Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work(macuser.co.uk)
macuser.co.uk
Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
http://www.macuser.co.uk/9015-adobe-creative-cloud-outage-leaves-adobe-users-locked-out
239 comments
My "recipe" is this:
Uninstall and switch to Sketch. http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/
I have been so, so happy. Not 100% apples-to-apples of course but it's been great for my UI design needs, way better than Photoshop/Fireworks.
For bitmap editing I supplement with Pixelmator (only $15!). I used to say Photoshop couldn't be beat because of insanely hardcore features like content-aware fill, but then this is happening: http://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2014/04/17/sneak-peek-at-pixe...
Uninstall and switch to Sketch. http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/
I have been so, so happy. Not 100% apples-to-apples of course but it's been great for my UI design needs, way better than Photoshop/Fireworks.
For bitmap editing I supplement with Pixelmator (only $15!). I used to say Photoshop couldn't be beat because of insanely hardcore features like content-aware fill, but then this is happening: http://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2014/04/17/sneak-peek-at-pixe...
For web UI work, I have to agree, Sketch is superior in all the ways that matter. Your output in sketch will look like your out out in the browser, and the way things are designed in sketch lines up nicely with the way things will be built in code.
But it's not Photoshop, and I've seen first hand how designers decry Sketch as inferior, not on its merits, but on the bad habits and false friends that Photoshop offers.
I've personally been on a path to rid myself of Adohe Products for years, and that means trying new things, learning new software and celebrating things that are different to what Adobe offers.
Also, Pixelmator does a great job of picking up the slack. I'm comfortable with the idea that i need two apps to design UIs. Sketch feels so much more focused because it's not dealing with image manipulation, and Pixelmator is so much more performant than Photoshop that I'm constantly reminded just how powerful my Mac actually.
For anyone up there looking for replacements to Adobe software, you won't find anything worthwhile. But if you're willing to consider alternatives, there's a lot of choice.
But it's not Photoshop, and I've seen first hand how designers decry Sketch as inferior, not on its merits, but on the bad habits and false friends that Photoshop offers.
I've personally been on a path to rid myself of Adohe Products for years, and that means trying new things, learning new software and celebrating things that are different to what Adobe offers.
Also, Pixelmator does a great job of picking up the slack. I'm comfortable with the idea that i need two apps to design UIs. Sketch feels so much more focused because it's not dealing with image manipulation, and Pixelmator is so much more performant than Photoshop that I'm constantly reminded just how powerful my Mac actually.
For anyone up there looking for replacements to Adobe software, you won't find anything worthwhile. But if you're willing to consider alternatives, there's a lot of choice.
I was curious about how content-aware fill works, so I did some digging. Photoshop's content-aware fill uses the PatchMatch algorithm, originally developed at Princeton:
http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/patchmatch....
Does anyone know if Pixelmator is using the same technology, or is it something new?
http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/patchmatch....
Does anyone know if Pixelmator is using the same technology, or is it something new?
Is there anything similar that works in Ubuntu?
I do wish there were better alternatives for each and every app in the CC. The only one that's competently matched is Premiere.
Pixelmator is good, but Mac/OSX only. It also doesn't have adjustment layers, meaning that if I want a layer to be black and white, I'd have to open it up separately, desaturate, then import it back in as a new layer, delete the old one and rearrange.
They finally have a 16bit color, and apparently the content aware fill is coming.
Pixelmator is good, but Mac/OSX only. It also doesn't have adjustment layers, meaning that if I want a layer to be black and white, I'd have to open it up separately, desaturate, then import it back in as a new layer, delete the old one and rearrange.
They finally have a 16bit color, and apparently the content aware fill is coming.
Wait, what... where is Premiere matched? I am tied to Windows because of CC. Namely, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects and AME - all Adobe. If Adobe only ported their stuff to linux then I could switch completely. Autodesk already has me covered with Maya and other tools, The Foundry as well, FadeIn is a great alternative to Final Draft (although I bought both)... I only need Adobe CC alternatives, especially Premiere - or AVID to port MediaComposer.
I'd love to know where the idea came from that Mac OS X has a slash in it somewhere. I've seen Mac/OSX, and I've seen Mac OS/X. I reckon it's probably because of OS/2.
People sometimes call the Playstation 2 the "PS/2" as well, which is all kinds of wrong.
No slashes in OS X!
People sometimes call the Playstation 2 the "PS/2" as well, which is all kinds of wrong.
No slashes in OS X!
I think it was being used the same way as people write PC/Windows, or perhaps Unix/Linux.
As I said elsewhere in the thread, I believe that Nuke is a more than capable After Effects replacement - although it's a LOT more expensive.
I wouldn't agree with Premiere being particularly well matched by anything else - what are you thinking of?
I wouldn't agree with Premiere being particularly well matched by anything else - what are you thinking of?
