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Adobe Makes Products Harder to Use, More Expensive
An anonymous reader writes "This is a follow-up to an earlier story on slashdot about Adobe releasing their Creative Suite package. It seems that Adobe has decided to go they way of Intuit's TurboTax last year and add activation to their products. Legitimate users are up in arms. For Adobe, they follow the steps of other companies, macromedia, quark (who coincidentally shipped their entire engineering offshore) in the graphics biz. Now since in theory they'll be making more money, I hope at least the price goes down (oops, it did not, looks like the upgrade price even increased)."
Err, no.
Adobe lets you activate on two computers. In fact, most Adobe licenses allow you to use their software on a "primary" and a "secondary" computer, as long as you don't use it at the same time on both machines.
Sheesh, talk about overreacting..
Nathan
for now. They say though that if acceptance of activation goes, it will be added to other products and platforms. So even if you buy it now and it has no activation, thats not to say a patch in six months will add it on (though, will you be forced to accept such a "patch")?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not sure that it handles forms and whatnot but for basic viewing of PDF files it works great and starts faster than Acrobat. You can even set up a Postscript printer to print to a file and convert that .ps file to a .pdf yourself.
Bleh!
That link for Sodipodi doesn't seem to work. Here is another: http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/
-Mary
Around Photoshop 4, yeah, I thought GIMP could become a contender against Photoshop, but the GIMP I saw 4 years ago and the GIMP I see today look a lot alike, only today's can't save to GIFS (well can now due to patents expiring). There are some high promised about GIMP 2.0, but if it still takes 16 steps with layers to Bevel text & add a drop shadow that takes about 4 mouse click in PS, what's the bloody point?
Again, nice job on that response.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Just checked on my linux box, it saves them just fine. Don't know about Windows though, don't have one. Can't see why it won't on some platforms and will on others. Perhaps it has been enabled after the GIF patent expired.
Do you think the people who sell multi-thousand dollar ads using Photoshop give a crap about the $900 sticker price?
That's true. However there is a large audience to whom $900 matters a lot. eg:
1. Students
2. Companies that want to purchase several licenses
3. Most of the third world
The few days I spent fighting with the GIMP, on the other hand, it crashed several times.
Never crashed on me. Maybe you used a development version? (odd minor version number ==> development version)
Ok, usually I don't reply to my own post, but I should make a few clarifications:
1. I'm basing my crash problems on Quark 6 which I have little experience using so far. Previous versions of quark are notoriously buggy so I don't expect this one to be much better.
2. Also, I'm basing my knowledge of activation on Quark's current scheme. They only allow installation on one harddrive. (2 if you pay an extra fee for a "mobile") If that harddrive, or anything else on that machine fails, you're fucked. You can make 5 hardware changes to a system over the course of a year, but if you make 6, the software shuts down.
3. I'm also basing this reaction on my experience activating 3 copies of quark 6, not adobe.
The software has a built-in activation application that is supposed to function over the internet, BUT it doesn't function through a firewall. So, all three of my copies had to be activated by phone. This process took about 2 hours.
I was not a happy camper.
I hope Adobe does a better job at managing this process.
There's always Paintshop Pro if you MUST go the commercial route, and for the tinkerers who don't use a lot of PS functions, there's always The GIMP.
I was considering switching to Paintshop Pro anyway, and Adobe pulling this shit... Well, it's just another in a long line of transgressions that show they're assholes and deserve to lose customers. (Dmitry Skylarov anyone?)
Approval was phased out because Reader 6.0 has the same save / sign features. Basically, Adobe actually LISTENED to their customers #1 complaint (reader users not able to save form data, only submit to servers), and gave more control to the author as to what can be saved / edited.
And companies that just want to hack up a couple graphics twice a year... $100 something for Paint Shop Pro is a good deal for a lot of these people...
Man, if it was me, and I was in a business situation with a very very close and important deadline, and this junk pops up? I'd have that key piece of software cracked so fast it wouldn't know what hit it. The software is meant to serve ME, not the other way around. If I've got a license sitting RIGHT THERE, and I CAN'T USE IT? Crack it, not worth the time to play their silly games.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
GIMP is worthless to the commercial advertising and print field. It's fatal weaknesses are.
* Lack of color profile support
* Lack of CMYK support
* Lack of LAB color space support
Just one of the above is a deal breaker, not to mention the power editing features of Photoshop which have made it the Quark of image editing. If you're only doing web quality/RGB work then you can do okay work with GIMP. But to say that GIMP is a drop in replacement of Photoshop betrays an utter ignorance of the professional prepress requirements.
Asstroll.
* GIMP, for every platform, saves GIFs.
* GIMP has several features that I've been searching for in Photoshop for years, and haven't been able to find.
* GIMP is incredibly stable.
* I've only run into one worth-mentioning GIMP bug. Ever.
* I use GIMP daily, and have never seen the source code
* Photoshop is not "Continuously Improving" -- it's just continuously getting larger and slower. I find Photoshop 6 a good deal easier to actually get work done with than 7, and I can't find any worthwhile new features anywhere.
GIMP has supported CMYK (colour selector and RGB conversion) since 1.3.17.