“Adobe. Listen up,” Brannan writes. “You have some great stuff, but increasingly, your sweet suites are bloated, crash happy, expensive, and sometimes don’t behave like a good Mac app citizen.”
Brannan wonders, “Are there alternatives to Photoshop for those who cannot afford the upgrade cost in real world dollars, let alone the assortment of Dummies and Idiots books, and multiple, back-to-back semesters in a University new media course?”
Full article, in which Brannan covers GraphicConverter, Pixelmator, and lazy ingrate Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements, here.
Note to advertisers: (including those who advertise via third-party ad networks and become, in effect, our advertisers): Your Flash-based ads are no longer reaching the most well-heeled customers online: 50+ million iPhone owners. They’re also not hitting brand new iPad users or 35+ million iPod touch users. If you care about reaching people with discretionary income, you might want to consider dumping your flash-based ads and moving to a more open format that people with money and the will to spend it can actually see.
Help kill Adobe’s Flash:
• Ask MarketWatch to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• Ask CNBC to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• Contact Hulu and ask them to offer HTML5 video via email:
• Ask ESPN360 to offer HTML5 video instead Flash via their feedback page here.
• Join YouTube’s HTML5 beta here.
• On Vimeo, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.
By the way, do not buy Adobe’s Photoshop Elements until you have tried Pixelmator’s free 30-day trial. We use Pixelmator daily.
Ronin, you’re right…unfortunately. (at professional-level design & image editing)
Here is a perfect example: Illustrator CS4 version 14.0.0
No patches ever released.
What? Adobe got it perfect with the first release?
Oh @Dinjin201 – stop it with the ‘smokescreen’ –
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” /> – happy friday…
Ready, Set, Go! lives!!! Yet, at $175, it may not be a bargain.
<http://www.diwan.com/ready/prsg.htm>
@Chris
Take a look at iStudio Publisher for page layout.
http://www.istudiopublisher.com
I’m not a Pro at DTP; I do really, really small time stuff for volunteer and Non Profit organizations – they want the stuff that looks nice but not at the pro prices. No way I’m saying that Pages is any kind of replacement. But remembering back to my days with Ready Set Go and others I think the core foundation is there in Pages. It says to me that if Apple wanted to, they could knock Adobe out of the water. I’m pretty sure that, for many reasons, they just don’t want to do it.
Hate this idea all you want.
Apple should keep beating up Adobe to drive the price down.
Apple should buy Adobe.
Then fix, modernize, re-invent Flash. Then sing it’s praises by adding the new improved iFlash to the iPhone ecosystem (but not for cross-cell phone platform app creation.)
Then fix the CS pro apps and only sell them on the mac.
@loganson
“PageMaker sucked”
PageMaker didn’t always suck. IIRC PageMaker 4.2 was great. But version 5 of PM, sucked royally. It was dog slow, and is what finally got me to switch to Quark.
If Quark wasn’t so extremely expensive, I’d still use it.
I really think Quark missed the boat by not coming out with a ‘lite’ version at a cost people could afford.
Illustrator can harness the use of Flash – but doe not require it. With all the issues in the Adobe products none of this means – not yet – that Adobe will stop DEVELOPING for the OSX… The war is on mobiles and web… Adobe needs to see the need of HTML specially on the strength of the Apple OSX platform – simple – Jobs is right
Without a major company behind the apps, nobody will switch their workflow over to an unproven system. Most content creators live with CSs bugs and move on. There is no other place to go really. MDN can gripe and stir the pot all they want and justly so but it won’t change the game. Apple probably should have bought adobe or maybe still might. That would be the ideal outcome but probably won’t happen. Coreldraw had promise, it’s vector tools have always been better then illustrators, but corel tried to get mac users and then gave up when nobody switched. They are now almost strictly pc. Nothing will change unless adobes bought or a major competitor wants to come up with an alternative.
Okay, here is what I simply don’t get. I read Jobs’s letter. I read about the Adobe response.
I did not see Jobs’s letter as an attack on Adobe. I saw it as a defense of Apple because of all the flask Apple got about not letting Flash play on Apple’s mobile devices. This is similar to Jobs’s letter about DRM and music when others were attempting to say Apple was the bad-music-guy on the block.