Final Cut is what I was thinking of, along with something else that hasn't been mentioned. Avid I think?
I saw your comment yesterday, I already started the trials and I just wanted to say thanks. I'm not a designer myself, so I just assumed that since Adobe was the industry standard, anything else must be much worse; it seems it's not the case anymore.
I'm going to have to see that in person to believe it.
There is a similar plugin for GIMP, though it is less refined.
It is like magic, but Adobe demoed (and, I think, shipped) it in Photoshop over four years ago: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/cs5-web-premium-feature-tour/conte..., so the technology does exist.
And this is why "cloud" software will always be worse then regular software.
What happens when these "cloud" companies go out of business?
You're pretty much SOL if you can't find a replacement quick.
Don't ever rely on "cloud" software for critical infrastructure unless you own that cloud.
Everybody get CS6 and delay upgrading as long as you can.
What happens when these "cloud" companies go out of business?
You're pretty much SOL if you can't find a replacement quick.
Don't ever rely on "cloud" software for critical infrastructure unless you own that cloud.
Everybody get CS6 and delay upgrading as long as you can.
The Adobe "Creative Cloud" is not cloud software. It just the Adobe Creative Suite desktop applications sold on a subscription model.
The problem here was that they added DRM to it to make sure you can't use it if you don't have an active subscription and those 'call home' servers failed.
It is more of a DRM problem than a 'cloud' problem.
The problem here was that they added DRM to it to make sure you can't use it if you don't have an active subscription and those 'call home' servers failed.
It is more of a DRM problem than a 'cloud' problem.
I disagree in some specific cases. For software that is focused around accessing shared data. Say, ERP, document collaboration, etc. for small businesses that can't afford or don't want dedicated IT staff cloud based software makes a lot of sense.
It makes a lot of sense iff those businesses lose less money on cloud+ISP downtime than they would spend on IT staff or on-site support from a retail store.
What's the point of that? You still need to worry about your own off-cloud backups and a contingency plan for when your vendor goes out of business.
> You're pretty much SOL if you can't find a replacement quick.
Everyone who seriously considers moving mission-critical software or infrastructure to the cloud should (if they don't already) have a contingency plan at the forefront of their evaluation of any platform/service. Evaluations of solutions like that take away much of the risk that you're proposing. It's also just smart business.
Everyone who seriously considers moving mission-critical software or infrastructure to the cloud should (if they don't already) have a contingency plan at the forefront of their evaluation of any platform/service. Evaluations of solutions like that take away much of the risk that you're proposing. It's also just smart business.
The problem is, Adobe never did this and abruptly forced everyone to switch to a subscription model if they wanted to upgrade. And existing versions only keep working for so long unless you keep the same hardware/operating system with them forever. So suddenly, thousands of people who rely on Adobe software daily are forced to switch to a subscription-only model.
Our shop is currently holding at CS6, and we have no desire to 'upgrade' to CC. Unfortunately, customers have been sending in artwork and source files created in CC, so we will eventually be forced into Adobe's subscription plan unless some other full-featured software suite of equal or greater capability comes along.
Does Creative Cloud not allow you to save in a format compatible with previous versions of Photoshop?
I ask for open formats from people. Send me something I can work with in my choice of software! Save multiple versions and deliver those just for redundancy. There's no excuse if you're using pro-level software to ever say "well I guess you'll have to buy it to do something with this"
I ask for open formats from people. Send me something I can work with in my choice of software! Save multiple versions and deliver those just for redundancy. There's no excuse if you're using pro-level software to ever say "well I guess you'll have to buy it to do something with this"
This all seems sensible until Adobe revokes your license and you lose all money you invested so far and access to the work you produced. There should be consumer protection laws for these cases. When you pirate software, everything works smoothly (unless you catch some trojan), but if you are a paying customer, all kinds of unpleasant and artificial problems are thrown at you.
Or just let the consumer vote with his money. (sketch and pixelmator look like they're growing nicely) All "protection" laws will do is add compliance costs and increase the barrier to entry.
> risk of having installed some possible malware
Are you talking about the Creative Cloud drm or the crack?
Are you talking about the Creative Cloud drm or the crack?
Both probably ;-).
Most likely just the crack...sometimes they come with additional crap and people (who are none the wiser) click on it and get something bad installed.
Most likely just the crack...sometimes they come with additional crap and people (who are none the wiser) click on it and get something bad installed.
You don't need a crack for CC, just to block Adobe's activation servers in your hosts after installing. (AFAIK)
Not anymore, this was valid up to CS5. CS5.5 and later need the amtlib.dll patch on Windows, dunno what's the state of affairs on Macintosh.
I'm pretty sure they don't..I had CS6 without using any patched files iirc
That only work for 90 days though once the counter hits 90 you're screwed.
You still code that can either crack the software or act is a server for it.
You still code that can either crack the software or act is a server for it.
