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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)."
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)
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.
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.
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.