Looks like I'll be sitting this one out, again. CS3 is just right and zippy, handles everything fine. Adobe had a real problem after Lightroom, trying not to make the two overlap too much so people would buy both. Now they've got a real weird model with LR, PS and BR. How they go together is anybody's guess. I'm using Aperture mostly now, with seldom trips to PS for the big stuff. CS4 added very little, and CS5 seems like another baby step. Adobe just keeps getting more and more greedy. PS10 got one little update and left many bugs untouched. 11 added very little. now 12 seems a bit pointless. 8% isn't much.
I'd like to see Apple take Adobe full-on with a pro suite. CS is a dinosaur. Heck, I can almost do everything in Pages that I do in InDesign. We need an Illustrator alternative, though.
Multipurposing these once-great print apps to export to the new-fangled online world seems like more opportunities for bloat, bragging rights, feature-creep, insanely complex code and crashes. I don't want a suite of Swiss-army knives! I need a suite of the best single-purpose knives I can own. I really like the Harry Potter-esqe world of having video in newspapers, magazines, billboards and books, but I don't think the technology is here to really allow us to print a newspaper or book like those that exist in the fantasy world.
I need a page design tool (InDesign) that is robust enough to handle a 500-page (or larger!) print job and not crash while exporting to PDF because it exceeds a 32-bit boundary.
I need an Illustrator that lets me develop illustrations that don't crash a RIP. Or mis-render in Photoshop because they crash a RIP.
And while I'm moaning and groaning, why can InDesign create beautiful typography while Illustrator makes text look worse than the trash created by Microsoft's word processor?
Am I a part of dieing breed of PRINT designers? Why do we need to "leverage" programs like InDesign into the virtual world just to "make things familiar"? I fully appreciate that Illustrator and Photoshop work exceedingly well in creating web graphics. But InDesign?
I'm not ready to accept extinction yet. Perhaps I just won't move beyond CS4 and all its inherent faults to use the few tools that really do work better than anything out there.
I guess I'm not the only one who's frustrated and has an increasingly hate-hate relationship with Adobe.
I'm 100% with you. Adobe have specific tools for each job - when the barriers are blurred, an intuitive work flow is ruined. The software has become bloated, unstable, unresponsive and very bad at it's basic stated functionality.
Please someone design an app that's not as bloated as Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop.
Oh.. someone already has...Pixelmator, Vector Designer and who needs Dreamweaver when you have Textmate and web standards.
While I agree about Dreamweaver being easily replaced by Textmate, Pixelmator is still no Photoshop and Vector Designer doesn't seem to do well with very complex illustrations (slows down to a crawl) last time I tried it.
I really want to like Pixelmator and Vector Designer because both are made to work well with OSX and both are better designed than Photoshop and Illustrator but they are still lacking so many features and above all don't allow opening PSD/AI/PDF formats properly. By comparison for example iWork does just fine for my office app needs because it handles the MS Office formats fairly well.
I really wish the developers of those two would get some serious backing and more developers behind them.
It's a layout application, I use that or Illustrator, as do most professional designers. Fireworks does not provide me with any of the tools I want for creating customisable grids or using styles.
I suggest you RTFM - customisable grids, librarys and styles all there. I agree - fireworks exists for web layout and image optimisation. It's tool set is lacking - no decent vector drawing tools.
I hate fireworks but I'd never, ever use photoshop, indesign or illustrator for web lay out - that just seems crazy. Repurposing content isn't as simple as saying print this, or upload it - the canvas are different ratios with different technical requirements and colour spaces, the user experience fundamentally different. The web and print do not share enough commonality to warrant an integrated software to create content for print and for online, and to try and blur this boundary is a mistake.
It makes for a counter-intuitive mess. As we are seeing with each release of CS.
I suggest you RTFM - customisable grids, librarys and styles all there. I agree - fireworks exists for web layout and image optimisation. It's tool set is lacking - no decent vector drawing tools.
