Adobe XD, where did it go wrong?
goodlookingdesign.co.uk
goodlookingdesign.co.uk
Also, before, companies, schools, and universities could purchase a few perpetual licenses and use those for teaching. Now, they would need to spend much more on person-bound license rentals.
So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left.
I'm still being held hostage by them to access my old files, but for every new project, I go out of my way to avoid using any Adobe-specific file format. If others do the same, then XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use.
EDIT: If I remember correctly, I released my first self-developed plug-in for Photoshop 5 around 1999. So I've been using Adobe products for a long time. Back then, plugins for hobbyist power users were a big market. Nowadays, that market is dead. All the hobbyists went to Gimp and Inkscape.
Similarly, the Substance3D communities became a ghost town more or less overnight when Adobe purchased the company and then removed Indie pricing. It went from $99 one-time on Steam to $49/month (min 12 months, so $588 annually) as part of Creative Cloud. Suddenly, Marmoset - their long-term competitor - became very attractive at a one-time $119 for students for a perpetual license. I also lost access to my old files there.
[0]: https://hackaday.com/2021/07/13/muse-group-continues-tone-de...
[1]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-audacity-how-to-wre...
This has become standard operating procedure. Push your agenda until you receive backlash, then claim it was all a big misunderstanding, and that you are listening to feedback. Let things calm down for a few months, then push the controversial changes anyway.
People are picking up on that, and won‘t accept it anymore. I think that‘s great.
Current leadership has shown their hand and the probable long-term direction they are headed.
Maybe it‘s an honest mistake, but the community no longer seems to extend the benefit of the doubt, which is totally understandable. Fool me 42753 times, shame on me.
I use Logic Pro for most things and have a dedicated, old Mac to run it, but Reaper is quite good and like $60 if one's on Windows or Linux (and isn't nearly as inscrutable as Ardour). Ableton Live is another stand-by and it runs on a Mac.
But in 2022 it's hard to recommend Audacity for much of anything, even aside from their drama problems.
I also don't know how it has changed when it got taken over.
No subscription required, very reasonable pricing.
* Ableton Live
* Reaper
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fai...
For music production, I've been using Studio One [3] for the last couple years, and it's truly the mosf straightforward and beautiful DAW I've ever used. Though, it's not free and open source, which is a downside for me. It's one of the few proprietary software I care to own.
Zrythm [4], however, has been catching my eye lately, and I'm looking forward to it maturing to the point where I can finally move to a FOSS DAW.
[1] https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity [2] https://github.com/SartoxSoftware/audacium [3] https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-One [4] https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html
After I left I was looking for a solution and couldn’t justify Adobe’s pricing for my own small project and picked up the Affinity suite for a song while it was on sale last autumn.
It’s great. It doesn’t have absolutely everything and I’ve had to learn new controls and all that but it’s not hard to learn and they’ve done everything I’ve needed them to do.
For a seasoned user of InDesign it’s entirely different and I could understand hesitation—I’ve known designers who tried and just couldn’t get the workflow down but for me it’s been fantastic.
I am very much a hobbyist, but I'm missing things I got used to in Photoshop.
If there's that one way to get a look that you've developed, it's disruptive to move to a different tool.
I've found this to be more difficult for creative work than for more procedural tasks. I can roughly translate between AppleScript or shell scripting or Python. But if a particular filter or plug-in isn't there, it's a lot of work to force it through a different pipeline.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1775400/Substance_3D_Desi...
Plus it seems that in addition to buying this app, you also need to rent a subscription if you want access to the preset library (which used to be included for free).
But yeah, it sucks that you have to get a subscription for the material library.
I don't like Adobe and don't use their apps any more, but their apps continue to dominate the design, illustration and publishing fields. That is unlikely to change any time in the near future.
I'm using the Affinity apps - the apps are successful and thriving, but making little dent on Adobe's influence on the industry. (Affinity proves an app doesn't need to displace or overtake an existing app, but can carve out their own successful market segment.)
