While I don’t visit Adobe’s site www.adobe.com that often, perhaps once a month, I was surprised today to see their new site design in place, and have to say that I approve of the new look and feel.

Now I know they don’t need my approval - who the heck does apart from my children! - but the new design is certainly less cluttered, and offers (IMHO), a better visiting experience. Things are easier to find, easier to read…. overall a job well done (though of course you would expect that, this is Adobe after all!)

There was, however, one surprise…. of course being a Dreamweaver fan (and yes, I still am a fan of it, even though they don’t have Dreamweaver for Linux (I wish), though I do use Dreamweaver MX running on my main Ubuntu laptop, running under WINE (though I digress)… the surprise I’m about to show you completely threw me, but can you guess what it is?

As you may or may not know, ADOBE have their own AJAXian framework - SPRY - which is a kind of offshoot/amalgamation/rework/integration of the old InterAKT MXWidgets (but with so much more!), so imagine my surprise when I saw this on the Dreamweaver page at ADOBE (http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/?ogn=EN_US-gntray_prod_dreamweaver_home)

All good so far, and I would definitely agree with these reasons to upgrade……

However, I’m a nosey sod, and because there’s also a nice Accordion widget at the bottom of the page, I thought I’d have a look-see to find out which set of tools they’ve used to create it…. Now as it turns out, it’s a Flash Accordion - Not always easy to tell these days with some of them (yes Javascript can be that good), so in Firefox, with my Web Developer tools extension installed, I did the trusty right click thing….

Now for those not in the know, this won’t mean much… however, Moo Tools (http://mootools.net/) is a compact, light Framework that provides Flash-style effects and widgets, using plain old Javascript… yes you guessed it… in the great scheme of things Moo Tools is a competitor to SPRY! (Well if you can call it a competitor, we’re talking about FREE tools here).

So what does this mean? Do the developers at ADOBE feel that SPRY isn’t up to the job? Moo Tools is certainly a more mature, and robust framework, though SPRY does offer features that Moo doesn’t, the same is also true . Could this be an early indicator that ADOBE are setting their sights on aquiring another company - Mad4Milk (http://mad4milk.net/), who produce Moo Tools, also produce Moo.Fx?

Or could it simply be that in this day and age of open source code, that the ADOBE developers just chose the best tools for the job?

Personally, I believe it to be the latter, but just couldn’t resist fuelling the Conspiracy Theories…. hehehe.