I hate fireworks but I'd never, ever use photoshop, indesign or illustrator for web lay out - that just seems crazy. Repurposing content isn't as simple as saying print this, or upload it - the canvas are different ratios with different technical requirements and colour spaces, the user experience fundamentally different. The web and print do not share enough commonality to warrant an integrated software to create content for print and for online, and to try and blur this boundary is a mistake.
It makes for a counter-intuitive mess. As we are seeing with each release of CS.
In InDesign and Illustrator you can customise the canvas size you want and use RGB mode, I do not print out website designs and would not want to, nor do I export designs from Illustrator or InDesign to the web. I design using layout tools and once I have a composition I am happy with I move to Dreamweaver and code it, using the pixel measurements as a basis for my positioning. I know a lot of designers who use exactly the same process, including After Effects to show animations etc.
FYI I did not say Fireworks could not use grids it's just not as quick or easy as InDesign.
Who cares. Nothing creative happens in Creative Suite anyways. All of those agencies smiling and drooling on Adobe.com did it for exposure and free stuff. You think they're serious? The truly creative work happens beforehand, then its passed off to the monkeys who like to sit on their butt all day in front of a computer... wasting their lives figuring out the latest crap UI. Thank god for them. If they're using more than 10% of the features in any given CS product, then they're doing it wrong.
We don't want clients who want to update their website with Contribute or have Flash crapping all over their site. We don't care what software our video editor used when they give us an MPEG. We don't care what software our freelance illustrators use when they give us an EPS. OUr writers can write longhand for all I care. Our programmers use BBedit. We like when photographers shoot on film and the lab scans it on Hasselblad gear with whatever software that uses. The last thing we want are creatives who claim to be "experts" in CS. Yes its true, and Adobe workflow is industry standard. We dont do standard work. We win awards and get the good stuff.
Already!? That's a fast update for Creative Suite. I am not putting another $600 into an upgrade this soon. Call me when CS6 is prepped.
The update cycle is every 2 years, just like the transition from CS3 to CS4. You're always welcome to sit out the upgrade, some people just like the latest features. Did you throw a hissy fit when Tiger was released 18 months after Panther, Leopard 2 years after Tiger and SLeopard less than 2 years after Leopard? Or did you like getting the new features and faster operation? I know OSX is cheaper than CS, but the $600 update to CS is for 5 or 6 products. Compare that to the $200 you'd pay to upgrade Aperture + $ 200 to upgrade logic + $300 to upgrade Final Cut, and it doesn't seem so different, does it?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gazoobee
We still have to pay a thousand bucks for the privilege of using it, and then another thousand a year later when CS6 comes out? Seriously?
Let's see them give away these (long overdue and much asked for), "under the hood" improvements for 30 bucks like Apple did with Snow Leopard.
First of all, Adobe's update cycle is 2 years, and the Master collections is $900 to upgrade and includes 13 programs, plus the Bridge. That comes to about $70 per app, which is much less than upgrading Logic or Final Cut, and on par with most OSX updates. Snow Leopard was an exception to normal Apple pricing, mainly because it's more of a "Service Pack" fixing a lot of problems in Leopard than anything else.
Quote:
Originally Posted by monstrosity
Adobe software is utter crap, someone please step up and show these losers how to innovate and cooperate.
Very funny.
Quote:
Originally Posted by John.B
See above. I have the Lr 3 beta. I have the Aperture 3 trial. Neither is going to completely take away the need for Ps, not in their current incarnations.
At least with Adobe, I can guess why they won't; my guess is that they simply refuse to add enough functionality to Lr in order to prevent cannibalizing Ps sales.
As for Apple, I have no idea why they won't step up to the plate.