Adobe were caught-out with the success of Sketch and Figma for UI design, and with the Procreate painting app on the iPad. My impression is that Adobe's alternatives (XD and Fresco for the iPad) don't share the same "mindshare" among designers as those other apps.
However, there are some Adobe apps like After Effects that simply don't have any serious competition. Also, there are thousands of tutorials for Adobe apps that continue to make them attractive to learn. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more tutorials for Photoshop than any other software (or even programming language) in existence.
Interesting aside: The file specification for .sketch files is available on the Sketch website. This means Adobe XD and Figma can import Sketch files. The reverse is not true: neither Figma or XD publish their file format specifications.
Yes, but that’s not because they were late to the party. They had the app for this kind of work in Adobe Fireworks and they shut it down with no migration path. That’s what opened the market up for Sketch and later Figma. Now that the latter exist, there’s no reason to pay Adobe’s extortionate prices, or buy into their monopolistic business practices.
They killed it and half arsed added a few features to Il/PS and said “there just use those instead”
‘ So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left’, according to my search Creative Cloud has 26 million paid members and is only increasing, at a fairly healthy rate too.
I hate it too and so do most that pay it but there customers certainly didn’t leave and this certainly has nothing to do with XD failing, the post explains quite clearly the issues.
A lot of creatives that use/would use XD already have a subscription to creative cloud that would pay for it, so it’s irrelevant, you just wanted to moan about the subscription and attach that complaint to this.
"After the customers left" might mean "after the customers who thrived in the previous era left", and then you would both be right.
Enterprise loves SaaS, because it solves problems they had (smoothing out purchasing, avoiding endless reauthorization and upgrade planning coordination), while not creating any problems (because they were always going to upgrade anyway). Hence the uptake and good numbers.
A lot of consumers hate SaaS, because it solves no problems they had (purchasing and upgrading were easy, if they chose), and creates new problems. They had previously been able to create indistinguishable output with an older version, albeit missing some features, to minimize recurring cost. And now that's no longer an option.
So you've made things easier for a group that spends a ton of money, but doesn't speak publicly on the internet (enterprise), which makes your metrics look nice. And you've made things harder / impossible for a group that does speak publicly on the internet (consumers), which makes your sentiment look bad.
So yes, both.
Very frustrating. Extremely hard to deploy via management tools.
This was discussed frequently inside Abobe, but the solutions always flowed back to more control instead of more openness. Now Adobe is going to push tech exoticism while suites like Affinity eat up the market.
Yes, their cloud subscription is growing in numbers. And my company pays for a subscription for me, so I'm 1 additional user and $200 (or whatever) in additional monthly revenue. But we are only subscribers because they are holding our data hostage with their proprietary file format. As soon as any app with good enough Photoshop PSD and Adobe Illustrator AI import comes around, we'll jump ship.
With that in mind, the fact that XD would lock us into yet another proprietary file format from Adobe is a death blow. We decided not to use it before even evaluating it, because it would increase our vendor lock-in. That's why I said in my original comment: "XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use". If XD files become worthless without an Adobe subscription, then we're not interested in producing them.
So technically you are correct that we're still a paying customer so we technically haven't left yet. But our mind and our loyalty is long gone. That's what I tried to say. People like my company do not wish to continue being a customer. Accordingly, they don't care about new products.
"you just wanted to moan about the subscription". No, I see this as a strategy mistake. Photoshop became popular because it was so easy for everyone to get a cheap old copy and start using it. Now that Adobe has locked out most of the hobbyists, where is the next generation of experts going to come from? Who is going to pay $600 annually just to practice with Adobe XD instead of using a free competitor?
I'd say you can see the same with 3ds max, which once was the undoubted king of 3d content creation software. By now, all the young people use Blender. It's free and almost as good. I predict in 10 years 3ds max will be obsolete and Blender will become the new standard.
This is the same time they added a dark pattern removing 3D support from Photoshop, which most of us had taken for granted for the last 10 years. Like we need to pay for a new subscription now and break our pipeline for fast painting models? They can fuck off.
Where's the data to back that up?
ADBE was $180 in 2018 and now $470 after maxing at below $700.
This is delusional. Creative Cloud is bigger than ever.
