FYI Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo are good alternatives that also run on Apple Silicon.
They have no subscription requirements and are 50% off right now ($25 each): https://affinity.serif.com/
They have no subscription requirements and are 50% off right now ($25 each): https://affinity.serif.com/
That said, its probably not a marketable skill by itself as most places would look for the “Adobe Illustrator” keyword.
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'm tired of the Adobe subscription ...
I too am tired of paying for Lightroom every month
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.