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Adobe Announces AlterCast

Posted on September 23, 2001

in News

by Isaac (isaac)

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Isaac

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User since: December 13, 1998

Last login: October 27, 2007

Articles written: 67

In a bag of new press releases, publishing software giant Adobe Systems Inc. has announced a new dynamic imaging server application -- Adobe AlterCast. Built on Photoshop and Illustrator code, AlterCast has been primed to work within new and existing CMS solutions.

However, priced from US$7 500 to US$60 000 it appears to be out of reach of many lone freelancers or small web design businesses. It also might have come 12-24 months too late, missing the rise of many Internet companies, and perhaps underestimating the early adoption of server-side technologies such as ColdFusion, ASP, and PHP.

AlterCast can generate and repurpose web images on the fly, outputting standard image file formats, and supporting the transparency, animation, and layer effects common within Photoshop. Budget tools, like ImageMagick, that can handle some of these capabilities already exist and may provide a competing alternative for smaller web projects.

More information is available in Adobe's press release.

Isaac is a designer from Adelaide, South Australia, where he has run Triplezero for almost a decade.

He was a member and administrator of evolt.org since its founding in 1998, designed the current site, and was a regular contributor on evolt.org's direction-setting discussion list, theforum.

On the side, he runs Opinion, Hoops SA, Confessions, Daily Male, and Comments, as well as maintaining a travel gallery at Bigtrip.org.
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What about the GIMP?

Submitted by Spyder on September 25, 2001 - 07:08.

Isn't there a way of using the GIMP to do some image processing? I believe thats how sites like cooltext.com work...

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Probably

Submitted by isaac on October 2, 2001 - 18:04.

I remember reading a while ago that the GIMP could do exactly this, so I think you're right.

If it can do this, I can't see how it'd hurt to have an article on evolt.org about it. ;)

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Keeping up with the Jones'

Submitted by MartinB on January 29, 2002 - 04:14.

It looks pretty clear to me that Adobe have just looked at the Macromedia portfolio of design tools, and asked themselves Where are we letting them get away with it?. There was a Generator-sized gap in Adobe's offerings, so this is them plugging it.

You'd need to have really high end needs to escape the capabilities of ImageMagick, as it can already handle the tasks mentioned above. I imagine manycustomers will only use it for generating navigation images of text overlaid on an image out of a CMS.

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Now that it has launched...

Submitted by OKolzig37 on January 29, 2002 - 09:08.

...there is more information available about AlterCast on Adobe's web site.

AlterCast Product Page

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Strengths

Submitted by isaac on January 29, 2002 - 17:43.

I suspect that the strength of AlterCast will be the tie-in with the PSDs almost every designer is very familiar with.

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PS integration the only benefit?

Submitted by MartinB on January 29, 2002 - 18:11.

Having looked through the product info, the only unique benefit I can see is the tight integration with multi-layered Photoshop files. And I don't think that warrants the money it costs to buy and implement when the layers can be saved out separately and run through ImageMagick or similar.

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Oh?

Submitted by isaac on January 29, 2002 - 18:15.

Oh yes, sounds so easy. Let me just hand you my 100+ layer PSDs... ;)

But yes, I know what you mean -- far too expensive for the mid-level developer. Shame about that, because I really do like Photoshop...

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