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Review of Adobe Creative Suite 5
Barence writes "Adobe today updated its Creative Suite software to version 5, and PC Pro has an absolutely massive collection of reviews. Along with an overview of the entire suite, from Design to Web to Production bundles, every individual component gets the full in-depth treatment. It includes video demonstrations of Photoshop CS5's fabulous Content-Aware fill trick and new Puppet Warp function; a long-awaited step up to 64-bit for Premiere Pro CS5; and big updates to Dreamweaver CS5, After Effects CS5, and the rest."
Aw man, my CS4 torrent had just finally finished.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Hope they atleast release the Actionscript to Obj-C cross compiler so that people can at least attempt to use it for themselves, if not distribute it through the App Store.
Or for enterprise (proprietary, in-house) use.
It's not an overview, it's a gushing, excited press release. And it doesn't even drop one word on my most important concern: is Adobe continuing their trend of writing awful, inconsistent, ugly, usually-slow UIs?
The fact that that, after Macromedia's was acquired, I'd actually pay extra to get Flash 8's UI back... well, that tells you something. How the hell do you write a UI worse than Macromedia's? That takes the kind of talent only Adobe can offer I guess... IBM should hire these guys to do Lotus Notes next. ;)
Comment of the year
I TOLD my company to wait a couple months, but noooo, they just HAD to go and buy CS4 last week...
I just purchased Dreamweaver CS4 3 weeks ago. I wonder what their upgrade policy is?
I'd imagine their upgrade policy is "Yes, we want you to buy the upgrade as well."
According to everything I read on the web, if you purchase it after the announcement (which is today) then they'll give you a free upgrade. But before that, you get bupkis.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I think a Bench Marks applied here would be most telling.
I predict a flood of funny photos on the Interwebz using Content-Aware Fill and Puppet Warp – probably with silly captions. More practical applications: removing an ex from all your photos, adding a secret crush to all your photos, and of course implausible uses in movies like removing the hero from live feeds so he can sneak past security cameras.
I cannot wait until poor applications of puppet warp show up on magazine covers and movie posters! http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/
Check out KB article from Adobe. Maybe it will answer your question?
At my work we always get the 24 month upgrade plan with any software we purchase from the Creative Suite. We buy Design Premium for $320 and the upgrade plan only costs an extra $120, although we do get the software at educational pricing so I'm not sure how much it would be for others.
Sadly after their ridiculous always broken DRM in CS3 I stopped buying Adobe products. The only unfortunate thing is that I've still yet to find a replacement for Illustrator since Freehand was killed. Ahh well...
Uh, why is this flamebait? Corporate customers can push apps to their iPhones without going via the App Store and, as far as I know, the restriction on non-native apps only extends to the App Store.
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Except that actually involves using GIMP... GIMP. People like me can't stand the interface despite the nifty features it may or may not have.
From what I can gather, the main reason people despise the GIMP UI is because they're so used to the designs of other programs. I've heard it said before that people that get used to GIMP, when they try Photoshop, find its UI to be "horrible" as well. Personally I like the GIMP interface and I don't see what's so horrible about it; might I remind you that if you hate its current UI so much, GIMP 2.8 (being released later this year) will have a single window mode so people don't complain as loud.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Inkscape?
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
There's no FLOSS alternative to the Adobe suite.
Photoshop vs GIMP = No contest
Illustrator vs Inkscape = Maybe passable alternative
Premiere vs Cinelerra = Don't make me vomit
OnLocation vs dvgrab+kino+some other misc tools = Well, it's like saying that you can do anything emacs can do with sed, awk, grep and cat.
InDesign has no FLOSS alternative. Yea, there are toolsets that can do the things that OnLocation, Encore, AfterEffects etc can do, but they're just a bunch of tools with no integration. The Adobe suite is a whole, integrated polished set of products.
I think if you want to see an example of what the open source method of software design (many people scratching their own little itch and putting the resultant code into a gigantic unsorted global code library) can *not* do, look at the Adobe Suite.
I hate printers.
Translation:
"I believe in morality but I don't think I'm significant enough to have to abide by it".
Then how do you suggest that software developers who target people instead of corps make money?
Unbundle the fscking apps already.
Even Microsoft lets you buy "just Word" for less than the price of Office.
All I want is Photoshop, so why am I paying for all of those other marquee apps as well? I'm using them on a Mac mini which cost less than the price of the suite.
Wait... don't tell me... that IS the price for Photoshop, and you just get all the other apps for free. I knew it! Damn you, Adobe!
"I believe in morality but I don't think I'm significant enough to have to abide by it".
Can't help but notice that the only time people talk about morality is when they want money. I happen to think that my point of view is entirely moral, but then I suppose our morals must differ. Babypuncher.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Try http://www.getpaint.net/ as an alternative to Photoshop.
It is very nice and free (as in beer).