The DRM on a game creation IDE I use stopped working not too long ago. I'd bought the product, but the DRM didn't care. So I just used a crack.
>Step 3
That is what VM's are for.....
That is what VM's are for.....
7.5 hours worth of repeated (and I mean repeatedly explaining the situation to each new contact) tech support calls over a licensing issue that was, ultimately, a 10 minute fix (allowing for included administrivia) that was already sitting available for access/correction on the computer in front of a "supervisor".
That left me swearing Adobe would never see another dime from me or people I advise. And it leaves me repeating this anecdote every time the news surfaces another story about their cr-p administration systems and support.
And these are the people who are going to be involved in e.g. EME DRM in our browsers? I sincerely hope not.
That left me swearing Adobe would never see another dime from me or people I advise. And it leaves me repeating this anecdote every time the news surfaces another story about their cr-p administration systems and support.
And these are the people who are going to be involved in e.g. EME DRM in our browsers? I sincerely hope not.
What should happen due to this outage:
Adobe Management: Oh no, our users cannot work. Let's remove the requirement for our software to phone home just to open/work.
What will probably happen:
Adobe Management: Hmm, maybe let's try to make our servers more available?
Adobe Management: Oh no, our users cannot work. Let's remove the requirement for our software to phone home just to open/work.
What will probably happen:
Adobe Management: Hmm, maybe let's try to make our servers more available?
The phone home is apparently periodic. I worked in Photoshop and Illustrator multiple times yesterday with zero problem.
I have CC and was able to work fine all day. I wasn't able to sign in but that has no bearing on me doing my job. Was this something that affected the licensing servers and I just happened to be lucky?
One of the issues with the move to the cloud with formerly desktop software is exactly this. I used to use the analogy of an army using guns, except instead of a magazine holding bullets they had a long hose feeding them rounds. It sounded great to the generals, because instead of carrying around 20lbs of munitions, the soldiers just needed to carry around their guns. Of course all it took is for somebody to put a kink in the hose to put them out of the fight completely.
Here's a list of Mac OSX alternatives to everything in the Creative Cloud: http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/graphics-roundups/the-best-...
Never outsource your core business.
Never outsource critical infrastructure that your core business requires to operate, unless you have a backup plan. If GitHub goes away, you can switch to BitBucket. If Digital Ocean goes away, you can switch to Linode. If Adobe CC goes away, what do you switch to?
Never outsource critical infrastructure that your core business requires to operate, unless you have a backup plan. If GitHub goes away, you can switch to BitBucket. If Digital Ocean goes away, you can switch to Linode. If Adobe CC goes away, what do you switch to?
Wait, do you really have to have a constant internet connection to run Photoshop now?
Australian here. Using the subscription version of Creative Suite avoids the $4000 fuck-you-Australia markup they add onto the price of the full version.
So yeah, we don't get to edit photos when the internet is down or Adobe's servers fail.
So yeah, we don't get to edit photos when the internet is down or Adobe's servers fail.
And this is why proprietary lock-in is wrong.
Adobe seem to do all they can to screw up the computer their software is installed on. On a Mac you are supposed to drag an app into the Applications folder; to delete it, drag it to trash. Adobe software doesn't work like this. To install a trial of their software you have to install multiple apps, that can't be easily removed, and put up with their stupid Adobe logo in the title bar even when you're not using their software. You can't even use a trial without signing up for a "Creative Cloud" account.
Adobe's "Creative Cloud" is a great example of how to alienate and annoy your customers.
(Don't get me started on Flash)
Adobe seem to do all they can to screw up the computer their software is installed on. On a Mac you are supposed to drag an app into the Applications folder; to delete it, drag it to trash. Adobe software doesn't work like this. To install a trial of their software you have to install multiple apps, that can't be easily removed, and put up with their stupid Adobe logo in the title bar even when you're not using their software. You can't even use a trial without signing up for a "Creative Cloud" account.
Adobe's "Creative Cloud" is a great example of how to alienate and annoy your customers.
(Don't get me started on Flash)
If you enable case sensitivity on OSX filesystem, adobe photoshop won't install.
http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case-sensitiv...
http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case-sensitiv...
This drove me crazy for months last year. Doing a case-insensitive backup of all your stuff before reformating just to install an app turned out to be far from trivial.
> If you enable case sensitivity on OSX filesystem
...
why would you do that to yourself!?
...
why would you do that to yourself!?
Because you're used to it from years of using Linux? Or have software from other unix-like platforms which expects a case-sensitive filesystem?
A good example would be MySQL. The case sensitivity of table names is determined by the file system on which MySQL is running.
It's terrible, I know, but if you're developing a webapp which is going to run on a Linux-server you might want to have a case sensitive database locally as well or you could end up with queries that run without a hitch on your dev machine but give a "No such table" error in production. That sucks.
Of course, nowadays, you could just use a Vagrant VM or something similar, but still.
