Boycott Adobe! Pirate Adobe! Steal Adobe! Hack Adobe! Short Adobe! Never purchase another Adobe product again!
Hey, why should these scumbags support a $1000 program they sold until last year when they can screw their customers? It's time for all of us to screw Adobe royally.
That said, CS3 works as well as CS4 with SL. The punks @ Adobe are trying to trick us into an needless upgrade.
I want us all to bankrupt Adobe!
I agree about boycotting Adobe products. But one should not pirate nor steal their products. Plus if you steal their software and use it, you are STILL using an Adobe product. Do yourself a favor and try to find other alternatives to Adobe (like you said, you use Pixelmator) to do your work. We live in a world where we vote with our pockets. Stealing a product still means there is a need for that product. (I won't buy another Apple product, but I won't steal their OS, hardware or software either.)
I wish I had more skill in programing, because then I would try to help the Gimp project out more to help it become a standard use program. Its about half way there and needs some cleaning up around the edges.
I'm ready now to explore some alternatives. Coda for one to replace Dreamweaver. Need to do some investigating...
I did one or two projects with Amaya and it was close, but didn't quite cut it for me and I went back to Dreamweaver.
The only reason I've upgraded any Adobe product for the last ten years is to keep compatibility with OS updates and with colleagues who update their versions. I'm a web developer who codes by hand, so I just use Dreamweaver for marking up HTML and I just use Illustrator and Photoshop for tweaking the designer's files and exporting slices. I don't recall any new features that I've needed in all that time. I would upgrade for bug fixes, but Adobe doesn't seem interested in that -- Dreamweaver didn't have a single patch between CS3 and CS4, if I'm not mistaken, and it's one of the buggier programs on my computer. I'd also upgrade for speed, but the programs seem to just get slower with each release.
Adobe is right up there with Microsoft among companies I only very hesitantly and very begrudgingly give money to. When I get tired of asking the designers I work with, "Hey, can you save that down to CS3 for me?" that's when I upgrade.
I could have gone on... if this level of outcry had been made about the healthcare system, we'd have had universal health-care decades ago. Amazing so many people argue against tax to keep people healthy, but are more than happy to download applications illegally and burden those of us who do pay for them to pick up the tab - BTW, I am not picking on you three, I have no idea what your politic are, but I have seen these comments on almost all of the Mac sites.
If you can't afford something, should you have it? Most people who use CS3 or even CS4 are just kids who think they need a $1000 suite to resize the shitty photos they take on their SLRs they can barely use.
I think what Adobe is doing sucks as well... so, don't use their stuff. There ARE alternatives, some are free.
Actually, I live in Canada so I already have universal health care (which I love dearly BTW). And for the record, I bought my copy of CS4 legally... my point is that for the amount of money the client/customer puts out for Adobe's products, Adobe should show some good will in return, especially since there are inexpensive or even free software that the average user can use as an alternative... this proves that while it is a professional level suite, CS is still way overpriced IMO. And to not offer an update for CS3/OSX 10.6 compatibility, is just stupid... even if you have the market cornered. To my mind, a professional level suite, at a pro price point should = professional level support.
Can anyone give me a really compelling feature upgrade that Adobe made to Photoshop between CS and CS3? (Intel native excepted). Something that meant you just HAD to upgrade to the latest version (likewise for InDesign, Illustrator or Dreamweaver).
When upgrading software that costs around the price of an actual MacBook for the upgrade alone, I need to know that I'm going to derive some kind of productivity benefit and claw that money back. A delivery driver is unlikely to trade in a nearly new van for a brand new van just because he prefers the new vans colour...
If I asked you to develope my website, and we agreed on spec and price, and you supplied a product I was happy with; would you feel obliged, when 18months later I update my hardware, or some function of the site, to carry on updating your site because of changes I want to make to the spec? Would you expect to be paid?
I think the three million other people ? with the exact same website that we would had built for you ? bring something to bear here.
No, I would not charge you 1/3 the cost of a new site (in this case a $599 upgrade) to make a cs3 patch.
Adobe will support cs4. It can't be so difficult to include cs3, which probably has a much larger user base anyway.
It is not like professionals have any choice. Adobe rules. For the causal user there are other alternatives because there is not that much need for compatibility with vendors, freelances, customers, service bureaus, etc. For the pros, that is just the cost of doing business.
