builds. This doesn't mean that they are changing the pace of development. It just means they are willing to try new things faster and push them to their customers quicker. Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Adobe Camera Raw, and much of the internet (largely the application base now) are doing the same thing. They don't change the interface they just fix the guts. And if they do change the interface, they don't do a full redesign: they streamline.
I think Xrite kinda did this with ColorPort in a way. It was their response to that expectation. We needed a free, standards compliant color management tool that updated often and didn't crash every time we upgraded our OS. But xrite needs to do this with other bread and butter products.
So while supporting legacy devices is time-consuming, the alternative or response will need to be a forefront commitment to updating ICC (with partners) and also i1Profiler.
Epson and HP and Canon update their printers, drivers, and inks nearly every year not to mention the rest of the printing world. New papers come out by the month! The contrast in speed between the rest of the world and Xrite's development cycle is rather huge. To put it bluntly, the rest of the software world just kinda sped up. And the users who were stuck waiting for xrite to catch up got angry as the years went by. So what we are needing now is a commitment not just to respond to current software issues, but to respond to the change in development cycle (and style) in the rest of the world.
Four years ago I was on the phone with an xrite rep telling me there would be a totally new pro profiling app coming out within a year. That was four years ago. The world has changed in the last three.
All the best,
Walker Blackwell
vp Black Point Editions
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