A good example would be MySQL. The case sensitivity of table names is determined by the file system on which MySQL is running.
It's terrible, I know, but if you're developing a webapp which is going to run on a Linux-server you might want to have a case sensitive database locally as well or you could end up with queries that run without a hitch on your dev machine but give a "No such table" error in production. That sucks.
Of course, nowadays, you could just use a Vagrant VM or something similar, but still.
[deleted]
What's funny is this is what Quark did in the 90s and then they got their market share stolen by Adobe. The same thing will happen to Adobe at some point. There will be so much user frustration that people will pack up and leave to the first reasonable tool that comes along.
The trouble is that the lock-in is immense. I know people with upwards of 20,000 PSD files in stock ready for when clients return and want similar jobs done. Every piece of print hardware I know of uses Pantone standard colours which no other software supports properly or fully. None of the plotters I have used support anything but Photoshop and Illustrator through Adobe Flash plugins. For all the cries that Sketch and Pixelmator replace Illustrator and Photoshop.. they just don't on the professional level.
Adobe software is ingrained in every business, I personally know people who would have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars due to this if they had upgraded from their CS6 versions to CC. There's no option for them to change to anything else even if they had.
Adobe software is ingrained in every business, I personally know people who would have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars due to this if they had upgraded from their CS6 versions to CC. There's no option for them to change to anything else even if they had.
You make a good point about high-end print production, but Sketch is definitely making inroads with professional designers. They don't have to worry about plotter compatibility.
When someone comes through the door and gives me anything but an illustrator file with the proper layers set up, they're going to get charged for someone to sit and weed them out of whatever format Sketch generates.
There was a printers close to where I'm typing this that would only accept Quark Xpress files for production.
That was fine for years. Now it is a car park.
That was fine for years. Now it is a car park.
One would hope that you're correct. And in the very long run you will be. But IMO not anytime soon.
True, Quark was unable to "change their stripes" and crashed and burned. Contempt for customers (and also contempt for their own US-based developers) came from the top.
However, programs like Photoshop are the result of thousands of man-hours of development. Perhaps even thousands of man-years! It's difficult to compete with that.
What does a startup's business plan look like? Perhaps:
Adobe gained market share from Quark during a time of transition in the industry. Quark was slow to transition their software to OS X. But now? OS X is stable and Apple isn't making any major changes. The only new thing is "the cloud". Which, ironically, is where Adobe just stumbled. But Adobe could trivially fix that, literally overnight!
True, Quark was unable to "change their stripes" and crashed and burned. Contempt for customers (and also contempt for their own US-based developers) came from the top.
However, programs like Photoshop are the result of thousands of man-hours of development. Perhaps even thousands of man-years! It's difficult to compete with that.
What does a startup's business plan look like? Perhaps:
Adobe is led by a bunch of dickheads who are
alienating their customers. We think there's an
opportunity for a more enlightened competitor
to take market share.
Adobe gained market share from Quark during a time of transition in the industry. Quark was slow to transition their software to OS X. But now? OS X is stable and Apple isn't making any major changes. The only new thing is "the cloud". Which, ironically, is where Adobe just stumbled. But Adobe could trivially fix that, literally overnight!
This is a classic innovator's dilemma. The competitor won't compete evenly with Adobe, they will start with an under served market. Adobe will scoff at them even being a threat. Sure, Adobe could stop being pricks any time, but that won't maximize profits, so they won't. Eventually, the competitor's product will become good enough, and the stampede away from Adobe will begin.
And it may not be one company. It may be one for image editing, one for illustration, one for graphic design, and so on. There are really good tools out there today, but "everybody uses Adobe" so everybody uses adobe. Every one of these events (especially when Adobe costs your company money but refuses to provide any kind of remuneration) is one step closer to people saying "I'm going to learn something else".
And it may not be one company. It may be one for image editing, one for illustration, one for graphic design, and so on. There are really good tools out there today, but "everybody uses Adobe" so everybody uses adobe. Every one of these events (especially when Adobe costs your company money but refuses to provide any kind of remuneration) is one step closer to people saying "I'm going to learn something else".
> Eventually, the competitor's product will become good enough, and the stampede away from Adobe will begin.
To prevent that is what patents are for.
To prevent that is what patents are for.
> Especially since Adobe management could decide, overnight, to not be total dickheads
That's a big assumption there
That's a big assumption there
If you're one of those, I highly recommend Pixelmator - download at pixelmator.com. My choice for a really simple, easy image editor is Acorn from Flying Meat Software - http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/.
It's like Apple's Numbers compared to Microsoft's Excel - there are things that the most sophisticated couple of percent of users will miss, but for most people it's a great alternative.
Adobe can't die quick enough to make me happy.
It's like Apple's Numbers compared to Microsoft's Excel - there are things that the most sophisticated couple of percent of users will miss, but for most people it's a great alternative.
Adobe can't die quick enough to make me happy.