Adobe has a lock on my field, unfortunately, but their software has become buggy and mediocre--power hiding behind a flawed interface. And yet it's expensive, with complex bundles (combining old and new apps regardless of development cycle) that you have to play games with to guess the best path! And they have complex, burdensome installers and updaters. Meanwhile, upgrades are seldom revolutionary, despite the high prices.
As a result, it's very hard to justify buying every single upgrade. I buy every-other version instead, and am now using CS3 while waiting for CS5, hopefully with long-overdue 64-bit support.
Failing to support just one version old is not acceptable to me. It may stop me from upgrading to Snow Leopard on one of my machines, but it will NOT make me buy CS4 (which still doesn't fix everything wrong with CS3) nor like Adobe any more than before (And I used to be a big fan--back when Photoshop was the poster child for rock-solid software.)
I'll be looking for unsupported ways to use CS3 (I'm hopeful) and I'll be looking for alternative apps (I know GIMP is far from perfect, but it might make do for a time on one of my machines, with CS3 on the other).
In short, I don't think Adobe has any legal OBLIGATION to support the prior version. But not doing so is one more example of the mediocre Creative Suite experience. And that in turn makes me buy less from Adobe.
So how much do you think that my car dealer should charge me to upgrade my 1, 2 or 3 year old cars?
Not the point.
He asked why people weren't current on CS4, why they would still be running CS3. The answer was that the upgrade price at 515 pounds sterling is fairly steep for a product that doesn't offer much in the update for Mac users. Except, as of Friday, support for running on SL.
(Of course, that's the honest people. The dishonest folks were current on CS4 probably the day it was released.)
Would you expect a air plane manufacturer to upgrade and support your prop plane instruments with their current jet plane instruments?
Your comparison is illogical. Who is the airplane manufacturer here? Adobe? Or Apple? My problem is that Adobe will not support CS3 on Snow Leopard, and they go so far as to say they're not even going to test it!
At the very least, test the product and see if it has major problems. Who knows... a patch that fixes CS3 to work beautifully with Snow Leopard may not even be necessary. The point is that Adobe abandoned support for it without even trying.
is it worth noting that CS3 may not even have any significant problems running in snow leopard?
i mean, i'm pretty sure running CS isn't supported and hasn't been for some time, but its continued to work through a few OS updates and the switch to Intel CPUs.
If I recall at the time, you could have upgraded to the CS4 for less than $200 or even nothing. Whatever it was, the difference in price, was more significant than in the increased power and functionality that the new suite offered.
Just how do you expect Adobe to support CS3 on Snow Leopard baffles me. CS3 wasn't programmed for dual core 64-bit processing?
Do you know what "support" means?
We'll see what happens with CS3 support when Windows 7 is released in October.
Actually, I live in Canada so I already have universal health care (which I love dearly BTW). And for the record, I bought my copy of CS4 legally... my point is that for the amount of money the client/customer puts out for Adobe's products, Adobe should show some good will in return, especially since there are inexpensive or even free software that the average user can use as an alternative... this proves that while it is a professional level suite, CS is still way overpriced IMO. And to not offer an update for CS3/OSX 10.6 compatibility, is just stupid... even if you have the market cornered. To my mind, a professional level suite, at a pro price point should = professional level support.
Fair enough, you make good points. I think Adobe have been taking the 'michael' with Mac users for some time; I'm surprised it's taken this long for the tension to boil over.
I haven't used photoshop for years, because I went through a time when I genuinely could not afford it. Now that I could, I choose not to have it and use the more affordable Aperture. I think this move will probably swing things Apple's way. But if you need the rest of CS3, it's a bit harder to change your entire workflow, if not impossible.
I am just frustrated by an apparent sense of entitlement people seem to have with software, that they really should have over more important things. Just ma little rant... [/rant]
If you have any memory of the recent evolution of OS X, Adobe has bent over backwards for this platform:
2000 - 2002: Migration of suite from OS 9 to OS X, a completely new OS.
2005-2006: Migration from PPC/Codeweaver to Universal/Xcode. This required changing not just their code base, but their entire development process, using a yet unproven tool: XCode. They even helped Apple improve XCode during this process.
