Adobe Account Expiration
mjtsai.com
mjtsai.com
It more that suits my needs, but it has a clear ceiling. This is a prosumer app, and works fine for those needs. If your workflow requires Adobe-only features, then obviously it won't be the right fit.
It definitely doesn't make sense to expire accounts in use by desktop software where the user doesn't login to the website.
When I've seen companies do sloppy stuff like this in the past it's because some employee manually queried for accounts but their SQL query was missing a bunch of cases.
It's also a lot nicer to use in many ways. For example, using Export Persona in Designer is soo much better than Adobe, I'd regret moving back.
Best part is that for less than the cost of two months renting Adobe, you own the entire suite.
Not affiliated whatsoever; I just despise Adobe's business practices.
This week I tried to make a go of switching from Premiere to Resolve for real(tm), and I lasted like...two hours. Finding myself saying "but where are the buttons?" was maybe the first time I have felt truly old trying to use a computer. Adobe can have my $30/mo forever, I guess.
Affinity mentions it takes $500k to develop a Linux version and their market research says they will never recoup that.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
For version 2 of Affinity Photo:
> It looks like someone got the program working. Unfortunately, it requires some work.
Last I checked, Affinity didn't support Photoshop's XMP sidecar files because {excuses}. That's a deal-breaker for lots of RAW photographers with existing files they care about.
Yes, I know we had little choice back then. But we are in a better position now.
The risk detailed in the link you posted is regarding online storage. Notice it's talking about downloading files stored with Adobe. That's a very real risk, and I never advocated storing stuff online.
However, if Adobe really canceled everyone's subscriptions tomorrow, people would immediately mess with Photoshop enough to at least export their files to some other formats, if not outright keep using it. There isn't a genuine risk of "can lose access to at any moment" here.
However, I'll also note that the risk profiles are obviously different for different situations. An individual photographer that takes pictures of their family or nature is not going to be in the same boat as the employees of some company. Heck, if I was working for some big corporation that dealt with RAW files, I would probably immediately migrate to an open format for files moving forward. That doesn't imply the same thing makes sense for every individual. Same goes for corporate vs. individual backup schemes/security defenses/etc.
The same pros didn't have a choice between Mac OS and Windows NT. The lack of accurate color calibration kept them on Mac OS, even with it's significantly inferior kernel process, and memory management.
First, "realistically it's not possible" isn't obviously true on its face. People have accomplished incredible feats of reverse engineering (arguably much harder ones) even in the open-source world - with hardly any compensation. It takes a ton of talent, investment, and dedication, sure. It's hard. But it's not like this is out of humanity's reach or something.
Second, "realistically it's not possible" applies just as well for the flip side. Expecting customers to ignore their very real and actual problems and pay for a non-solution just because HNers prefer them to (calling them "sunk costs" or whatever, as you can see in sibling threads), is realistically not possible either. It's just ignoring reality.
Finally, customers (at least retail ones) aren't investors or policymakers - they're just customers. You can't burden them with problems in the hope of guilt-tripping them into "but society would be so much better in the coming decades if you ignored your problems". That hasn't even worked for something with consequences as severe as climate change, let alone Adobe's vendor lock-in on Photoshop.
As I said, you're not wrong - you'll just get stuck with exploitation by Adobe as a result, and the reason is not laziness or excuses by the developers of other software. RAW edits in the sidecars in particular simply can't be made compatible between different software, because everybody has their own magic and these files only keep the configuration data for it. The best you can count on is compatibility between the different versions of the same software, if the vendor provides it, and you will lose your edits when Adobe goes out of business or decides to cut some backward compatibility.
Nothing ever is. But it doesn't need to be.
> The problem with reverse engineering is that it's a minefield for the business entity, from all viewpoints
I don't buy this; RE is a gross exaggeration of what's actually going on. They don't even need to go through the trouble of reverse-engineering for the most common XMP file functionalities people actually want. The XMP file is just a list of operations. It's right there in XML, already human-readable in English. The cases most people care about are astonishingly simple. Like "+25 contrast", "+2 exposure", "-50 highlights". Surely the app can at least alter brightness and contrast... just read the darn file and apply the straightforward stuff as if the user applied them manually! And if users re-adjust the settings, just update these back in the file like Photoshop would. If they see a random transformation they can't replicate adequately, they can just warn the user. It's not even hard to handle the easy pieces, let alone requiring reverse engineering! You won't get a bit-for-bit pixel-perfect repro, but who cares? It's not like they have to change the heart of that one random user who used XMP files to transform their penguin into a gorilla that they hashed on the blockchain to get the 90%+ of the other holdouts to jump ship!
>The cases most people care about are astonishingly simple. Like "+25 contrast", "+2 exposure", "-50 highlights".
There's an entire iceberg under these words alone. What definition of exposure are they using? Which kind of math and curves to separate the highlights from other tonal zones? What's the color science behind their stuff? How do they approach things like perceptual uniformity? (ACR's colorspace axis are notoriously different from their typical definitions in color science). I'm not even starting on things that are always applied without you noticing, like the input curve or highlight recovery (which is surprisingly complex). It's also the thought process that needs to be reverse engineered, not the code itself. Without all that, you won't get nearly the same look, let alone identical.
Try diving into the source code of something like RawTherapee or darktable (coincidentally, the thought process behind the latter is thoroughly documented) to understand how complex this magic actually is. And then there's the question of patents, competition (you are always behind), and adversarial actions by Adobe. It's simply a non-starter for a business.
I also preserve the RAW and XMP files in case I'd like to reedit something (although in practice I never do that). But I don't put my trust in those in the long term as much as in the TIFFs.
Get in touch with Adobe support to file a bug or something? I get mistaken e-mails from companies all the time, but not one of them is HN-worthy.
This certainly falls under first world problems. A small annoyance, like spilling coffee in the morning. And the author spilling coffee on himself is just something I can't get outraged behind.
Dropbox has been in the news here several times over the past year for account inactivation, but that's hardly new.
I guess what I'm trying to convey is I highly doubt Adobe will pioneer anything - good or bad.