I think most Lightroom users are very happy with it's workflow as a photograph cataloguing and developing program. (Hence the name Lightroom). Adding a bunch of extra features would take away that workflow. Photoshop is for deeper photo editing and manipulation. Keeping the 2 programs separate makes sense in the same way the Numbers and Pages are kept separate, even though lots of people stick spreadsheets into text documents; combining the 2 would slow down Pages from it's main use...
Also, John B.: You can buy Photoshop CS4 Standard, and not have the 3D editing features or the extra cost. 3D is only available in Photoshop CS4 Extended. I think we can assume Adobe will continue this product model as there are lots of folks who only work in 2D.
It's a layout application, I use that or Illustrator, as do most professional designers. Fireworks does not provide me with any of the tools I want for creating customisable grids or using styles.
Wrong... most professional web designers use Photoshop then fireworks as a sub program. I've contracted for some very big companies... it's never been a question of what program to use for layout before CSS conversion. Photoshop.
They bought and killed the competition. Why bother?
(If Illustrator is still not multi-cpu aware, I will kick something, hard.)
For my line of work there is some competition: CorelDraw. It's PC only and it does technical drawing with dimensions VERY well. The whole Creative Suite focus on web oriented tasks makes it harder and harder for me to justify using Illustrator. If CorelDraw ever came back to the Mac, I would have to seriously consider it because of it's out of the box superiority in the areas of technical drawing.
I agree. Illustrator needs some attention. So much more could be done with it.
Wrong... most professional web designers use Photoshop then fireworks as a sub program. I've contracted for some very big companies... it's never been a question of what program to use for layout before CSS conversion. Photoshop.
Photoshop is an awful program for layout, it's a photo editor with added features. I have no interest in getting into an argument about this but in my experience designers use Illustrator or InDesign for sketching out ideas.
I welcome puppet tool in Photoshop. For a long time it's been the only thing that keeps me using After Effects. Puppet Tool is brilliant! (It's been around for many years in After Effects, so calling it new technology is a bit going to far, isn't it?)
Brushes in Photoshop. Seriously? Finally? I thought Adobe was fundamentally AGAINST serious brushes. What took them so long? It's been around since I dunno... over 15 years in Corel Painter.
Photoshop is an awful program for layout, it's a photo editor with added features. I have no interest in getting into an argument about this but in my experience designers use Illustrator or InDesign for sketching out ideas.
Man you're really missing the boat if you aren't using photoshop for laying out websites. It's extremely powerful. All websites start off as rasterized... InDesign was never meant for websites... but do whatever works for you. It just isn't what the pros use for website layout and development.
I disagree with the folks who say Dreamweaver and Fireworks are irrelevant to web design. I do all my coding in DW and use Fireworks in place of PhotoShop because I can really see what I'm doing and the Javascript is very clean.
My beef with CS4 is that DW is not fully compatible with Snow Leopard and will not support file formats and add-ons such as those from Web Assist which are written in Cocoa and follow standards. When I wrote to Adobe about DW incompatibilities their awful support system (no single person but some sort of robotic thing) the answer was that it was Apple's problem. Meanwhile, DW lags behind and is slow, clunky, and can't handle PHP coding well at all. Fireworks should be more integrated with DW and I would love if they brought back Macromedia's cool ability in DW to correct broken links and see the functionality of your site in several different ways to validate it against Web Standards.
Sounds like they haven't updated DW or FW so that they keep up with whats happening on the Web. I've abandoned Flash because it is not 508 compliant and is a real resource hog.
I have to admit also that I use Photoshop Elements because it was $99 vs. the bloated price of PS which I can't afford. It works great.
A few years ago, when Adobe bought out Serious Magic, I was excited and hopeful that they would bring the vector keyer from Ultra to the Mac. So far, they only shipped a rebranded version of the Windows only Ultra with the CS3 release and then completely dropped it for CS4.
If the vector keying engine from Ultra is included in After Effects in CS5, I'll buy it. That all by itself will be worth the price of entry.