2008- Sorry, Adobe, we changed our mind: no 64-bit Carbon. This forced Adobe to move their entire suite to Cocoa for CS5.
They are doing a remarkable job keeping up with these changes in the course of their regular upgrade cycle. I think things will finally settle down for them, as there is not much left that Apple can do to them, but they have had a rough nine years supporting a huge, complex suite on the Mac platform. We should all be thankful they didn't give up or simply skip major releases on the Mac.
oh puh-leaaase!
the only thing adobe has bent over backwards for in the last decade was to suck at the teats of microsoft. their mac software has been transformed from awesome tools for the graphics industry to dreadful mac bloatware that plays second fiddle to windows software. they have abandoned mac users years ago.
i remember adobe bragging that the transition to osx was going to be a breeze and yet they were among the last to ship usable products (quark of course being the last to come around).
my favourite version of illustrator (10) runs smoother, better, faster on an 8-core mac pro than any later version. i'm dreading the day i have to abandon it.
there is no excuse for adobe to treat mac users as second class citizens. WE made them who they are and they repaid us by focusing most of their development on courting the windows consumer market. lets not forget that without apples adoption of postscript for the first laserwriter (several thousand dollars of the price was for the postscript license) adobe would not be where they are. WE are the ones that made photoshop the verb it is today.
now all new versions are windows first and their mac 'ports' are garbage - flash being the posterchild of that trend, but by no means the only one. 64 bit coming to windows years before the mac. don't give me the 'carbon' bullshit - adobe has had ten years to get their ass in gear.
reading in the comments that people have had no issues with CS3 on snow leopard, i agree that this might be a tempest in a tea cup - but the tea is stale and has been for years.
what we need is a new macromedia to give adobe a reason to wake up.
I cannot believe this guy is a Principal Product Manager. If I talked to my customers the way he is on that blog, I would be fired in a heartbeat, not to mention they would look at my product in a different light.
I will never look at Photoshop the same...I will think of his words in that blog to customers every time I see the splash screen.
Adobe charges premium upgrade pricing for an endless series of maintenance releases, and very rarely ever releases actual bug fixes in between.
I can't remember the last useful addition to Illustrator. Hey Adobe, how about bringing the god damned graph function in Illustrator into the current century? Am I really paying $600 a year for minor features like "live paint?"
Bridge, thats a f-ing joke. Acrobat, so slow its painful, I use it only as a last resort and every version seems to get worse. Flash CS3, slow and crappy no matter what version you "upgrade" to. I'd sooner user TextWrangler than Dreamweaver. The one app in the CS bundle that has had upgrades worth paying for is InDesign.
We'll see what happens with CS3 support when Windows 7 is released in October.
It's not a direct comparison. Windows 7 is basically Vista with some small improvements and a different shell. The major architecture change happened in Vista already between Vista and XP.
Edit: You could compare if cs4 had shipped before Vista was out and cs3 had issues on Vista without an update.
the only thing adobe has bent over backwards for in the last decade was to suck at the teats of microsoft. their mac software has been transformed from awesome tools for the graphics industry to dreadful mac bloatware that plays second fiddle to windows software. they have abandoned mac users years ago.
i remember adobe bragging that the transition to osx was going to be a breeze and yet they were among the last to ship usable products (quark of course being the last to come around).
my favourite version of illustrator (10) runs smoother, better, faster on an 8-core mac pro than any later version. i'm dreading the day i have to abandon it.
there is no excuse for adobe to treat mac users as second class citizens. WE made them who they are and they repaid us by focusing most of their development on courting the windows consumer market. lets not forget that without apples adoption of postscript for the first laserwriter (several thousand dollars of the price was for the postscript license) adobe would not be where they are. WE are the ones that made photoshop the verb it is today.
now all new versions are windows first and their mac 'ports' are garbage - flash being the posterchild of that trend, but by no means the only one. 64 bit coming to windows years before the mac. don't give me the 'carbon' bullshit - adobe has had ten years to get their ass in gear.
reading in the comments that people have had no issues with CS3 on snow leopard, i agree that this might be a tempest in a tea cup - but the tea is stale and has been for years.
what we need is a new macromedia to give adobe a reason to wake up.