[1] https://krita-artists.org/t/krita-usage-statistics/29184
And you can, last I check, get it at a monthly rate or get licenses for smaller packages, so it makes doing intermittent professional or hobbyist work more accessible to a wider range of people.
Previously it was $1k+ software costs barrier to entry for almost any professional or semi-pro activity via most software publishers.
So I really appreciate Creative Cloud.
I don’t have any loyalty to Adobe and would jump ship if a professionally viable alternative came out that was less proprietary, let alone cheaper, but most of the alternatives just aren’t. I do think that’s changing, so we’ll see though.
I was in a position at my company to end our use of XD and immediately move to Figma. We've grown 3x since and Figma's been great. For personal work I prefer Sketch it looks and feels like a native app.
This makes me wonder. Who is actually using Photoshop today and why?
In the past, these were graphics designers and photographers. The latter already migrated to Lightroom, Capture One etc. Designers have so many tools to choose from, why would they use Photoshop? I understand for long-time users it's just inertia, but new users are spoiled for choice.
Games studios, VFX studios, and other companies doing that kind of artwork are going to be licensing Adobe products for decades to come.
Photoshop has unrivalled features - not just photo editing, but also digital painting, animation and even limited video editing. At one time, Adobe even added 3D features to Photoshop (which they later removed). Photoshop also supports a massive market of third-party add-ons like plugins, brushes, scripts, effects, LUTs etc.
In a different comment, I mentioned that no other software can rival Photoshop in learning resources. So yes, Photoshop is a monster in features, bloat, in clunky UI - and still dominant in design and photography fields.
I work in the manga/webtoon localization industry, and all files received from the original publishers that aren't TIFF are INDD or PSD. There is no choice but to use photoshop and indesign. Recently, I had to cough up money for the pricey indesign server in order to be able to ingest the .indd files en masse. There's no other choice. At first I thought I could do it with a mix of humans converting to .idml (the xml zip slightly less proprietary format) and my own python!... but you still need indesign for that first part, and after weeks of python, I gave up trying to parse that nasty mess that is idml. Now I run an ugly indesign js script that also talks to photoshop via bridge to create workabke files. It's disgusting and I pay the adobe tax, but it works. P.S. protip: never export images from indesign using any other option besides PDF, Indesign's built in image renders are awful for manga. Tune all the pdf settings so there is no quality loss, then "print" the pdf to image using ghostscript
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/
One-off purchase price, like Adobe apps used to be, and a very reasonable price at that.
Modern Photoshop feels extremely bloated. Slow to start, slow to paste images, cumbersome in other aspects. Since I'm using it much less frequently than I used to, I'm considering switching to an open source equivalent -- like I did with my 3D needs: I already switched from 3DS Max to Blender.
There’s no real standard alternative for advanced retouching afaik.
Aftereffects and I design are also the industry standard in their areas.
Too bad Adobe has grown so large that the technical people have lost all power. It happens to all companies: they build marketshare and reputation with technical excellence, but eventually reach some sort of singularity where every single reasonable dev departs.
The only thing left for a company at this point is maximizing revenue from enterprise/government contracts, and usually dwindling out after a private equity reverse takeover/merger with a company you've never heard of.
Management is in a tough spot, because changing their ways might decrease revenues, which would hasten their demise. Imagine the reaction from Adobe's shareholders if they announced they're cutting prices to a third and dropping all DRM..
I am not a UX professional so can't comment on feature parity with Figma etc.
It was however interesting to discover that the native cross platform app was powered by dotnet core & the open source Avalonia framework[2]. It looks quite polished and the framework seems to have come a long way since I tried a few years ago.
How do they fund development? Nagging about their icons8 subscription?
I think in future they also intend to charge for collaborative features or cloud storage.
I think the average consumer doesn't care about this and it makes sense from corporate strategy standpoint - this is your bread and butter. It generates enormous cashflows. But you're not going to get good reception on HN - we wan't none of these features. We want 2008 version of Adobe products. Install. Get the job done. Close it. We're happy to pay for that.
