Btw, I've been a happy Affinity [Designer, Photo, Publisher] user for many years now. Can't even believe I'm still getting updates with my years old licences. +1
So yeah it's sort of like climate change. Probably ok for now, but you should definitely start making moves to live somewhere else in the next few years.
Figma threw every single artist and designer in the world that does 2D work under the bus when they could have saved us all and built better tools.
Actually I'd go beyond saying it's the principle, actually now it's personal all the money I spent on Figma, all the hours I spent pushing Figma in organizations and building our workflows around it has just gone to strengthen Adobe's grip on my livelihood.
This might sound dramatic but imagine for a moment how you'd feel if you could only work within your industry if you used VSCode, it was closed source and it cost $60 a month and the only chance of fighting against that had sided with the enemy.
Your analogy once was true with Microsoft and Visual Studio in the 90s. It was the main IDE for Windows development (there was no Linux, not really). And it was expensive. There wasn’t much competition until Java took off.
These days Microsoft isn’t seen as the enemy as often. Github is doing fine for example. Companies can change.
- I used Fireworks every day in my job, they killed it.
- After Effects was a top 3 digital creative tool ever made, they let it rot till it's a janky shadow of its former self, it can't even the timeline without audio glitches making ANY audio work to animation impossible, same can be said for Photoshop, can't even save an image without it trying to force you onto their dropbox competitor.
- They had the perfect entry point tool for multimedia creation with Flash that a whole generation of teens learnt how to express themselves online with and they let parts of it rot because they saw it as nothing more than a videoplayer and enterprise app Java competitor.
How are they not my enemy, we're talking decades of attacks on my workflow at this point.
Apple tried very hard to support Flash on the iPhone. Apple flew out Adobe engineers to help them get it work on mobile. It was a tire fire and that's why Apple killed it. The dysfunction with Flash started before the iPhone, and arguably started with the acquisition of Macromedia.
The irony is that Microsoft gave us freedom, Apple gave us lockdowns.
It's quite annoying paying good money for old rope for years and years on end.
I'd not be so bold, personally.
- ed: I wondered perhaps if Smart Guides were newer than I remembered, but nup, having checked - they were there in CS2.
$85 / (30 * 24 = 720) hours. Wow so cheap! Now we have some sense of how business is working.