Microsoft, while not being particularly creative, does focus on the needs of developers, so I'm not surprised it has become the reference platform. I think Apple has made all the right decisions in going to OS X, then Intel/Xcode, now Cocoa-only 64-bit, but to call it bullshit, implying that these changes should somehow be trivial to adopt for a company with the size of Adobe's code base, is bullshit in itself.
Now that Apple is done with its major transition pains, maybe Adobe can focus more on features and less on Apple's migration path.
Comments
Boycott Adobe! Pirate Adobe! Steal Adobe! Hack Adobe! Short Adobe! Never purchase another Adobe product again!
Hey, why should these scumbags support a $1000 program they sold until last year when they can screw their customers? It's time for all of us to screw Adobe royally.
That said, CS3 works as well as CS4 with SL. The punks @ Adobe are trying to trick us into an needless upgrade.
I want us all to bankrupt Adobe!
I agree about boycotting Adobe products. But one should not pirate nor steal their products. Plus if you steal their software and use it, you are STILL using an Adobe product. Do yourself a favor and try to find other alternatives to Adobe (like you said, you use Pixelmator) to do your work. We live in a world where we vote with our pockets. Stealing a product still means there is a need for that product. (I won't buy another Apple product, but I won't steal their OS, hardware or software either.)
I wish I had more skill in programing, because then I would try to help the Gimp project out more to help it become a standard use program. Its about half way there and needs some cleaning up around the edges.
I'm ready now to explore some alternatives. Coda for one to replace Dreamweaver. Need to do some investigating...
I did one or two projects with Amaya and it was close, but didn't quite cut it for me and I went back to Dreamweaver.
The only reason I've upgraded any Adobe product for the last ten years is to keep compatibility with OS updates and with colleagues who update their versions. I'm a web developer who codes by hand, so I just use Dreamweaver for marking up HTML and I just use Illustrator and Photoshop for tweaking the designer's files and exporting slices. I don't recall any new features that I've needed in all that time. I would upgrade for bug fixes, but Adobe doesn't seem interested in that -- Dreamweaver didn't have a single patch between CS3 and CS4, if I'm not mistaken, and it's one of the buggier programs on my computer. I'd also upgrade for speed, but the programs seem to just get slower with each release.
Adobe is right up there with Microsoft among companies I only very hesitantly and very begrudgingly give money to. When I get tired of asking the designers I work with, "Hey, can you save that down to CS3 for me?" that's when I upgrade.
I could have gone on... if this level of outcry had been made about the healthcare system, we'd have had universal health-care decades ago. Amazing so many people argue against tax to keep people healthy, but are more than happy to download applications illegally and burden those of us who do pay for them to pick up the tab - BTW, I am not picking on you three, I have no idea what your politic are, but I have seen these comments on almost all of the Mac sites.
If you can't afford something, should you have it? Most people who use CS3 or even CS4 are just kids who think they need a $1000 suite to resize the shitty photos they take on their SLRs they can barely use.
I think what Adobe is doing sucks as well... so, don't use their stuff. There ARE alternatives, some are free.
Actually, I live in Canada so I already have universal health care (which I love dearly BTW). And for the record, I bought my copy of CS4 legally... my point is that for the amount of money the client/customer puts out for Adobe's products, Adobe should show some good will in return, especially since there are inexpensive or even free software that the average user can use as an alternative... this proves that while it is a professional level suite, CS is still way overpriced IMO. And to not offer an update for CS3/OSX 10.6 compatibility, is just stupid... even if you have the market cornered. To my mind, a professional level suite, at a pro price point should = professional level support.
Can anyone give me a really compelling feature upgrade that Adobe made to Photoshop between CS and CS3? (Intel native excepted). Something that meant you just HAD to upgrade to the latest version (likewise for InDesign, Illustrator or Dreamweaver).
When upgrading software that costs around the price of an actual MacBook for the upgrade alone, I need to know that I'm going to derive some kind of productivity benefit and claw that money back. A delivery driver is unlikely to trade in a nearly new van for a brand new van just because he prefers the new vans colour...
Just as an example, nothing personal:
If I asked you to develope my website, and we agreed on spec and price, and you supplied a product I was happy with; would you feel obliged, when 18months later I update my hardware, or some function of the site, to carry on updating your site because of changes I want to make to the spec? Would you expect to be paid?
