Wish I could cancel my creative cloud subscription but there is still prevalent use. Sketch and Figma do a much nicer job of things. Seems Adobe end up copying some of their features but always buried a few more clicks deep.
They have no subscription requirements and are 50% off right now ($25 each): https://affinity.serif.com/
I have a bad taste in my mouth about the ordeal and have been boycotting their software in protest. Because of how rude their support was, I would rather pay Adobe than spend a single dollar more at Affinity.
In HN of all places, I would expect people to understand that it costs money to maintain a product for different systems.
And it wasn't even their fault, your laptop getting stolen is not on them [1]. There's a lot of bullshit with services (like Amazon not refunding you the difference on an order if the price goes down before your item arrives), but this doesn't seem like one of them.
Also, if you paid $70 for designer, then that kind of sucks because I almost always see it for 50% off. Case and point, it's $35 right now.
[1] I am trying to make a point that's purely technical, but I don't want to seem too callous - I am sorry your laptop got stolen, it sucks to lose something expensive that is very important, and has a lot of important data on it. And I know responses like mine are the last thing someone with anger wants to hear (I've been in that position), but I run my own business and I am also on the other side now where it's really hard to deal with situations like this.
Huh? What has that got to do with this case? They're already maintaining it on multiple systems and its not like aetherspawn would be able to use it on more than one system. It literally is no different to the Affinity devs whether aetherspawn is using the OS X or Windows version since they both cost the same amount (and the license was only three months old).
It just seems like they wanted another sale to allow access to a second platform, which would make sense if they retained access to the first.
I'm not sure what the right approach is here (certainly being rude about it isn't it, though!) but every time a company has given me leeway, I've always then went around telling everyone who would listen how great the company is. Seems like they did the opposite by alienating the customer instead. That doesn't seem like a good approach.
Now subscriptions. I notices my jetbrains stuff worked with the same license key when I switched it to linux. But I'm paying them yearly.
I'll totally agree there is no need to be rude. Though I imagine if you are in customer service for a while, its probably a natural defensive posture.
But even if not, they could have simply said sorry, our policy is that we don't do this. aetherspawn said they were rude about it. There was no reason to be rude, they could have said no while still being empathic to the situation and being courteous. I don't know how rude they were or weren't, of course.
Its explicitly part of their biz model to charge for different platforms in liu of doing the subscription thing.
> just give them a new one that they can use
It always rubs me the wrong way when a customer decides what value something has to a business, assuming they know everything about the business' incomings and outgoings, assuming they know the size of the business, assuming that all businesses must operate the same way because some businesses have the flexibility to offer acts of goodwill.
It makes the assumption that all businesses, especially in software, are on equal footing. They very much aren't. Sorry, but the customer can't always be right — the business has its own bills to take care of, employees to pay, rights to licence, and lights to keep on; beyond what the customer paid for, it really doesn't have any further obligations. Good will is exactly that: good will.
That said, its probably not a marketable skill by itself as most places would look for the “Adobe Illustrator” keyword.
I'm tired of the Adobe subscription ...
I too am tired of paying for Lightroom every month
I get a variety of artwork from designers in a plethora of formats and sadly can't enforce my preferences on them.
Otherwise, I've been able to bang out some quick vector layouts since some of the basic hotkeys are the same, and it seems to handle almost any vector format I've opened with it.
I don't know where you use CC for, but if it is just for photoshop, you might give https://www.photopea.com/ a try.
Affinity Photo and Designer are great tools, they are cross-platform (although you have to purchase them separately), and regularly go on sale (I bought both for 70$ total).
I have yet to find a task I used to use Photoshop or Illustrator for that I can't do with these. I am not a hardcore or super advanced user, but that's why it works for me.
https://bythom.com/newsviews/nikon-launches-new-software.htm...
Ed; "Everything is there: stills, video, image browsing, NEF processing, Lightroom-like capabilities, cloud integration, image ingest,and much more."
edit: we are talking about replacements for Adobe products here, so context matters. Adobe products _also_ don't run on Linux.
When you cover about 98-99% of your users platforms, I think you're cross platform.
Otherwise, we could define a cross-platform slippery slope such that no software has ever achieved it. There's always another platform you didn't support.
Does it run on more than one platform? If yes, it's cross platform.
Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Linux? BSD? Haiku? Minix?
Listen, I love linux, and it's not MY fault that the year of the Linux Desktop never came and that its marketshare has continued to fall against its competitors.
If I'm talking about a mobile app and I say "cross-platform" I probably meant iOS and Android. It would be strange to say "what about Linux??" in that context.
So here we are talking about competitors to Adobe products, where "cross-platform" means Windows and Mac, so when I say "cross-platform" in this context, I am also referring to that same set of platforms.
The intersection of artists, who are heavy users of the Adobe suite of products, and linux aficionados is essentially zero.
You do realize this, do you not?
He thankfully now makes a comfortable living from it.
It's one of my favourite indie-hacker-style stories, as the hacker was motivated by his intrinsic joy of making something.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...
I think this is less uncommon for bootstrapped companies than a lot of people assume. E.g. Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell has a similar story.
At some point I'll manage to figure this out and take a bold step further to leave Adobe all behind. I know there are options, tried most of them (Affinity etc), but I make my living through these apps and I need reliable software with resources and community, just like Figma did in a great way for UX/product design, I wish they create side products like CC apps, for print design, even audio design, that would be awesome.
I grew up with Photoshop 4 and CorelDRAW!, so I would totally be happy with those as well.
YMMV
I use it for work.
One time fee, I can’t justify Photoshop CC for once per quarter usage.
I may use it intensively for a few days then not touch it for months.
That said Acrobat is really fully fleshed so I understand why people still only use it professionally
When you want to cancel, you go to one central repository with all your virtual cards and turn off the card for the service you want to cancel. When your next payment comes up, the card will decline, the service will close your account for you. Easy cancellation.
That is in addition to their scammy practice of displaying a monthly price, but locking you into a yearly contract. You pay monthly, but if you cancel within the year they charge you a cancellation fee that is essentially equal to the entire remaining subscription. Not sure if they do that anymore, but that was the case with my sub 2 years ago.
I couldn't apply a filter to a shape layer, which I can do in Photoshop. It didn't blur out the option, I had to click it to find out I couldn't do it.
I did try to gaussian blur a layer and it did nothing until I hit 50px then at 51px it basically blurred everything out of existence. I tried this in Photoshop and it behaved in a more linear way, as I'd expect.
This would actually be less of a problem if every Photoshop alternative didn't try to be a pixel perfect clone of Photoshop. Take some risks, evaluate some choices and see if you can do things better than Photoshop. Otherwise the comparisons will be too stark.
I understand a lot of the vitriol towards Adobe for a number of reasons, but for some reason they just do photo/image editing better than anyone else. I keep waiting for the day a FOSS alternative pops up that actually competes.