Adobe
Systems
I stand atop Adobe Towers, the
tallest building in San Jose.
The Towers are right under the
approach path for the San Jose
airport, so airplanes fly very
closely overhead.I spent the summer of 2001 as an intern for Adobe Systems. I worked with the Adobe ATG (Advanced Technology Group) at a satellite office in Arden Hills, Minnesota. This picture was taken on the balcony of Adobe Towers in San Jose. I had the opportunity to visit Adobe corporate headquarters at the end of summer.
Our team was working on a project called "Blackduck," a set of e-book authoring tools that were built as plug-ins to Adobe InDesign, a popular desktop publishing tool.
I built several multimedia input filters that allowed InDesign eBook authors to add videos to their books. This involved learning how to decode a variety of video formats, including AVI and MPEG.
During my internship, the yet-to-be-released version of Adobe InDesign was still referred
to by its code name, Annapurna.
I recall spending a lot of time
looking at this splash screen,
starting up the debug build of
InDesign to test my plug-ins.
I must be dreaming...One benefit to working for Adobe is access to all of their great software. I really admire Adobe's products.
Another highlight of the summer was the annual soccer match between Adobe and their business rival Macromedia. Macromedia's CEO even traveled to Minnesota to join in the fray. I played forward for the Adobe team. Sadly, we lost 3-2.
Note the custom-designed team shirts.
A few wise guys on the Macromedia team poked fun at us by holding up "Free Dmitry" signs. The soccer game occurred right around the time when Russian hacker Dmitry Skylarov was arrested for selling software that removed the encryption on eBooks in Adobe Acrobat format. We retaliated by cracking jokes about Macromedia's stock price.