I think the three million other people ? with the exact same website that we would had built for you ? bring something to bear here.
No, I would not charge you 1/3 the cost of a new site (in this case a $599 upgrade) to make a cs3 patch.
Adobe will support cs4. It can't be so difficult to include cs3, which probably has a much larger user base anyway.
But of course they need to sell more product.
As a result, it's very hard to justify buying every single upgrade. I buy every-other version instead, and am now using CS3 while waiting for CS5, hopefully with long-overdue 64-bit support.
Failing to support just one version old is not acceptable to me. It may stop me from upgrading to Snow Leopard on one of my machines, but it will NOT make me buy CS4 (which still doesn't fix everything wrong with CS3) nor like Adobe any more than before
I'll be looking for unsupported ways to use CS3 (I'm hopeful) and I'll be looking for alternative apps (I know GIMP is far from perfect, but it might make do for a time on one of my machines, with CS3 on the other).
In short, I don't think Adobe has any legal OBLIGATION to support the prior version. But not doing so is one more example of the mediocre Creative Suite experience. And that in turn makes me buy less from Adobe.
So how much do you think that my car dealer should charge me to upgrade my 1, 2 or 3 year old cars?
Not the point.
He asked why people weren't current on CS4, why they would still be running CS3. The answer was that the upgrade price at 515 pounds sterling is fairly steep for a product that doesn't offer much in the update for Mac users. Except, as of Friday, support for running on SL.
(Of course, that's the honest people. The dishonest folks were current on CS4 probably the day it was released.)
Would you expect a air plane manufacturer to upgrade and support your prop plane instruments with their current jet plane instruments?
Your comparison is illogical. Who is the airplane manufacturer here? Adobe? Or Apple? My problem is that Adobe will not support CS3 on Snow Leopard, and they go so far as to say they're not even going to test it!
At the very least, test the product and see if it has major problems. Who knows... a patch that fixes CS3 to work beautifully with Snow Leopard may not even be necessary. The point is that Adobe abandoned support for it without even trying.
i mean, i'm pretty sure running CS isn't supported and hasn't been for some time, but its continued to work through a few OS updates and the switch to Intel CPUs.
If I recall at the time, you could have upgraded to the CS4 for less than $200 or even nothing. Whatever it was, the difference in price, was more significant than in the increased power and functionality that the new suite offered.
Just how do you expect Adobe to support CS3 on Snow Leopard baffles me. CS3 wasn't programmed for dual core 64-bit processing?
Do you know what "support" means?
We'll see what happens with CS3 support when Windows 7 is released in October.
Actually, I live in Canada so I already have universal health care (which I love dearly BTW). And for the record, I bought my copy of CS4 legally... my point is that for the amount of money the client/customer puts out for Adobe's products, Adobe should show some good will in return, especially since there are inexpensive or even free software that the average user can use as an alternative... this proves that while it is a professional level suite, CS is still way overpriced IMO. And to not offer an update for CS3/OSX 10.6 compatibility, is just stupid... even if you have the market cornered. To my mind, a professional level suite, at a pro price point should = professional level support.
Fair enough, you make good points. I think Adobe have been taking the 'michael' with Mac users for some time; I'm surprised it's taken this long for the tension to boil over.
I haven't used photoshop for years, because I went through a time when I genuinely could not afford it. Now that I could, I choose not to have it and use the more affordable Aperture. I think this move will probably swing things Apple's way. But if you need the rest of CS3, it's a bit harder to change your entire workflow, if not impossible.
I am just frustrated by an apparent sense of entitlement people seem to have with software, that they really should have over more important things. Just ma little rant... [/rant]
If you have any memory of the recent evolution of OS X, Adobe has bent over backwards for this platform:
2000 - 2002: Migration of suite from OS 9 to OS X, a completely new OS.
2005-2006: Migration from PPC/Codeweaver to Universal/Xcode. This required changing not just their code base, but their entire development process, using a yet unproven tool: XCode. They even helped Apple improve XCode during this process.
2008- Sorry, Adobe, we changed our mind: no 64-bit Carbon. This forced Adobe to move their entire suite to Cocoa for CS5.