On the graphics and web side of things, I agree that there should be some more serious competition - especially on the Mac side. My go-to application has always been Canvas, but when ACD bought out Deneba, they killed the Mac version. The last version of Canvas made for the Mac will still run on Snow Leopard. I'm used to its quirks but it really kills me that it was discontinued for Mac, since I can get work done fast in Canvas.
If I had the cash, I'd buy Canvas back from ACD, tear it apart and fix the bugs I'm so familiar with and maybe buy the rights to the excellent but currently comatose TypeStyler and add those features to it. Oh, and I'd drop the Windows version out of spite. (OK, I wouldn't but I would enjoy thinking about it...)
Comments
I'd like to see Apple take Adobe full-on with a pro suite. CS is a dinosaur. Heck, I can almost do everything in Pages that I do in InDesign. We need an Illustrator alternative, though.
Multipurposing these once-great print apps to export to the new-fangled online world seems like more opportunities for bloat, bragging rights, feature-creep, insanely complex code and crashes. I don't want a suite of Swiss-army knives! I need a suite of the best single-purpose knives I can own. I really like the Harry Potter-esqe world of having video in newspapers, magazines, billboards and books, but I don't think the technology is here to really allow us to print a newspaper or book like those that exist in the fantasy world.
I need a page design tool (InDesign) that is robust enough to handle a 500-page (or larger!) print job and not crash while exporting to PDF because it exceeds a 32-bit boundary.
I need an Illustrator that lets me develop illustrations that don't crash a RIP. Or mis-render in Photoshop because they crash a RIP.
And while I'm moaning and groaning, why can InDesign create beautiful typography while Illustrator makes text look worse than the trash created by Microsoft's word processor?
Am I a part of dieing breed of PRINT designers? Why do we need to "leverage" programs like InDesign into the virtual world just to "make things familiar"? I fully appreciate that Illustrator and Photoshop work exceedingly well in creating web graphics. But InDesign?
I'm not ready to accept extinction yet. Perhaps I just won't move beyond CS4 and all its inherent faults to use the few tools that really do work better than anything out there.
I guess I'm not the only one who's frustrated and has an increasingly hate-hate relationship with Adobe.
I'm 100% with you. Adobe have specific tools for each job - when the barriers are blurred, an intuitive work flow is ruined. The software has become bloated, unstable, unresponsive and very bad at it's basic stated functionality.
Please someone design an app that's not as bloated as Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Photoshop.
Oh.. someone already has...Pixelmator, Vector Designer and who needs Dreamweaver when you have Textmate and web standards.
While I agree about Dreamweaver being easily replaced by Textmate, Pixelmator is still no Photoshop and Vector Designer doesn't seem to do well with very complex illustrations (slows down to a crawl) last time I tried it.
I really want to like Pixelmator and Vector Designer because both are made to work well with OSX and both are better designed than Photoshop and Illustrator but they are still lacking so many features and above all don't allow opening PSD/AI/PDF formats properly. By comparison for example iWork does just fine for my office app needs because it handles the MS Office formats fairly well.
I really wish the developers of those two would get some serious backing and more developers behind them.
It's a layout application, I use that or Illustrator, as do most professional designers. Fireworks does not provide me with any of the tools I want for creating customisable grids or using styles.
I suggest you RTFM - customisable grids, librarys and styles all there. I agree - fireworks exists for web layout and image optimisation. It's tool set is lacking - no decent vector drawing tools.
I hate fireworks but I'd never, ever use photoshop, indesign or illustrator for web lay out - that just seems crazy. Repurposing content isn't as simple as saying print this, or upload it - the canvas are different ratios with different technical requirements and colour spaces, the user experience fundamentally different. The web and print do not share enough commonality to warrant an integrated software to create content for print and for online, and to try and blur this boundary is a mistake.
It makes for a counter-intuitive mess. As we are seeing with each release of CS.
I suggest you RTFM - customisable grids, librarys and styles all there. I agree - fireworks exists for web layout and image optimisation. It's tool set is lacking - no decent vector drawing tools.