Love pixelmator - use it every single day and would never, ever consider using Photoshop for the types of image manipulation/touch up that I do.
Photoshop is really for the professional image editor - I can't believe that the average consumer really can't get by with pixelmator/acorn.
Photoshop is really for the professional image editor - I can't believe that the average consumer really can't get by with pixelmator/acorn.
I love Pixelmator! It was on sale for $15 when I picked it up and I haven't regretted it. There's a slight learning curve from Photoshop, but it's definitely cheaper which is a huge plus.
I second this: Pixelmator is great. But most heavy Photoshop users won't leave Photoshop unless dragged away. It's all they know. Sure they'll kick, scream, bitch. But suggest something like Pixelmator you get excuses like "But Pixelmator doesn't have [insert obscure filter that they've only used once in their life]".
In the end, they'll still stay on Adobe's CC.
In the end, they'll still stay on Adobe's CC.
Actually Pixelmater doesn't have tons of NON obscure features, professionals (and image editing enthusiasts) use day in, day out.
We don't just crop, resize and apply some blur.
We don't just crop, resize and apply some blur.
You could not be more wrong with your assesment why Photoshop users stay with Photoshop.
I bought Pixelmator, and I also got CC licencse. I don't even remember when was the last time I had Pixelmator open.
Pixelmator is a great and cheap alternative if you indeed only need pretty basic things, but many need a lot more.
And if you are in print business there is no discussion at all.
The immediate thing that this particular sophisticated user misses is the ability to not have to buy a Mac to run it :)
Looks like great software, but there's no Windows version I can see.
Looks like great software, but there's no Windows version I can see.
On the topic of reasonable alternative tools, Sketch[1] has started to gain a tremendous amount of traction within a short amount of time within the web design community.
[1]: http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch
[1]: http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch
As a Sketch user myself I still recognize downside for some is that it isn't cross platform. There are still a lot of people that have to use creative tools on Windows for one reason or another. Data exchange is also a big deal. Sketch does make an excellent alternative to Illustrator for my purposes.
I'd argue that alternatives to Photoshop and After Effects are the killer apps needed for getting most people out of Adobe's ecosystem. The OS X specific alternatives for Photoshop (Acorn, Pixelmator, etc) just aren't quite there yet. I really, really want them to be though because I've held off on upgrading from CS4 for about as long as I can.
I'd argue that alternatives to Photoshop and After Effects are the killer apps needed for getting most people out of Adobe's ecosystem. The OS X specific alternatives for Photoshop (Acorn, Pixelmator, etc) just aren't quite there yet. I really, really want them to be though because I've held off on upgrading from CS4 for about as long as I can.
There's already an excellent alternative to After Effects - Nuke.
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke-product-family/nuk...
Unfortunately, it's a wee bit more expensive. But I wonder if we'll see a price drop soon...
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke-product-family/nuk...
Unfortunately, it's a wee bit more expensive. But I wonder if we'll see a price drop soon...
Undortunately, in my experience, this simply will not happen. Most designers I've worked with are wedded to Adobe so tightly that they won't even conceive of an alternative, and are utterly lost without it. Unfortunately, that perpetuates the monopoly, extortionate pricing, and allows poor service such as in this case.
Wasn't a fan of the CC move. After using Photoshop for 10+ years I've switched to using Sketch for UX design and haven't needed to look back yet.
I like to mention this: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=24116953#p24116...
Not to mention that the Creative Cloud app itself is a battery vampire, automatically sets itself to launch at startup, constantly nags about updates, and then screws everything over when you do update.
I won't touch Adobe products anymore. Their products are great, but for the average shop there's barely anything they can do that can't be done with open source or reasonably priced alternatives, and often with much less bloat.
Was just restored an hour ago apparently, with no compensation for the downtime of the people affected....
Does anyone have access to GIMP download statistics for the past ~10 days?
Edit: Answering my own question... Not the main repository, but it's something.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-win/files/GIMP%20%2B%20...
Edit: Answering my own question... Not the main repository, but it's something.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-win/files/GIMP%20%2B%20...
Adobe CS6 torrent stats is probably an interesting graph to look at also.
Too bad GIMP is such a crappy alternative.
Also, check out Krita; it looks a lot like photoshop to me, but the last time I used photoshop was 7 years ago. https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-dBDHsjsOG4w/U1e8ubOrBTI/A...
There is a guy, David Revoy, that uses only free software to do it's job, and it seems successful at it. http://davidrevoy.com/
There is a guy, David Revoy, that uses only free software to do it's job, and it seems successful at it. http://davidrevoy.com/
Ehh...depends what you're doing.
99% of the time, I just need to crop an image to a certain size. GIMP is actually much better than photoshop for this particular exact task. Nice UI for resizing the selection box in place. Other simple tweaks - brightness/contrast etc - are handled perfectly competently.
