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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)."
who knows, maybe even they will get the hint.
Shouldn't Adobe wait until they actually steal more of Quark's XPress customers away, before they start doing the same shit Quark did to drive their customers away in the first place?
~Philly
I own a 100% legit Avid editing system, however I downloaded a crack and use it on my system.
The reason?
If you lose the hardware key (dongle), or it gets stolen, Avid helpfully suggests you buy another full copy of their software to replace it.
So I use the crack on my system and have the dongle locked up somewhere safe where nothing is going to happen to it.
Just another example of legitimate users who are inconvenienced by additional copy protection.
I'm sure Adobe is trying to stem the casual copying of their products, as it will do absolutely nothing to stop hardcore hackers from breaking the protection in the course of a few hours and releasing a patch for everyone else.
I use quark and various adobe products for DP work and I have to meet deadlines. When it's 8 pm and I have to ship files by 8:45, I can't spend time troubleshooting an installation of a product that just went haywire. I don't have time to spend 2 hours on the phone with customer support figuring out how to RE-activate. (the activiation codes in quark are roughly 40 numbers long. 40 numbers!!!. Try communicating that over the phone line with a guy in india.
My old solution: I have another computer with the same software installed. When one goes down, I drop it like and empty bic lighter and fire up the other one. No problem.
With software activation, I can't set up this failsafe without blowing my department's budget.
softare activation wankers
tcd004
I recently felt really good about deploying Acrobat 5.0 with a customer for in-house forms work. Basically, they had 45 people. 2 stations had Acrobat so they could make forms, everyone had the free reader, and the 10 few who needed to save or sign forms had the $50 Acrobat Approval. This worked wonderful, was affordable, and I could feel good about PDF as an "open" format.
So what happened? Acrobat 6.0 came out. Sure enough, they left out Approval. Their customer service tells me to either get Adobe Acrobat Elements (1000 licenses or more only!) or "upgrade" to Acrobat 6.0 (mind you, they have a Standard or Professional version now). So I just went from:
2x$250 + 10x$50 = $1000
to
12x$250 = $3000
That was not cool and makes me look like a dork for recommending Adobe as being somehow "more open" than, say, MS Word. To this day, they won't even say that there will be no Approval version. All I want is for them to say "we don't plan on it" so that I can just tell my customers to abandon it--they won't even do that. They just say "stay tuned to the website for the next exciting release".
This mentality makes me wonder when PDF will become a closed format.
Adobe is plummeting rapidly on my list.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
Pretty much my thoughts...
We had several users that needed Acrobat just to make "read only" forms. When more people ask, we're going with OpenOffice (just push the PDF button and poof, PDF!). Our graghics people are gettting The Gimp for Windows instead of Photoshop. Activation has nothing to do with this, it has to do with costs. Adobe is pricing themselves out of the market, and OSS strikes again.
~corporate tool, but employed~
Others have mentioned Gimp as a potential alternative to Photoshop. Sodipodi is considered to be a potential alternative to Illustrator. Sodipodi also strives to be the best SVG editor around, free or commercial.
However, anyone who has used either knows that they need more work to get them up to the level of quality artists need. These projects need your help. Instead of forking out more C notes to Adobe or wasting time warezing, do something constructive.
You can make a significant contribution for as little as a few afternoon's of your time. Write a tutorial or a chapter for the GIMP Users Manual (GUM) or the Sodipodi User's Manual (SUM). Publish an article about the apps for a suitable online or print magazine. Or just teach it to some friends. If you can code, pick a bug or feature request and contribute a patch to address it. If you don't code but want to, take it as an opportunity to learn how and to be a part of the Open Source community's successes.
1.- Broke student downloads Adobe.
2.- Broke student learns Adobe through college.
3.- Broke student makes a name as an Adobe artist (whink, whink!).
4.- Company hires broke student and PAYS adobe because it can afford it. Otherwise company would have kept that other obscure graphics package that never made it out of a joint venture or out of obscurity.
Did you really think Adobe would be as stupid as you to actually ignore this basic fact?
Ask Microsoft, I got a visit from a local freelance support guy, I noticed he had 1 CD with Windows 3.11, 95 AND 98 in only 1 CD! do you expect me to believe MS had no way to prevent the creation of such a CD? pleassseeeee!! they owe their whole businesses to warez!
I've been scanning, then saving several >150mb (uncompressed) images as JPEGs using v7 of Photoshop. Every 15t or so image gets corrupted. When I try to open it, Photoshop complains about an invalid JPEG header. No other programs are able to open the file.
Absolutely correct, this PITA from Adobe will do nothing to stop illegally copying of their products.
I lived in Viet Nam for a while and did some consulting there, and I noticed a very peculiar thing. Everywhere I went, installed versions of Windows, Photoshop, MS Office, Exchange, whatever, almost always had the same serial number. If a new version was released, regardless of any protection that version might have, a crack was on the street at CD shops in no time. People tell me China is the same way, and most of the stuff in Viet Nam probably actually comes from China, at least orginally. Then it gets locally duplicated. The better ripoffs actually have the manufacturer's art duplicated on the CD. The cheaper ones were just plain old CDRs.