I hate fireworks but I'd never, ever use photoshop, indesign or illustrator for web lay out - that just seems crazy. Repurposing content isn't as simple as saying print this, or upload it - the canvas are different ratios with different technical requirements and colour spaces, the user experience fundamentally different. The web and print do not share enough commonality to warrant an integrated software to create content for print and for online, and to try and blur this boundary is a mistake.
It makes for a counter-intuitive mess. As we are seeing with each release of CS.
In InDesign and Illustrator you can customise the canvas size you want and use RGB mode, I do not print out website designs and would not want to, nor do I export designs from Illustrator or InDesign to the web. I design using layout tools and once I have a composition I am happy with I move to Dreamweaver and code it, using the pixel measurements as a basis for my positioning. I know a lot of designers who use exactly the same process, including After Effects to show animations etc.
FYI I did not say Fireworks could not use grids it's just not as quick or easy as InDesign.
We don't want clients who want to update their website with Contribute or have Flash crapping all over their site. We don't care what software our video editor used when they give us an MPEG. We don't care what software our freelance illustrators use when they give us an EPS. OUr writers can write longhand for all I care. Our programmers use BBedit. We like when photographers shoot on film and the lab scans it on Hasselblad gear with whatever software that uses. The last thing we want are creatives who claim to be "experts" in CS. Yes its true, and Adobe workflow is industry standard. We dont do standard work. We win awards and get the good stuff.
Already!? That's a fast update for Creative Suite. I am not putting another $600 into an upgrade this soon. Call me when CS6 is prepped.
The update cycle is every 2 years, just like the transition from CS3 to CS4. You're always welcome to sit out the upgrade, some people just like the latest features. Did you throw a hissy fit when Tiger was released 18 months after Panther, Leopard 2 years after Tiger and SLeopard less than 2 years after Leopard? Or did you like getting the new features and faster operation? I know OSX is cheaper than CS, but the $600 update to CS is for 5 or 6 products. Compare that to the $200 you'd pay to upgrade Aperture + $ 200 to upgrade logic + $300 to upgrade Final Cut, and it doesn't seem so different, does it?
We still have to pay a thousand bucks for the privilege of using it, and then another thousand a year later when CS6 comes out? Seriously?
Let's see them give away these (long overdue and much asked for), "under the hood" improvements for 30 bucks like Apple did with Snow Leopard.
First of all, Adobe's update cycle is 2 years, and the Master collections is $900 to upgrade and includes 13 programs, plus the Bridge. That comes to about $70 per app, which is much less than upgrading Logic or Final Cut, and on par with most OSX updates. Snow Leopard was an exception to normal Apple pricing, mainly because it's more of a "Service Pack" fixing a lot of problems in Leopard than anything else.
Adobe software is utter crap, someone please step up and show these losers how to innovate and cooperate.
Very funny.
See above. I have the Lr 3 beta. I have the Aperture 3 trial. Neither is going to completely take away the need for Ps, not in their current incarnations.
At least with Adobe, I can guess why they won't; my guess is that they simply refuse to add enough functionality to Lr in order to prevent cannibalizing Ps sales.
As for Apple, I have no idea why they won't step up to the plate.
I think most Lightroom users are very happy with it's workflow as a photograph cataloguing and developing program. (Hence the name Lightroom). Adding a bunch of extra features would take away that workflow. Photoshop is for deeper photo editing and manipulation. Keeping the 2 programs separate makes sense in the same way the Numbers and Pages are kept separate, even though lots of people stick spreadsheets into text documents; combining the 2 would slow down Pages from it's main use...
Also, John B.: You can buy Photoshop CS4 Standard, and not have the 3D editing features or the extra cost. 3D is only available in Photoshop CS4 Extended. I think we can assume Adobe will continue this product model as there are lots of folks who only work in 2D.