It certainly isn't a drop-in replacement for the sort of magic 'proper' photoshoppers do. But for a semi-competent web-monkey like me, it suffices perfectly well on those occasions when imagemagick is too blunt an instrument.
Vector to bitmap conversion sucks, though. Seriously, if IM can do this without pixellating everything to buggery, why not GIMP?
99% of the time, I just need to crop an image to a certain size. GIMP is actually much better than photoshop for this particular exact task. Nice UI for resizing the selection box in place. Other simple tweaks - brightness/contrast etc - are handled perfectly competently.
It certainly isn't a drop-in replacement for the sort of magic 'proper' photoshoppers do. But for a semi-competent web-monkey like me, it suffices perfectly well on those occasions when imagemagick is too blunt an instrument.
Vector to bitmap conversion sucks, though. Seriously, if IM can do this without pixellating everything to buggery, why not GIMP?
Lightroom is far better for the tasks you mentioned than GIMP. IrfanView or XnView would be also perfectly adequate for your simple tasks.
Forget about easy skin retouching in GIMP, no 16-bit/channel in official release yet, forget about high-end fashion photography with GIMP. It's still not there :-(
Forget about easy skin retouching in GIMP, no 16-bit/channel in official release yet, forget about high-end fashion photography with GIMP. It's still not there :-(
Well, you can change that in a way. Just use the money you would otherwise pay Adobe and fund the feature you need. You can easily contact the developers, there's a list of them here https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/AUTHORS ; By browsing the source code, you can also find their emails.
Pixelmator is a much better solution if you're on a Mac. Not free though...
I would actually pay 50€ or so for Pixelmator if it'd be available for Linux – but sadly it's not.
I'd think, though, that the Pixelmator devs could port it to Linux quite easily, as most of the code already works with OpenGL/OpenCL/etc. so they'd only have to port the Cocoa-based UI to QT.
I'd think, though, that the Pixelmator devs could port it to Linux quite easily, as most of the code already works with OpenGL/OpenCL/etc. so they'd only have to port the Cocoa-based UI to QT.
And they would also need to port the whole Core Graphics subsystem.
Sourceforge hasn't been recommended way for GIMP downloads for months. It is no longer linked from the official page.
I have a hard time understanding why anyone would lease a service that is vital to their job, or at least without a backup. If your livelihood depends on something then spend your money appropriately. Even if you did sign up for CC you can still have an older version ready to go in a pinch.
Adobe is increasingly forcing you to do it.
EDIT: For example, can you figure out how to buy Photoshop from this page? I can't. I've been trying for a couple minutes.
http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/software._sl_id-conten...
EDIT: For example, can you figure out how to buy Photoshop from this page? I can't. I've been trying for a couple minutes.
http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/software._sl_id-conten...
You have to find it here, I've had this page bookmarked since they started pushing CC, just in-case.
http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/cs6._sl_id-contentfilt...
http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/cs6._sl_id-contentfilt...
Wow! I didn't even realise it was still possible to buy Adobe products the old-school way.
This is extremely good news.
This is extremely good news.
Yes - but it's old versions that will no longer be updated. You can usually find older versions directly from resellers at Amazon at prices below Adobe's direct prices.
The older versions also will not accept files created in the newer Creative Cloud versions. This has been a constant source of frustration at my office. It's an excellent way for Adobe to encourage/force everyone to buy CC.
Yeah, that's pretty clearly the wrong page for buying photoshop. But I quickly found the right one by going to Products > Creative Suite 6 > Buy CS6 > Buy Photoshop CS6. The real problem is finding it if you don't know that it's part of Creative Suite 6.
Except CS6 is not the latest version of Photoshop. The equivalent would be a car lot refusing to sell new cars, only to lease them.
You can't buy the latest versions of Adobe software. They are simply not available for purchase. You can only rent them. So if you work with designers who use Creative Cloud you are similarly forced to subscribe. At this point, I'm probably just going to get out of the field entirely once it becomes impossible to continue because of Adobe's idiocy.
The cost breakdown shows that someone who upgrades with every major release saves money going with the CC. Plus your average art-focused computer user may not want to worry about updates and stuff.
I agree it would probbly be smart to have an old copy of CS4 sitting on your computer though, just in case.
I agree it would probbly be smart to have an old copy of CS4 sitting on your computer though, just in case.
I wasn't a fan if CC at first but it's turned into an incredibly good deal for me at $30 per month. A little downtime from time to time can't be avoided. People just love to complain.
I'm sure your words are comforting to those graphic designers who missed print deadlines due to this outage.
Quite frankly, if a persons workflow doesn't include a potential for downtime then they only have themselves to blame. This whole 'down to the wire' and 'stop the press' mentality is a combination of drama-grade fallacy and unprofessional project management skills.
This hand-wave over designer's inability to build enough slack to deal with Adobe's failure into every project is a combination of unsubtle trolling and egregious sociopathy.
