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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used any Adobe products since they started doing the subscription-only model. I want to use it, they typically make good enough software, but I have a line in the sand that I will not pay for a subscription. I want to buy my software and own it and use it for as long as I want.

Basically my options if I don't want top pay a license fee for forever is to find alternatives, or pirate the software. I've opted for the former, but either leads to Adobe getting $0 from me, where they could have gotten >$0 if they had had a "pay outright" program.

I have generally found good enough alternatives with their competitors (Toonboom is generally good enough for basic animation, Krita is good enough for artsy stuff, Final Cut Pro is good enough for video editing).

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Adobe software isn't quite "good" in my experience. The company is an Oracle: all-in on giving the right bullet points to pointy-haired managers but with a palpable paucity of technical merit.

I have to work with Adobe Experience Manager and it's a weird, painful, slow/inefficient kludge, not to even get into the licensing terms and what devs are "allowed" to do on their own servers.

Acrobat Reader stands out in my memory only as that extremely slow, bloated thing you launched by accident, then closed 5 minutes later once it loaded to use Sumatara instead.

They killed Flash by neglect after buying it from Macromedia - we might still have it around if they invested in it properly and made it up to par for the iPod. Thankfully we finally have good emulators that work in the browser to see the vast amount of old Flash content.

Creative Suite is fine and mostly functional from what I hear, but they didn't make that codebase either, and I've never felt limited by free or cheaper alternatives like GIMP or Sony Vegas. (I find it baffling how people rag on GIMP - I use it in a professional and personal capacity and I love it, and I'm familiar enough with Photoshop to compare it.)

Adobe has let pretty much all of the Macromedia stuff fade out

Sure Apple is to blame partially for Flash, but even now they rarely add new features to "Animate". There are other applications out there that are doing more interesting things.

Dreamweaver has been outdone by visual studio code and sublimetext, granted it was really only good for ColdFusion.

Fireworks was left to die, oddly enough it could of been the next Sketch, although Figma probably would of beaten it eventually anyway

Freehand was killed to let Illustrator be dominant

The truth is that Adobe said they could get Flash running on the first gen iPhone with 128MB of RAM and a 400Mhz processor.

Safari barely ran on the first gen iPhone. If you scrolled too fast, it would display a checkerbox while the rendering caught up. It didn’t even have enough memory to have a background image on your Home Screen.

When Flash finally came to mobile in 2010 on Android, it required 1Gb RAM and 1Ghz processor and it barely ran. I had an HTC that met those specs. The first iPhone that met those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

Adobe was always over promising and under delivering on Flash for mobile to the point where the Motorola tablet that advertised flash support didn’t ship with it and embarrassingly enough, you couldn’t even view the Xoom’s home page on the web with the tablet because it required Flash.

Blame for Flash? Or celebrated for killing Flash?

Flash was a security nightmare

Surely Apple bears a ton of responsibility for killing Flash. That was the beginning of their mobile walled garden.

I know that there were almost certainly patent issues and the like that made this difficult, but I firmly believe that if Adobe had open-sourced the Flash player, then Flash would still be as big or bigger today.

If it were opened up, it could have been integrated directly into browsers and maybe even the web standards. The Flash desktop program would still probably be the de facto means of creating Flash content but at that point it could have conceivably still been on iPhone, at least eventually.

It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.

The death of Flash kind of makes me sad. A lot of HTML5 stuff feels like it's playing this huge game of catchup from what we had in Flash in 2004, and I still think that Flash was one of the most fun development platforms ever; the ease of quickly going from "drawing" to "animation" to "code" was so streamlined and as a teenager I had a lot of fun with it, and I haven't found a tool since then that I've had as much fun playing with.

  It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.

I just do not believe it. It was the best available rich presentation/interaction game in town. Trivial to get started and no need for a platform to sign off on your work.

No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.

There were performance issues too, and it was pretty bad on Android phones, at least when I used it in 2012.

I think it might have been able to live on in the form of Adobe AIR if Adobe hadn't given up on it. I think AIR could have occupied the space that Electron does now.

Totally. I still think that more development can cover a lot of sins. Look at JavaScript. It started for changing text colors or something. Now it is one of the fastest interpreted runtimes.

Years of incremental improvements on this bustling platform could have made Flash into a performant beast.

Anyway, we will never know what could have been if Flash had been a mobile option on day one.

The ruffle.rs project has most of newgrounds back up running flash inside a wasm runtime. Is there any reason we can't all use the same old development tools in a vm to create more new flash content?