No news on Illustrator? That is my must have app of the whole bunch.
They bought and killed the competition. Why bother?
(If Illustrator is still not multi-cpu aware, I will kick something, hard.)
It's a layout application, I use that or Illustrator, as do most professional designers. Fireworks does not provide me with any of the tools I want for creating customisable grids or using styles.
Wrong... most professional web designers use Photoshop then fireworks as a sub program. I've contracted for some very big companies... it's never been a question of what program to use for layout before CSS conversion. Photoshop.
I'd like to see spine-bleed in InDesign5, A critical feature for designing full-bleed perfect-bound books.
Hopefully you have sent that request to Adobe, and not just to this forum?
They bought and killed the competition. Why bother?
(If Illustrator is still not multi-cpu aware, I will kick something, hard.)
For my line of work there is some competition: CorelDraw. It's PC only and it does technical drawing with dimensions VERY well. The whole Creative Suite focus on web oriented tasks makes it harder and harder for me to justify using Illustrator. If CorelDraw ever came back to the Mac, I would have to seriously consider it because of it's out of the box superiority in the areas of technical drawing.
I agree. Illustrator needs some attention. So much more could be done with it.
Wrong... most professional web designers use Photoshop then fireworks as a sub program. I've contracted for some very big companies... it's never been a question of what program to use for layout before CSS conversion. Photoshop.
Photoshop is an awful program for layout, it's a photo editor with added features. I have no interest in getting into an argument about this but in my experience designers use Illustrator or InDesign for sketching out ideas.
looking forward to using Cs5
I wonder how flash will be more integrated within all of the software
Brushes in Photoshop. Seriously? Finally? I thought Adobe was fundamentally AGAINST serious brushes. What took them so long? It's been around since I dunno... over 15 years in Corel Painter.
This is gonna be huge for illustrators.
I'd like to see spine-bleed in InDesign5, A critical feature for designing full-bleed perfect-bound books.
ok I was a bit scared by the first half of the sentence...
Hopefully you have sent that request to Adobe, and not just to this forum?
I am a pretty regular participant at Adobe's forums. I think they're well aware of Illustrator's single-cpu-ness.
Photoshop is an awful program for layout, it's a photo editor with added features. I have no interest in getting into an argument about this but in my experience designers use Illustrator or InDesign for sketching out ideas.
Man you're really missing the boat if you aren't using photoshop for laying out websites. It's extremely powerful. All websites start off as rasterized... InDesign was never meant for websites... but do whatever works for you. It just isn't what the pros use for website layout and development.
My beef with CS4 is that DW is not fully compatible with Snow Leopard and will not support file formats and add-ons such as those from Web Assist which are written in Cocoa and follow standards. When I wrote to Adobe about DW incompatibilities their awful support system (no single person but some sort of robotic thing) the answer was that it was Apple's problem. Meanwhile, DW lags behind and is slow, clunky, and can't handle PHP coding well at all. Fireworks should be more integrated with DW and I would love if they brought back Macromedia's cool ability in DW to correct broken links and see the functionality of your site in several different ways to validate it against Web Standards.
Sounds like they haven't updated DW or FW so that they keep up with whats happening on the Web. I've abandoned Flash because it is not 508 compliant and is a real resource hog.
I have to admit also that I use Photoshop Elements because it was $99 vs. the bloated price of PS which I can't afford. It works great.
If the vector keying engine from Ultra is included in After Effects in CS5, I'll buy it. That all by itself will be worth the price of entry.
On the graphics and web side of things, I agree that there should be some more serious competition - especially on the Mac side. My go-to application has always been Canvas, but when ACD bought out Deneba, they killed the Mac version.
If I had the cash, I'd buy Canvas back from ACD, tear it apart and fix the bugs I'm so familiar with and maybe buy the rights to the excellent but currently comatose TypeStyler and add those features to it. Oh, and I'd drop the Windows version out of spite.