It's called 'planning for the unexpected' and encompasses a wide range of scenarios, only one of which can be blamed on Adobe.
Well, to play devil's advocate, 'planning for the unexpected' should also cover 'a client calls at the last minute with a rush job', shouldn't it? In that case, how is an Adobe outage the consultant's fault?
Yes, a professional should be prepared for unexpected customer requests with tight deadlines. And the response to such a request is to just get the work done. That, of course, involves being prepared for any service outages that might interfere with such work.
It wasn't a little down time. Also they handled it poorly.
I had four staff without access to key systems for our designs. I had to call customers and explain why deadlines were going to be missed.
Made me look unprofessional, especially since there was NO announcement by Adobe. I had to search Twitter to find out what was going on.
I had four staff without access to key systems for our designs. I had to call customers and explain why deadlines were going to be missed.
Made me look unprofessional, especially since there was NO announcement by Adobe. I had to search Twitter to find out what was going on.
You don't have CS5 or 6 running on backup computers in case of CC or general internet outages? Did you explain that to your customers?
>>A little downtime from time to time can't be avoided. People just love to complain.
If you feel this way then image-editing isn't your core task in your job.
Imagine if the github.com maintainers had your attitude. "Meh, some downtime here 'n there. Whuchagonnado?" A github outage for _OVER 24 HOURS_ would freakin' wreck me and my coworkers. The image-editing department for a high-fashion magazine in New York or Paris with those already near-impossible deadlines losing 24hrs is going to make some execs somewhere very angry.
If you feel this way then image-editing isn't your core task in your job.
Imagine if the github.com maintainers had your attitude. "Meh, some downtime here 'n there. Whuchagonnado?" A github outage for _OVER 24 HOURS_ would freakin' wreck me and my coworkers. The image-editing department for a high-fashion magazine in New York or Paris with those already near-impossible deadlines losing 24hrs is going to make some execs somewhere very angry.
I would think git's distributed nature would make this a lesser issue. You would just have to set up another remote target and push/pull from that (say on AWS or some other provider).
Sure. But not having access to the tickets database might cripple a team pretty badly.
One reason I'm still toying with the idea of trying fossil[1] "for real" and/or find/make a tool that distributes issues within mercurial/git like http://www.bugseverywhere.org/
Note-to-self: looks like hattawiki might be a nice companion on the path to "distributed everything":
http://hatta-wiki.org/Install
[1] https://www.fossil-scm.org/
One reason I'm still toying with the idea of trying fossil[1] "for real" and/or find/make a tool that distributes issues within mercurial/git like http://www.bugseverywhere.org/
Note-to-self: looks like hattawiki might be a nice companion on the path to "distributed everything":
http://hatta-wiki.org/Install
[1] https://www.fossil-scm.org/
For a distributed wiki try gollum. It's the wiki engine behind the github wikis and it's basically a wiki where the database is a git repo. I love it for family use. I can put up a nice web interface for everyone else to edit and yet I use git push/pull and my normal text editor. Works great.
Turn it around into a special no-Photoshop issue of the magazine, and disrupt the high-fashion industry!
No one other than Adobe can provide a Creative Cloud that you can type cc add remote creativebucket.org and keep working. You can, however, type git add remote bitbucket and should be working to several remotes.
And yet another fashion magazine expert. So many! I'd like to point out that your image is solely based on low-grade chick-flicks.
And this is why I won't trust SaaS that doesn't provide a viable self-host solution (which for practical purposes tends to mean Free software, although I suppose "binary" only self-contained jars might be a realistic alternative). And also why I can't see myself selling/working on such a solution without providing some form of viable/realistic exit strategy/alternative.
With traditional apps, you run the risk of eg: your laptop crashing/being stolen -- but if you need to work, you can just go and pick up a new laptop, burn an hour or so reinstalling your application(s) -- and hopefully get your work done by the deadline. With a self-hostable SaaS, you can spin up a vps/dedicated server and install, maybe even in less time -- but with "closed" SaaS -- you have no option.
Of course, with all (high-bandwidth) SaaS-solutions, network access becomes a single point of failure.
With traditional apps, you run the risk of eg: your laptop crashing/being stolen -- but if you need to work, you can just go and pick up a new laptop, burn an hour or so reinstalling your application(s) -- and hopefully get your work done by the deadline. With a self-hostable SaaS, you can spin up a vps/dedicated server and install, maybe even in less time -- but with "closed" SaaS -- you have no option.
Of course, with all (high-bandwidth) SaaS-solutions, network access becomes a single point of failure.
It should be noted that "just spin up a VPS/dedicated server" is not a serious competition for most SaaS companies, nor is it a requirement for most people who buy SaaS. Try explaining that process to Office Manager Milly, whose #1 feature request is being able to fax documents to the SaaS app rather than having to upload them.
