The word tirith means guard (or watch) in Sindarin, one of Tolkien's languages from Lord of the Rings. See also Minas Tirith! I really enjoy this utility's name.

Headline is out of date. They changed their plans. From the link:

> We are not discontinuing or removing access to Adobe Animate. Animate will continue to be available for both current and new customers, and we will ensure you continue to have access to your content. There is no longer a deadline or date by which Animate will no longer be available.

I suspect this may be driven by subscription consequences. In the UK consumer rights mean that you're able to cancel a subscription commitment if the offering is materially changed. I used this in the past when Adobe withdrew a product to cancel an annual license I no longer needed mid-term.

Making a zombie product probably has a lower impact on their revenues.

They only "changed" them because it materially affected them.

"We're going to provide support and security patches" means "in a year we'll quietly stop any work on it anyway"

There was a cartoon on bluesky with the dialogue:

"we've listened and we're going to keep offering Animate" (crowd cheers)

".. but we're not going to make any changes to the software" (crowd cheers louder)

"wait why are they still cheering"

.. the joke being that the customers don't want the software to materially change, just so long as it continues to run.

We have to learn that a lot of software can be just that: done, without requiring a continuous of new superfluous features

Knowing how to finish can be just as important as how to start.

Or, a bad finish can absolutely ruin a good start.

Adobe has no clue how unattractive it is right now.

> "in a year we'll quietly stop any work on it anyway"

Exactly what my guess about this is too. People who rely on Animate shouldn't rest easy just because Adobe backed off this time.

I mean, framed differently:

> A material number of customers see Animate as a differentiator from our competitors, so even if we only provide support and security patches, the investment is justified for retention.

I don't really think there's a hidden agenda here. The announcement surfaced new information for them, they probably reframed their own analytics and saw insights that backed maintaining Animate as a result.

> The announcement surfaced new information for them, they probably reframed their own analytics and saw insights

That's such corporate-speak.

It means they don't know their customers at all and/or couldn't care less. They literally told major animation studios that the product is going to be dead in just a month.

And now they slightly backtracked the decision by promising vague support and bug fixes. Internally the product is already dead (otherwise there wouldn't be an announcement), teams disbanded and/or re-organized. They will fund a skeleton crew for "bug fixes", and the product will eventually be broken beyond repair in the same time frame as in the original deprecation notice.

People who still move to other options, if you can find something thats offline & local, as Adobe will rethink it in next couple of months again.

This is very true.

I too am sick of internal compiler errors

Code signing certs are unfortunately expensive

You don't even need a certificate to prevent update tampering like this. The updates could have shipped with an ECDSA signature and this wouldn't have happened. It's also free and doable in an afternoon.

$0 at SignPath. Quite a few OSS projects use it.

$700+ at Sectigo for two years

Something of Notepad++ size might think about it now

"of Notepad++ size" is basically one guy in his free time, no?

"But look at those downloads, they magically print money"

Notepad++ is Windows-based and could use the Windows store instead of the built in updater. Microsoft charges a one time fee. It would pass SmartScreen checks. His website has a bunch of ads integrated which I assume are there to help pay for hosting.

Mr. Ho already has hosting charges and he uses GitHub. For those who use GitHub, he could continue his GnuPG method for signing. Additionally, GitHub integrates with Sigstore. Windows wouldn’t trust his signature but at least there would be better traceability. Version 8.8.7 labeled “authenticity guaranteed” is a step in that direction.

The real “issue” here was his outside hosting platform for updates from my reading of the article.

the issue was not the money, but that it was difficult to get a certificate without having some sort of legal entity

Certum.eu has this figured out.

https://support.certum.eu/en/code-signing-required-documents...

https://shop.certum.eu/open-source-code-signing-on-simplysig...

$49 (EU) Gross

It was negligence. You don't need a certificate to prevent update tampering.

Delaware LLCs are "cheap," but you're still looking at $300-500 a year in fees.

Since every frame is independent they can be quickly decoded

AVIF frames are independent; you'd want an actual video codec for streaming. AV1 is probably the most advanced video codec that has wide support.

A six degree angle?! That's insane. I never considered that as a possibility.

It is not as likely as some of the others but still more likely than five or four... it all depends on what you started out with.

Very perspicacious remark that it's more likely than five or four... are you an astronautical engineer by any chance?

But I'm wondering about such shallow angles - wouldn't it bounce off the atmosphere or somesuch? Perhaps it's just about possible somehow: just imagine firing a kilometre of rock from a mountain at a six degree angle with enough velocity to get it into orbit, but in reverse.

At some point it might but that would depend highly on the speed of the object relative to us....

Tunguska must have been just too steep because it left a very long track and likely did not even impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

At Mach 80 a lot of things that seem compressible are not... so yes, once you get to angles like that at some point it would possibly deflect but the energy dissipated will still be massive and the shockwave will be ringing the whole planet.

Rust is a pretty apt name when you consider it was named after the fungus, which is very resilient and keeps spreading everywhere

Behold the egregore

Interesting rabbit hole, thank you!

It's a great concept that seems extremely relevant! Happy to have sent you down that rabbit hole!

It actually explains a lot about why religions, psy-ops, placebo's, mass-hysteria/psychosis, cults and even plain old marketing works. Feels like I took a peek behind the curtain.