I don't see why you couldn't, other than getting hands on legitimate versions of Flash that still have ActionScript support.

Kindof, but there was a ton of work done on ActionScript 3 making it all ECMA (?) compliant and there was a heck of a lot of road left on that. It was TypeScript before there was modern Javascript. And that could have been parlayed into a different runtime, like Haxe did. Flash the runtime had many problems, but the IDE and tools behind them were mature and well-understood.

AS3 is a pretty underrated language. It was ridiculously fun to make stuff with it, and if you bought the official Flash Builder IDE (which was Eclipse based), you had decent autocomplete and everything.

The runtime definitely needed to be improved, but I feel Flash gets a bit more hate than it deserves. By the tail end, there was even decent 3D graphics support, and CrossBridge was a pretty cool predecessor to Emscripten that allowed you to convert C++ programs into SWF stuff (IIRC an early version had the Doom engine ported over).

I couldn't agree more. AS3 was my gateway drug into static typing, IDEs, all manner of things. I did have Flex/FDT at one client, but after that I ended up using Flash Develop because it was so good, even if it was Windows.

Having first MTASC and then the as3 compiler on the command line was another route into modern-day build pipelines. The 3D engines were great, Box2D port was great, and looking at it all now in 2024, the APIs still hold up and Adobe could restart an entire multimedia division with it.

> Apple bears a ton of responsibility for killing Flash.

Correct, and that might have been the single greatest gift Apple has bestowed upon the open Internet. Flash was the walled garden of the web — closed source, proprietary and a perennial security nightmare — and the community owes Apple a huge debt for gratitude for hastening its demise.

I know some people have fond memories of flash games, flash art and, in some instances, Flash websites. I do appreciate that it was a cultural moment. I do appreciate that it was accessible to novices and artists in a way that HTML5 is not. But the web is not, and should never have been, reliant on a closed source proprietary platform.

This is what actually happened

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713706

I don't think Vegas has been Sony for quite awhile has it?

Vegas is great, but as far as I'm aware there's not really a way to get it running on Mac, and I don't own a Windows computer anymore (I still will VM it if I really need it). For my video stuff I've been using Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion for the last couple years since it's a one-time purchase and I think pretty good. I'd like to use Premiere and After Effects but, as stated, I don't want to pay for subscriptions.

I don't know enough about photo editing to say if GIMP sucks, I've used it before and it seems fine.

It's Vegas Creative (MAGIX), now... https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/us/vegas-pro/

Yeah I looked it up shortly after posting that comment.

I wish they'd release a Mac version, because that was actually my favorite video editor on Windows. It would be really great if they made a Linux version but I'm not holding my breath for that.

There is also the affinity suite where you can get the whole suite for less than the annual cost of photoshop alone.

Affinity software is exceptionally good. 50% off right now, btw... https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

DaVinci! https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

I so wish they were a viable option to replace Illustrator for certain printing things. But they just have this slightly different output that the printing house I'm trying to use (Tayda) doesn't jive with.

Realistically, you can’t use the software forever anyway unless you’re planning on never upgrading your computer.

"ToonBoom, is generally good enough for basic animation".

What? This is the premier 2D animation package used by most of the top studios.

Oh no question, bad phrasing on my end, I sort of meant it inverted.

Toonboom is excellent if you're a professional. I'm very much not a professional, I barely know what I'm doing. I think Flash/Animate appealed to someone like me, because I found it easier to draw some goofy thing really quick and animate it.

I feel Toonboom has a much higher learning curve and isn't really for people like me. It's not insurmountably difficult or anything, just that I'm not really the target audience and as such I don't know that it's a good fit for "basic" stuff, if that makes any sense.

> subscription-only model

When did they do that? I guess I only really use Lightroom; but you've been able to buy each major release outright for ~1.5years of subscription (last I worked it out)

I believe CS6 was the last version of Adobe Animate you could purchase outright. I don't know about their other products as much.

I even emailed Adobe sales representatives two years ago to see if I was missing something, and maybe there was a way to buy it that I wasn't seeing. They made it very clear that subscriptions are the only way now.

CS6 was followed by Creative Cloud for all their products.

> Adobe getting $0 from me

Yeah but they’re getting all the money from everyone else.

Adobe are not idiots, they ran the numbers and figured that subscriptions bring in more money. If that means tombert won’t give them money, good riddance.

You'd pay $1500 or whatever for a perpetual Photoshop license? I wouldn't

That's dirt cheap for a software you can make a living off. For FEA or CFD one would need to shell off in the order of 50-100k plus 20k per year. 1500? I would.