Also, let's cut to the chase, Adobe's advertisement platform is where its shareholders wants it to go: https://business.adobe.com/products/advertising/adobe-advert...
Preferably once, not monthly.
Paying a monthly fee to Adobe in particular strikes me as a horrible proposition: extortionate early termination fees, constant price increases, the inability to use the software whenever their servers or CC program throw a fit, finding that your programs were broken by an update you didn't ask for... And, of course, there's the fact that you're essentially locked out of your own files if you ever terminate your subscription, even if you were a paying customer for years.
I really miss the days where you could just pay for something and have it.
It is a manipulative trick to offer users a 7 day free trial, and then lock them onto an annual plan, with penalty for early termination.
An extra sentence saying something to the effect of '50% of any remaining annual plan will be charged on early termination, [see more details link]' could have been easily incorporated without disturbing the Zen of the page.
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FK0pes-WQAM8bkK?format=jpg&name=...
I recently had to use Adobe XD. The installation process - extremely bad UX and the Adobe cloud thing - bloatware. On top of that... trying to open the XD file a week later, it asks me to login first before I can use the app. And you can only export to PDF 3 times - otherwise you have to upgrade.
In my view Adobe is user hostile.
Not sure how you can turn around that ship - Adobe has a shareholder value uber alles mentality.
But thanks for trying.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/adobe-pulls-all-user-access-in-ve...
I'm not that long in the tech industry.
Yeah, this pretty much sums up the disappointment for anyone who's still paying for Adobe these days.
Everything they have feels like legacy software. There's no one at the helm. They are hanging on and their stock price is still going up, purely because of inertia and the effect of their monopoly on photoshop. [edit, I just checked and it's finally going down. Hooray.]
Adobe is no longer in a position to compete with anything new that comes along. They're going to ride their current software and locked-in users to the grave. They're currently at what, almost $500 a share? There has never been a company more over-extended and overpriced. They're fucking doomed, and the sooner they go down the better for everyone in the creative industry.
I hate CreativeCloud. It eats resources and I found gigabytes of random trash logs it writes.
I wish I could download and use Photoshop on its own.
When I get a new laptop, I won’t install CreativeCloud.
Has anyone got recommendations for photoshop alternatives? For graphic/web design only stuff, editing, cropping, adjusting pixels and stuff like that.
(No, definitely not Resolve.)
I think Resolve is fine if you don't know other tools or your needs are small. I've used it in a pinch before when I didn't have any other options, it's totally usable. And there are some tools (grading, obviously) which are absolutely top notch, and if you are in an all-Blackmagic recording stack I can definitely see some benefits to ease-of-use when, say, pulling video recorded from an ATEM Mini and some Blackmagic cameras. But it's a limited editor with limited compatibility with everything else in my workflow and those of the folks I know.
Photoshop’s workflows are etched into my muscle memory, so while I like Affinity Photo, it’s just different enough to be frustrating.
Pixelmator Pro on the other hand works exactly how I expect. It’s quick, fully featured and just plain pleasant to use. Thoroughly recommended.
Whereas I often find myself having to search through help pages and forums when using Affinity Photo.
For many years I didn’t consider a computer a computer until it had Photoshop on it, but since moving to Pixelmator, Affinity and Figma I’ve been able to ditch Adobe completely.
Its dependency on that malware AdobeCloud didn’t help either. You can’t delete it, you can’t turn it off, and it randomly maxed out the CPU.
Adobe has good products but their business practices disgust me and they need a kicking.
One of the Cs in CC must stand for the clap.
As if "Figma balls" were any better…
Creative Cloud is the worst piece of software ever conceived. And why do I have to update the updater to then update creative cloud before I can update an app that refuses to open otherwise? It’s just pure madness and I really wish the market would finally put an end to this and just refuse to engage with Adobe’s malicious pricing and subscription policies.
Figma on the other end, feels like a good friend that has my best interests in mind. Hope it’s going to stay like this for a while.