Therefore, I saw Adobe’s response as just a defensive response. So, I ask myself why they did that? I only come up with fear.
Oops, wrong article to post on. Mea culpa.
Adobe’s dirty little trick is to incorporate new digital cameras into their raw image plug-in for whatever the current version of PS is, so if a new camera came out today, with CS5 being the current PS, one would have to buy CS5 for the raw image plug-in to work. They could just as easily update the plug-ins for new cameras in earlier versions of the camera raw plug-ins, but then people wouldn’t be forced to buy the latest version of PS. I guess they learned from Microsoft.
In this April 12/10 MDN thread…
[http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/24755/P51/]
‘Mel Gross’ said at 01:28 pm
“How would you like to go to a shareholder meeting and have to explain why you were spending 50% of your R&D;on 25% of your customers?”
To which ‘iHTC’ replied at 08:06 pm
“It is easy to explain this, when the so-called ‘minority’ group adds as much PROFIT to Adobe’s coffers as does the ‘majority’ group. Mac customers create damn near 50% of Adobe’s profits.”
‘Mel Gross’ replied at 11:41pm
“iHTC you make statements that you can’t back up, and indeed, you are just making them up.”
So, on Friday, April 30, 2010 in a PUBLIC article released by Bambi Brannan, she says, “About half of Adobe’s revenue comes from Mac users who feel taxed to death by frequent and expensive Adobe Creative Suite updates, many of which feel foreign, are crash prone, and full of bugs that take forever to get fixed. “
‘Mel Gross’. Did she just make that up? Care to refute her?
To be honest, this is crap. I can’t remember the last time I lost a file to an Adobe product crash. Yes, they do have a few bugs, particularly Illustrator, but lets face it, there is NO alternative.
All of these examples do abut 10% of what an average Photoshop or Illustrator pro would need. For heavy lifting, would you really hire a 90 lb weakling over a professional weight lifter?
Good luck with that. The rest of us are stuck with Adobe for the foreseeable future. Really, if anything actually came close, I’d be using it. I’m just a cartoonist/photographer and last I checked, I wasn’t made of money… I might be made of pixels, though. LOL
We’re pushing hard to get FreeHand released and back in circulation and have hit Adobe with a mail campaign in the midst of this Apple/Adobe craziness. 5000+ members at FreeFreehand.org is a lot of letters to cross their desks. Good chance that Illustrator will have it’s alternate app here. Go to the freefreehand.org site for how this is unfolding.
@neomonkey
Sure, and you could alos work for free and help out your employers bottom line.
Why do you think they make updates! Why should they give there development for free, is you are the one with the problem, and they are the one with the solution. You think you are entitled to a free solution? Why?
@Maeric
Name two features that Freehand had that have not been implemented in Illustrator. I can think of one. Master Pages, or Master Art Boards. That is it.
I used to use Silicon Beach’s SuperPaint which was bought by Aldus and disappeared shortly after.
It was a nice low end application which was a cross between MacPaint and MacDraw with both a paint and vector layers.
Can anyone recommend a contemporary low end replacement? Nothing too sophisticated as I’m not in the ‘creative’ space.
@Mac-nugget
I’d start with the Selection Tools which are two in FH. Also a much better Find and Replace. And how about overall speed.
There’s no real alternative for Adobe Creative Suite. Every graphic designer knows that, so stop that annoying whining. Pixelmator? Let me laugh.
Did M$ pay Adobe to stop making good Mac applications?
It bears repeating, too, that it will take more than just the designers to switch away from Adobe’s Creative Suite. Until the myriad of print vendors and industrial press printers can accept whatever new file formats and software we switch too, the point is pretty moot. Most printers rarely accept anything other than Adobe CS files with the lone exception of Quark, which is becoming less and less relevant. It’s one thing to do simple photo retouching or design low-resolution web graphics on new software, but having to work with a printer and their very specific requirements, color management systems and formats is yet another. Most of these guys are more resistant to change than PC-loving IT professionals.
@ Maeric
Thanks for the info – I will definitely check out the site.
I always preferred FreeHand over Illustrator – it was a really great app., in it’s day.
I don’t necessarily see Apple buying Adobe, but I’d love to see them pick up FreeHand.