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Replacements For Adobe Creative Suite 3 Apps?
Gilmoure writes "With rumors of Adobe not supporting Creative Suite 3 applications on Mac OS X 10.6, I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? If the apps can work with the native file formats, all the better but if they provide the same functionality, that's still good.
I have several designer friends that are looking forward to the speed boost of OS X 10.6 but don't want to go through the Adobe upgrades so soon after the CS2 to CS3 upgrades. Especially when Adobe's already working on CS5."
I've been using Photoshop since, oh, version 4. Adobe has never had anything resembling 'support' for any of it's products. They have KB articles which occasionally have something to do with an issue you are having. There are user supported forums which are often useful. But calling Adobe? Writing Adobe? Perhaps if you're some large shop with "Gold Support" (as in you give them the gold) it's more useful. But for normal end users Adobe has been just as unhelpful as everybody else in the business.
There have been dozens of bugs in every version of Photoshop that aren't fixed until the new version comes out - then the come out with NEW bugs.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Agreed, well maybe it's worse than you state. I found a cross platform bug in InDesign. It would consistently crash on Windows or OS X and made one of their lesser known but advertised features completely useless for a large number of shops. I reported the bug multiple times, in detail and it still persisted through three versions. Heck, it's probably still there, I haven't checked the latest version because I have not bothered to upgrade.
Perhaps it depends on the professional involved. I've been using Adobe since 1993 and the only time I called up their support was because their DRM had locked me out of running CS2 on a new system (the old system was destroyed in an accident so could not be manually de-authorized). Besides that, I can't think of one reason why I need support from them beyond such unforeseen installation issues. As others have mentioned, if you're using it for business then there's no real necessity to upgrade to 10.6.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Clearly, GIMP needs a complete fork. There are sooo many different partial enhancements, revisions, face-lifts and the like, and none of them actually work all that well/universally. Something like, say, inkscape, which works identically on all platforms (natively, without any hosery) or OpenOffice.org would be pretty damn useful for bitmapped graphics. We've got gimpshop, gimp.app, GimpPhoto, and surely a handful of others I'm not immediately familiar with.
Most of the major functionality is "there" in GIMP, as I understand things. I understand there is (or was until very recently) some problems with it's "professional" color rendering precision or some such thing, and a handful of other things. I'm surprised there hasn't been a concerted effort to fork things to something "new" and more universally accessible instead of the arcane, cumbersome menus.
Personally, I'd love to see a "Photoshop Pro" type UI, or for that matter: I'd be quite happy to have a working Paint.NET or similar.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's helpful when dealing with serious fonts that come in several subtle variants (like bold oldstyle nums) to reduce the included fonts count. Scribus is not a word processor. The adobe counterpart is no better in this light, as far as I can tell, because I had a helluva hard time dealing with a print shop that insisted on re-creating in InDesign a rough I submitted them in pdf. I had to dig the F* manual on internet to teach the typographer how to switch some caps into the alternate glyph of the face.