Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/18/u-s-sues-adobe-over-shady-subscription-plans-and-hidden-fees.html
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I remember when Adobe knocked Quark off its pedestal. Well deserved at the time. Now it’s time someone did the same to Adobe.
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They’ve been nickel-and-diming customers for so long now that any brand goodwill was exhausted years ago. There are so many open-source and free alternatives to their core products that most people outside corporate America will feel no need to feed them anymore.
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Look for the Adobe & HP merger announcement any day now.
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If only one of the competitors would add CMYK support.
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I remember talking to a Quark dev at some graphics convention - asking why they didn’t fix the glaring UI issues. His answer - “people love the ‘quirks’ in our program; if we try and fix anything, they complain.” You might not remember, but Quark was actually better than InDesign - more precise control, faster previews. Only, you had to know all the stupid tricks and workarounds to use it properly. Adobe had issues, but it worked as expected, making it much easier to use without years of experience.
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Yes and no. If you only want like “most” of what PhotoShop does you can get that for like $30 or $40, or if GIMP’s UI works well enough for free.
There are a bunch of things PhotoShop does that the competitors don’t that a lot of professionals are still better off paying 200x that cost per year and actually producing movie posters with the right colors for any given printing process.
Depart from PhotoShop and the competitors are less common and cover a smaller percentage of the features.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an Adobe fan, and my needs in PhotoShop far far short of where the competitors currently are (although PS has a much better algorithmic fill, other then that one thing Pixelmator does everything I would use in PhotoShop). I also rarely turn anything I make in PixelMator into anything printed (sometimes playing cards).
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A few years ago I tried using Adobe Photoshop at work and it had changed dramatically in the many years since I’d used it. It was impossible for me to figure it out in the short time I had, so I ended up taking the image home and making the changes I wanted in The GNU Image Manipulation Program. Granted, that program only seems understandable to me because I’ve used it for years, but damn, Photoshop is complicated. And screw Adobe for locking in and squeezing customers so hard. Can we get rid of the PDF, too?
Google had a photo organizer called Picasa. It had a few basic editing tools (e.g. red-eye removal, white balance adjustment) that would probably make an expert Photoshopper cringe at the shortcuts taken, but it met my needs well enough for 90% of the adjustments I’d make, and for anything more complicated, there was The GIMP. Of course, Google killed Picasa years ago. It’s a shame, because it ran on Windows and Linux and I had a whole photo collection organized around it.
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Quark seemed to actively hate their customer base, and at the time, I switched to Indesign even though it wasn’t as good in capabilities.
Since then, Adobe has gotten too big for it’s britches. I am glad I have access at work and barrow it for my personal comp - but it is frustrating how over the barrel we are with them. Our proprietary software all integrates with Indesign.
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I ditched Acrobat and Reader years ago for more basic options that don’t have a scripting engine built into it (on top of PostScript being a programming language, mind you) which are free. And since most office type applications have a ‘save as PDF’ option now, I rarely need a PDF editor now.
For a while, I used good ol’ JASC Paint Shop Pro, which was good enough for me and my wacom tablet. However, as of late, I’ve been using Procreate on my iPad for drawing, which has worked out well enough, although I miss the ability to tweak each pixel individually if desired…
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I hate Adobe with a passion. I bought an upgrade to a relative’s non-subscription Lightroom photo processing software as a birthday present and it took him and me days to get everything sorted out with Adobe.
When I had to buy a new full featured PDF editor I bought Kofax Power PDF. One-time fee and I own it forever. Even the free Adobe PDF reader loads tons of crapware on your machine. No thanks.
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For a free, basic reader, I’ve been using SumatraPDF for years; it’s very lightweight, and does just fine as a viewer. However, it does not support forms or scripts built into the pdf files, so be forewarned there. If the PDF has a script that affects how the document is rendered, it won’t render properly in that application. (in which case, your local browser probably has a viewer which will do the job just fine as well…)
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Almost true! Adobe is unavoidable if you have much need to integrate with client workflows beyond turning in finished work, and even then if anything is going to end up printed. When I get “Well I have Affinity” from a freelancer I hear “I’m going to send you CMYK files where the K is in every channel and it turns out I don’t know what K is or indeed a channel”
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I feel your pain. But I suspect that is exactly WHY they ditched it. It ran on the OS, locally. The ‘do no evil’ overlords want you chained to their servers and services.
I just opened Picasa and it told me it was not optimised for this Mac (a 2012 one running High Sierra - which tells you something about how long ago Picasa was allowed to die) and the developer needed to update it.
But warning messages aside, it seems to still actually work!
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PDF is a subset of PostScript with (a lot of) the programming language features removed, keeping just the graphics rendering primitives. That’s presumably why someone thought they needed to add JavaScript to it since it actually does lack the scripting features of PostScript.
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And that’s why I avoid using any of Google’s software. You just get accustomed to using it, and learn all of it’s quirks, and they kill support for it (usually because it works too well and they haven;t worked out how to monetise it). Has happened far too many times for me to give them a pass.
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When Adobe was run by engineers, you just had to ask yourself “what would make sense to do in this case?” and you’d be right because they thought of every reasonable idea and baked them all in. There were multiple ways to do just about everything.
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God I hate adobe, We use it at work which is a school and even with AD sync if the kids dont put their passwords in correct 1st time it simply does not work, our old adobe worked fine, it was all machine licences and then because of the pandemic we did not use it for 6 months and so we could no longer use machine licences and had to switch to each user signing in, adobe is shooting them self in the foot as all our kids’s 1st experience of their product is now how bad it is and its awfully to use, there is no reason for the kids to have to sing in just bring back machine licences already!
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this shit started way back with CS2; trying to uninstall the suite cleanly to install it again from scratch was nearly impossible. to do that, you needed a tool from adobe which was also nearly impossible to find on their website, unless you had the direct link from someone on some forum. I knew people who had to just completly install a fresh OS to get rid of CS2 on their system.
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I owned a full version of Creative Suite. Paid a decent amount as an upgrade from the previous full version of Photoshop I also owned and upgraded since the beginning of time.
Bought a new computer. Needed to transfer the license. They would not activate and let me us what I “owned”. I didn’t own anything. They switched to their subscription model, and that was it. The rep I talked to seemed incredulous that I could just walk away, knowing the investment I had with Adobe.
Never looked back. Alternative programs and the death of Flash made the decision so easy. Affinity products are what I have now. They seem to work.
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