They are doing a remarkable job keeping up with these changes in the course of their regular upgrade cycle. I think things will finally settle down for them, as there is not much left that Apple can do to them, but they have had a rough nine years supporting a huge, complex suite on the Mac platform. We should all be thankful they didn't give up or simply skip major releases on the Mac.
oh puh-leaaase!
the only thing adobe has bent over backwards for in the last decade was to suck at the teats of microsoft. their mac software has been transformed from awesome tools for the graphics industry to dreadful mac bloatware that plays second fiddle to windows software. they have abandoned mac users years ago.
i remember adobe bragging that the transition to osx was going to be a breeze and yet they were among the last to ship usable products (quark of course being the last to come around).
my favourite version of illustrator (10) runs smoother, better, faster on an 8-core mac pro than any later version. i'm dreading the day i have to abandon it.
there is no excuse for adobe to treat mac users as second class citizens. WE made them who they are and they repaid us by focusing most of their development on courting the windows consumer market. lets not forget that without apples adoption of postscript for the first laserwriter (several thousand dollars of the price was for the postscript license) adobe would not be where they are. WE are the ones that made photoshop the verb it is today.
now all new versions are windows first and their mac 'ports' are garbage - flash being the posterchild of that trend, but by no means the only one. 64 bit coming to windows years before the mac. don't give me the 'carbon' bullshit - adobe has had ten years to get their ass in gear.
reading in the comments that people have had no issues with CS3 on snow leopard, i agree that this might be a tempest in a tea cup - but the tea is stale and has been for years.
what we need is a new macromedia to give adobe a reason to wake up.
I will never look at Photoshop the same...I will think of his words in that blog to customers every time I see the splash screen.
I can't remember the last useful addition to Illustrator. Hey Adobe, how about bringing the god damned graph function in Illustrator into the current century? Am I really paying $600 a year for minor features like "live paint?"
Bridge, thats a f-ing joke. Acrobat, so slow its painful, I use it only as a last resort and every version seems to get worse. Flash CS3, slow and crappy no matter what version you "upgrade" to. I'd sooner user TextWrangler than Dreamweaver. The one app in the CS bundle that has had upgrades worth paying for is InDesign.
There I feel better.
We'll see what happens with CS3 support when Windows 7 is released in October.
It's not a direct comparison. Windows 7 is basically Vista with some small improvements and a different shell. The major architecture change happened in Vista already between Vista and XP.
Edit: You could compare if cs4 had shipped before Vista was out and cs3 had issues on Vista without an update.
oh puh-leaaase!
the only thing adobe has bent over backwards for in the last decade was to suck at the teats of microsoft. their mac software has been transformed from awesome tools for the graphics industry to dreadful mac bloatware that plays second fiddle to windows software. they have abandoned mac users years ago.
i remember adobe bragging that the transition to osx was going to be a breeze and yet they were among the last to ship usable products (quark of course being the last to come around).
my favourite version of illustrator (10) runs smoother, better, faster on an 8-core mac pro than any later version. i'm dreading the day i have to abandon it.
there is no excuse for adobe to treat mac users as second class citizens. WE made them who they are and they repaid us by focusing most of their development on courting the windows consumer market. lets not forget that without apples adoption of postscript for the first laserwriter (several thousand dollars of the price was for the postscript license) adobe would not be where they are. WE are the ones that made photoshop the verb it is today.
now all new versions are windows first and their mac 'ports' are garbage - flash being the posterchild of that trend, but by no means the only one. 64 bit coming to windows years before the mac. don't give me the 'carbon' bullshit - adobe has had ten years to get their ass in gear.
reading in the comments that people have had no issues with CS3 on snow leopard, i agree that this might be a tempest in a tea cup - but the tea is stale and has been for years.
what we need is a new macromedia to give adobe a reason to wake up.
Microsoft, while not being particularly creative, does focus on the needs of developers, so I'm not surprised it has become the reference platform. I think Apple has made all the right decisions in going to OS X, then Intel/Xcode, now Cocoa-only 64-bit, but to call it bullshit, implying that these changes should somehow be trivial to adopt for a company with the size of Adobe's code base, is bullshit in itself.
Now that Apple is done with its major transition pains, maybe Adobe can focus more on features and less on Apple's migration path.
"Actually works in Snow Leopard and doesn't suck like CS4: Everything is Flash Edition"