But not all of us make a living off of Photoshop.

I'm a programmer. I periodically need to make a tiny tweak in a file that's been created by a real artist, or I want to edit a photo I took, or whatever.

It's insane to spend $1500, or even $500 (the CorelDraw buy-it-outright price) for hobby and occasional-use software like that.

And yeah, I use other things like Affinity Photo, which is Good Enough for many of my purposes, but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists--unless they flatten the image before giving it to me, it's a crap-shoot whether I can import it in anything but the exact version of PhotoShop they were using.

It feels like extortion: I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file, or I have to pay Adobe an outrageous sum to do it myself. Lose-lose.

Fully understood, this carefully engineered vendor lock-in is the cherry on the cake. It's in all CAD software for no reason and forces you to follow the herd. Open standards should be imposed by state actors...

If you're paying artists to make art in PS, are you not doing it for something you make money off of? Or are you just really deep in the hobby that you're nearing professional level?

Photoshop was never $1500 either. CS6 was $700. The design standard CS6 suite was $1300.

Maybe hunt for artists that use the reasonably priced Clip Studio Paint instead? It's pretty popular among manga and the like artists anyways.

Realistically, I'm looking for artists that are good first. And 98% of them use Photoshop. Not going to restrict myself to non-Photoshop artists.

> I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file

Hire the artist and ask them for the files exported into a format you can open. If they refuse, hire somebody else.

I do agree with the sibling that open standards should be set by state actors. But they should only make them available, not mandate them into private actors.

> ask them for the files exported into a format you can open

They already do that. That's not the problem.

If the original Photoshop file has 200 layers, and 60 of those layers have effects that use advanced Photoshop-only features, then no other art program can open the source material. Period.

At best you can get approximations of the original Photoshop render if you open the image in another program. But generally what you get is garbage if it's not a recent version of Photoshop.

The point of getting the Photoshop original with the layers is that I might be able to make a tweak to one of the layers and have it re-render a result that is better for what I need. Something that is difficult or impossible if I just have a JPEG.

And asking the artist to do the work in a program that doesn't have all of those features is roughly equivalent to asking a software engineer to use Mac/Windows/Linux (pick one they don't know) and to write all of the code in Visual Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one they don't know). Yes, technically anything is possible in any environment, but it might take 10x as long and be 100x as painful--with a result that may not be as good due to the tools not being as good.

Artists are professionals with an acquired skill set. You can't ask them to work using unfamiliar tools and expect them to be happy or productive.

> And asking the artist to do the work in a program that doesn't have all of those features is roughly equivalent to asking a software engineer to use Mac/Windows/Linux (pick one they don't know) and to write all of the code in Visual Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one they don't know).

You mean the thing that every single company does for their work for hire?

When a developer doesn't know, they go after another developer. (And they should restrict the number of constraints to what is really important, but almost no company does that.)

No company I've worked for in the past decade has told me what kind of computer I should work on. Even the W2 gigs have allowed me my choice of Mac/Linux/Windows. I work for tech-savvy companies, though. I'm sure there are tech-naive companies that force everyone to work on Mac or whatever.

And companies that want programmers who write, say, Delphi or Visual Basic, are going to be getting crap developers, and would be better off porting their software to something more modern. I did some work on a Delphi project to help out a friend, and no, I wouldn't go to work for a company to work on Delphi full-time. They couldn't possibly pay me enough.

But that's my point: Just like they would get crap developers, I would get crap artists. Or extremely expensive artists. Not interested. It would literally be cheaper to pay Adobe the extortion they ask than to try to work with non-Adobe artists.

I mean, sure. But on the other hand:

- Paint is not only free but built-in

- Paint.net is free and covers most of what I'd need to do

- GIMP is free. Cumbersome, but if I need to do any batch operations that's when I bring out a full suite.

If I only need to do a quick edit for some hobby thing, I'm not frought for options.

>but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists

So you are a professional? If you have artists at your beck and call and it's not a forboding deadline, I don't know why you wouldn't ask the artist to make the edit.

There's definitely a debate to be had about proprietary file formats (I work in games, so I completely understand that with its 3d equivalent that is the FBX format... thankfully there are very slow moves to cast that away), but I'm not sure I have a good solution. I don't necessarily think a company should be forced to open source/spec its own tooling.

> I don't know why you wouldn't ask the artist to make the edit.

Have you ... worked with artists? To get them to produce technically precise artwork?