That said it's incredible to me how many huge organisations have ticket systems with age old and easy-to-fix backlogs with issues that just doesn't get fixed - like the team has completely left the building. I'm thinking Google and Apple here in particular. After doing full stack agile development i know it can be difficult and complex - but not that difficult to check forums and fix various issues each month.
If such a tool already exists please let me know! I love being able to edit photos on my iPad or Mac without having to worry about manually syncing anything, and Apple Photos is a bit too basic.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/darkroom-photo-video-editor/id...
https://apps.apple.com/app/pixelmator/id1444636541
Of course both don't have every Lightroom feature, but that might be a boon to many like me.
For syncing you can use your favourite cloud storage.
Edit: Of course, it's not available for iOS...
I've tried several times to find that link again, but always failed. Does this ring a bell with somebody?
However, reading it now I'm not entirely sure if it's still possible to install this...
The other teams go from a very rough sketch (often in Excalidraw) to a HTML prototype. Everything about this approach is better. Being able to put the prototypes in front of users for research is worth its weight in gold.
I still wish Adobe hadn’t killed Fireworks when they purchased Macromedia. It was such a brilliant package, by far the best ui design tool at the time.
Despite its little quirks, I believe Figma has the best dynamic of this space. I also can't be happier to ditch an Adobe product for a valid alternative.
For some reason, Figma has just never felt right to me.
This is my impression too. Adobe XD has always been in 'catch-up' mode to rivals Sketch and Figma.
I was sceptical a complex, feature-rich design tool could be possible in the browser, but Figma proved me wrong. Not only that, Figma has proved to be serious competition to rival Sketch which is a native desktop Mac-only app (with all the speed and functionality advantage of a native app.)
Both Sketch and Adobe XD are also hampered by the fact that sharing designs or collaborating with others is harder compared to Figma. Sketch and Adobe XD were designed with the focus on single-user desktop app use, not the multi-user (cross-platform) collaboration scenario common today.
Both Sketch and XD allow you to share designs by uploading screenshots or files to their 'cloud' or hosting services. But editing is still required in the desktop app - unlike Figma where the browser is the app (although there are Figma Electron desktop apps for offline use).
Adobe XD has a feature called 'co-editing' where multiple users can edit a file at the same time - but each user must have the XD app installed.
Figma is even encroaching on the territory of other online tools like Miro. For example, Figma can be used as a digital whiteboard - ideal for a mixed team of developers, managers, designers and any other stakeholders. This is simply not possible in Sketch or Adobe XD.
Hats off to the Figma dev team because it actually blows Sketch out of the water in performance, smoothness and stability. Really makes you question the supposed native app advantage when you have such a highly capable team.
I was just thinking, as a part of the compensation issues of PMs (release feature, get promoted), are we killing the 'back end' teams in favour of 'front end' teams, because they are more visible?
It seems like requests on core and productivity improvement/power user features are always just forgotten about. Not because they're 'harder to implement' or whatever, but because back end doesn't get the resource and manpower they need?
It really seems like they lost the few key people that were holding the whole thing together, either to another company or just to the void due to bad management.
I would love to understand more about this change.
The more I mature as an engineer, the more I see the value of few engaged Individual Contributors that behind the scenes are driving the product and steering management decisions.
It is often under-appreciated how much an active corporate engagement model is due to 1 or 2 highly motivated employees. Once they leave, engagement drops because it wasn't something being driven from management or PMs.
And with as much bullshit as Adobe throws at you with creative cloud, at least you can export .xd files.
Also a dev and I also found Figma to be kind of clunky at first compared to other options. It has gotten much better though, they will never be on the level of Sketch but at the same time the biggest obstacle that Sketch has is that it's a Mac only desktop app.
Figma might be clunky, but I found it's flexibility to be a massive benefit over other tools.
I could argue XD has it's place in enterprise environments where it's more painful to purchase outside of Adobe and it's good enough to do basic UX visioning/mockup.
There should be almost always a ui/ux designer, but it's basically at the bottom of the list..
Hence, not much money to be made.
Given this, it might be difficult to justify a proper budget to compete with the market leaders
Why do people feel the need to make websites barely readable by going for low contrast?
only Their thing or no thing.
This is just sad..