If you can't already buy cracked versions of this latest scheme there, I'm sure they'll be available shortly, and as with most anti-copying schemes, this one will only inconvenience the legit users, while bothering copyright violaters (those aren't pirates; pirates hijack ships, for crying out loud) not in the least.
The GIF and TIFF plugin binaries are separate downloads, at least on Windows and Debian. This was because of the LZW patents. I'm not sure how future releases handle them.
Regarding GIMP's crashiness - Linux 1.2.x version is rock solid and not even the mightiest powers known to humankind could shake its foundations, but Windows version is slightly unstable. (Not much - one or two crashes in a week, and it's usually only happening when I'm running out of disk space...)
I think its great you pay for your software and you like the product you buy. What annoys me is when companies let people get away with using products for free just to increase the user base, cutting out other cheaper alturnatives which would have been tried IF people had to pay for the software. Sorry to everyone else here, but I am PRO product activiation. Irs about time people see the true price of the software they use, rather than getting a free ride. More people that try and use alturnatives the more "acceptable" it will be not to use the "professional" product.
James
If Gimp is good enough for Hollywood special effects studios it is good enough 90% of the people out there. You over estimate the value of Photoshop.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
If you're good with Photoshop it's difficult to not make more money than you spent on it in a year. Even a beginning designer could make enough to buy the whole suite in under a week. Plus it's deductible.
Now there's a lot of people recommending thg Gimp in this thread and if you use it and enjoy it that's fine. But feature and usability-wise there is absolutely no comparison. Yes, OSS is wonderful but the fact remains that for someone who is trying to make money using a bitmap-editing program Photoshop offers a better value propisition than the Gimp does, even though you have to pay for it. Adobe doesn't take the money they make from Photoshop and use it to pay for a factory that converts orphans and kittens and orphaed kittens into fuel oil, they improve their products continuously. There's a reason that a real alternative to Photoshop doesn't exist and it's not because Adobe is anticompetitve or anything, it's because it's really hard and really expensive to make software as good Photoshop unless you're just ripping off thier feature list as quickly as you can. One of the reasons that I don't like The Gimp is that except for Script-fu and a mess of a user interface the developers brought nothing original to the bitmap editing table and are instead content to just poorly ape the work of others. Now that's innovation, eh?
As far as activation goes, it's not that big of a deal either. Adobe is only using it on Photoshop for Windows. It's pretty obvious that it'll get cracked. They're probably just doing it to please their dumb shareholders who think that all those copies of Photoshop being used to ham-fistedly combine Domo-kun, Admiral Akbar and the Eiffel Tower at Fark will somehow magically become sales.
If they come and hunt you down and say "hey you stole this" and you have your 3 freaking owned disks, what are they going to do?
In today's climate, prosecute you under the DMCA.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Parent makes a good point. Don't believe it? Well...
I once came dangerously close to losing a job over suggesting the use of GIMP.
I worked for an NPO that provides essential living services (as well as group home services) for persons suffering from Cerebral Palsy. Like many NPO's, budgetary cutbacks were always sources of stress. So, during a roundtable where we were discussing switching as many departments as possible to open source alternatives, GIMP came up. This never went beyond the meeting table, but I was summarily written up for insentivity.
And I am one of the very last "Thalidomide Children" (early 70's). For those that don't know, thalidomide caused birth defects (usually related to extremeties). Missing a hand, since birth, over here and I was severely reprimanded and nearly canned over suggesting a software title.
It may seem silly, but people put alot into a name.
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#SickNotWeak
Adobe has, in effect, said that they don't want me to use a program that I purchased to fit the way I work. They're greedy bastards. They haven't learned from history about what happens when companies get greedy . They've lost at least one customer forever.
Let me explain.
Over the years, I purchased Adobe Photoshop 4.x, 7.0, and Adobe Elements 1.0. I use them both at work and at home, as I refuse to buy into the BS that I must fork out hundreds of dollars for the convenience of not doing the uninstall-on-one-install-on-the-other dance twice a day (most EULAs are really 'end machine license agreements').
Last week Adobe did an "audit" at work. Prior to that we had an email that said, in effect, make sure we have no unlicensed Adobe software. When I checked with my boss about my situation, he said as long as it was a licensed copy, I was okay. Well, Adobe had a problem with that. They insisted that since I was using my legally-licensed copy at a place of business, that the business would have to own the license in its name. If you knew where I worked (when referring to the company off-premises, one typically substitutes the word "cheap" for part of the name), you'd understand that getting them to crack open their wallet for a copy of Photoshop has between zero and no chance. For about 10 seconds, I toyed with the thought of selling my license to the company in exchange for some office supplies (trade in kind for a staple or a paperclip or something), but then I thought, "screw 'em -- I'm not giving up my license at home."
So, here's my present course of action: I already uninstalled Photoshop on the work box and installed GIMP. I will use GIMP for the stuff that I need at work and Photoshop for the stuff at home, but I'm done with any new versions of Photoshop.
Yeah, right.