The point would be that sometimes it takes 4-5 turnarounds with an artist to get something exactly right. Something that I, as a non-artist but skilled app user, can do in less time it takes to explain what I need to the artist a single time. So it's about saving my time and not having to pay for hours of artist time for something I can do in 10 minutes.

What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being greedy and I refuse to patronize them. That's what it comes down to. I'm not saying they should be forced to do anything. Just that I don't like what they're doing, and therefore end up having to work around their software rather than using it.

I have a license for the last one they offered for a fixed cost; bought it for a steep discount when the new licenses were the Next Big Thing. But they won't get any more of my money until they offer the software at a reasonable price tier.

>Have you ... worked with artists? To get them to produce technically precise artwork?

Yes. But I work in games, so maybe I was expecting professional artists working on complex assets and not a grab bag from fiverr for some UI art. Anything "simple" probably takes them 2-5 minutes and maybe a few turnarouns while I could maybe take an hour of edits for much worse quality.

>What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being greedy and I refuse to patronize them.

I agree completely. But I know there's no such thing as a smooth migration, especially when working as a team.

It's sad, but they have a lock on the market for a reason and that moral stance won't be without some growing pains or compromises. I'm sure we both know trying to get an artist to migrate tools is much harder than a programmer.

Well, I think you could say I've worked in games too. [1]

In fact, it's in games that the artists, especially when working with 3d, had the hardest time getting the precise kinds of changes that I would need.

But even in 2d, if they, say, created a sprite, but then left a few pixels non-100%-transparent in the corners of the image, I could ask them to go find those pixels and erase them...or I could do it myself.

And if they don't get them completely erased, then there will still be artifacts on the screen and the texture atlas packing will be screwed up.

Yeah. I've been doing this for a long time.

And no, I don't have much hope of getting artists to migrate. I'm just tilting at windmills.

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/person/13230/tim-mensch/

I mean, sure, there's probably an upper bound of a number I'd pay, and I don't do enough photo editing to justify paying really any amount of money for Photoshop.

For software I'd actually use though? Upper bound is probably $600 judging by what I paid for Toonboom Harmony. Honestly if I had known about Moho at the time I probably would have gotten that since it's considerably cheaper and on Humble Bundle fairly often.

I'm not in a creative industry so it's tough for me to know "fair" numbers, just "what can I justify as a toy" numbers. I like to occasionally whip out an animation tool and draw stuff with stick figures, and I like having that readily available, and I don't want my tool to change from under me so I don't want transparent updates. I just want to buy my software once.

I wouldn't pay $1 for Photoshop when GIMP is free and open source. It's been my daily driver in a personal and professional capacity for ages, and Photoshop offers nothing special for me.

If GIMP is a replacement for you, you're not Adobe's target customer.

I'd be interested to know exactly what task Photoshop is capable of that GIMP isn't.

AI features. Content aware fill. Better masking / feathering tools. Layer effects and composition. Text handling by far. Vector layers. Smart objects. Dynamic link to other creative applications. Brushes x1000. Pen input. Smart selections.

DiffusionBee on Mac has AI infill on images, and the models run locally and it’s free and open source. I have to think that someone is looking at implementing that in GIMP, at least as a plugin.

I've been using a content aware fill extension in GIMP that works nicely

I agree with you in principle, but there is one big task where Gimp can't compete: importing PSD files. Kudos to Gimp developers for the level of psd support it has, but it's not perfect (naturally).

Genuinely don’t know: can you do scripting/batch processing with GIMP? I have set up some complex workflows in photoshop using JS to manage the batch sequencing IIRC, though it was quite a while ago.

Another one I don’t know: can you embed a gimp file into a layout editor? A common workflow is to embed a photoshop file into an indesign file; you can then edit your photoshop file and have your indesign file updating automatically. This is a common workflow in several adobe products, eg I believe after effects sequence embedded into a Premiere timeline is possible/common.

>can you do scripting/batch processing with GIMP

You sure can. I'm not even an artist and that's the one part of GIMP I can speak for. It has its own Python library, so almost anything you can do in editor you can do programmatically, but I made a few scripts for batch processing an entire album of images.

(documentation is about as awkard as the GUI, though. You will eventually find what you need after putting in 3-5x more effort than what should have been necessary, but it's somewhere in the docs)

To be fair, singular or very small businesses in general aren't the target consumer for companies that switch to these subscription models. They are penny slots while Adobe is discussion contracts with larger studios.

But you are their average customer

I'm glad there are people willing to pay for the development of software so I'm not stuck using GIMP. It's actually a good thing when people get paid for their work, the issue here is that adobe's predatory pricing models and making it difficult to cancel.

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