Heck - just MAKE some ID. Invent a school. "Iceberg college" located in Teptula, Motana. Print it up all nice on thick paper and laminate it. Done. IT will take you a few hours, and save you hundreds of dollars. The stores don't bother checking. Just show your ID. As long as it has your picture on it, you're good as far as the knuckle-dragging idiot at Best Buy us concerned.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
No, they are far too lazy and incompetent to plan that far ahead. Steve Jobs nailed Adobe's corporate personality perfectly when he called them lazy. They just throw feces^H^H^H^H^H features at the wall and see what sticks, and if they break things in the process, they don't care. Heck, the entire Carbon API was put in almost entirely to placate Adobe because they were too lazy to port to Cocoa ten years ago. Now after giving them TEN YEARS to clean up their mess and move to new APIs, they're STILL whining that they have to rework their GUI to move to 64-bit. They've known that this was coming for a DECADE and still they whine that they're having to do actual work. AMAZING!
I spent several hundred dollars to buy CS3, only to find out after I bought it that they didn't support my machine (and didn't mention it in their specs). I had to spend three days hacking up their worthless software just to get it to install and launch on my case-sensitve HFS+ root volume.
I didn't buy the CS4 upgrade because I would have to go through the same hell. I won't be buying CS5 because I would have to go through the same hell. Until an Apple OS upgrade breaks CS3 in some show-stopper way, I won't be buying future versions of their suite. If I'm paying several hundred bucks for a piece of software, I expect it to work. If there are bugs, that's fine, but not even being able to install the piece of excrement crosses a line. I was sorely tempted to file a class action suit, but I'm just too busy to be bothered.
The worst part is that it would take Adobe less time to fix these problems than it took me to hack their piece of s**t app for myself. Yet two updates later, they STILL haven't bothered to spend two or three days of a single developer's time to fix them. Maybe it's because they don't have a single competent developer among them to do the work? After all, Apple even provided detailed directions.
Or maybe it's just because they don't care. As far as they are concerned, they own the market. They have no competition, so they have the right to make every user conform to their specifications with impunity. No matter how bad they make things for their users---no matter how many hoops we have to jump through---we'll still have to use their shovelware. Fortunately, there are alternatives. If Apple ever makes a change to the OS that breaks CS3, I'll just drag it to the trash rather than pay the crooks at Adobe hundreds of dollars for another update that won't install without hackery.
I hope for everyone's sake that HTML5 buries flash and Pixelmator buries Photoshop. The world would be a better place without companies like Adobe.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
CS actually makes this really easy to do.....
Illustrator vs Inkscape = Maybe passable alternative
*sigh* Inkscape is not trying to ape Illustrator. Inkscape is a clone of Xara. And that's the way I like it. The sooner the world can forget an over-complicated monstrosity like Illustrator ever existed, the better. =)
(...Still sort of bitter that the Xara open source project went nowhere, but hey, Inkscape keeps getting more awesome with every release...)
The Adobe suite is a whole, integrated polished set of products.
We don't need a "whole integrated set of products". We don't need a walled-garden comfort zone where we have a set of "working" applications, and when you step outside of that boundary, you start griping about everything.
You're looking for one application that does everything you need. I'm looking for applications that do everything I need. We need to accept the fact that programs may have deficiencies that they make up with extra features. I don't need one application that does everything; I just need applications that do what I need with minimum hassle. If I need to save a file in one program and open it in another, that's generally not slowing me down too much.
I love the GIMP, but I recently really, really started to love MyPaint. MyPaint doesn't do everything The GIMP does. It doesn't claim to do that. It makes it up by focusing on the infinite-canvas/natural-paint-tools features. I need to use both programs, and I accept this isn't a bad thing. I draw sketches on paper, scan in GIMP/XSane, ink and colour in MyPaint and give final touches in GIMP again. No problems.
Yet, I've seen a lot of Photoshop zealots who just can't accept the fact that there's programs out there that might complement their existing set of tools. No infinite canvas in Photoshop? Tough cookies, you're not allowed to leave the comfort zone. Because once you do, you start craving for the missing features in the other programs. Missing features are evil... unless they're missing from Photoshop, in which case you can't mention them. Because the Suite is perfect.
So, we don't want integrated suites. We want an universally implemented set of file formats. This works to some extent; if I want to feed in text data, OpenDocument or HTML copy/paste usually works. Vector images? Just use SVG or export to PDF. Plain old bitmaps? PNG or JPEG. What we really need right now is a commonly agreed multi-layer image format; PSD is generally considered too difficult to implement. GIMP's .xcf isn't implemented any-frigging-where, and no one cares about the formats other OSS apps have for this purpose. I'm hoping OpenRaster will be an interesting direction.
Sorry, but Linux is a pretty DAMM good plataform for hollywood film studios. We've got Autodesk Maya, Softimage XSI and don't forget Blender, Cinepaint, Mentalray. Crap, even disney is using Photoshop over Crossover (wine) to cash-in some money. http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/case_studies/WaltDisney.pdf http://www.linuxmovies.org/software.html But, for the enthusiast and casual video editing, there is no good option yet. This is also true for music compositors.
The day you drop $350 of your own money to buy a current version of a piece of software that won't even install and don't complain about it, you'll be allowed to complain about my complaining. Until then, piss off.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.