Milly may have heard about Heartbleed recently. She doesn't understand public key cryptography, SSL, servers, configuration files, or the command line. She does understand that all of her information being leaked to bad guys is not optimal. How would you go about advising Milly on what the consequences of Heartbleed are for her self-hosted SaaS product?
Milly may have heard about Heartbleed recently. She doesn't understand public key cryptography, SSL, servers, configuration files, or the command line. She does understand that all of her information being leaked to bad guys is not optimal. How would you go about advising Milly on what the consequences of Heartbleed are for her self-hosted SaaS product?
It should also be noted that sometimes you're not talking to Millie. Self-hosting is a viable option for a lot of people and businesses, even more so with the help of a friendly local CIO-as-a-service consulting company nearby whose rates are competitive with the SaaS+time wasted by non-tech users trying to manage the PCs that access it.
Naturally the hypothetical ignorant office manager is going to be a woman. This is ycombinator, after all.
Ugh, seriously? This is the input to this conversation that you decided was the most important? Try not being so hyper-sensitive to social issues and keeping the conversation on track within the context of the OP.
We've learned to live with centralized water and electricity and banking, all outside of our control, rather than rely on on-premises solutions. SaaS, too, will win out after a few hiccups.
In a very real sense our data is an extension of ourselves, a part of our minds. In contrast water, electricity, and banking are by-and-large anonymous basic services that have no further properties.
I get that cloud storage people think of themselves as the utility providers of the future, after all it makes instinctive sense to want to own something which consumers will spend their whole lives on. I've been in meetings where SaaS people gave presentations saying stuff like "...and in the near future the average person will spend 60% of their total income on cloud services; let's make that future happen!"
The difference is of course that after a power outage or after changing your utility providers, everything is back to normal - but after a little "cloud accident", all your stuff is simply gone. Worse, suppose in that glorious cloud future a person might end up in a situation where they can't make those substantial payments to their cloud providers for a time. All their stuff will be gone, as well. It turns out, we're being re-educated to accept a world where everything is just rented, not only including the stuff we "bought", but also the right to keep our very own creative output. Let the severity of that sink in for a minute.
We're drifting into a setting where basic properties of our digital lives are taken and then rented back to us at a horrendous markup.
I get that cloud storage people think of themselves as the utility providers of the future, after all it makes instinctive sense to want to own something which consumers will spend their whole lives on. I've been in meetings where SaaS people gave presentations saying stuff like "...and in the near future the average person will spend 60% of their total income on cloud services; let's make that future happen!"
The difference is of course that after a power outage or after changing your utility providers, everything is back to normal - but after a little "cloud accident", all your stuff is simply gone. Worse, suppose in that glorious cloud future a person might end up in a situation where they can't make those substantial payments to their cloud providers for a time. All their stuff will be gone, as well. It turns out, we're being re-educated to accept a world where everything is just rented, not only including the stuff we "bought", but also the right to keep our very own creative output. Let the severity of that sink in for a minute.
We're drifting into a setting where basic properties of our digital lives are taken and then rented back to us at a horrendous markup.
Exactly and the analogy with the utilities is bad for another reason too.
It makes sense for the utilities to be centralized generating electricity for every house separately is inefficient and has only become recently viable with solar panels. Where possible people tend to switch to that for independence or a combination of both.
Getting water to every house in a city is impossible without it being centralized.
SAAS on the other hand is not necessary. We can do the same thing without requiring constant connectivity or by building and app that requires connectivity only when absolutely necessary for it to work.
However we can't ask for rent if it's not a service. I for one avoid all SAAS like the plague.
I don't mind one time payments hey if i get enough value from the product I wouldn't mind the option of donating extra however monthly payments make me look twice at how much value I'm getting or if i can get it from a product that requires a one time payment instead.
It makes sense for the utilities to be centralized generating electricity for every house separately is inefficient and has only become recently viable with solar panels. Where possible people tend to switch to that for independence or a combination of both.
Getting water to every house in a city is impossible without it being centralized.
SAAS on the other hand is not necessary. We can do the same thing without requiring constant connectivity or by building and app that requires connectivity only when absolutely necessary for it to work.
However we can't ask for rent if it's not a service. I for one avoid all SAAS like the plague.
I don't mind one time payments hey if i get enough value from the product I wouldn't mind the option of donating extra however monthly payments make me look twice at how much value I'm getting or if i can get it from a product that requires a one time payment instead.
The only way to give people back control, while maintaining the benefits of 'the cloud', is to make it insanely simple for people to run their own infrastructure. I'm working on the building blocks to make this a reality.
http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/
http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/
> Worse, suppose in that glorious cloud future a person might end up in a situation where they can't make those substantial payments to their cloud providers for a time. All their stuff will be gone, as well.
There should be some sort of process for this, akin to safety deposit boxes. Image the machines to tape, store for a year or two. You may need to work in something to ensure you don't turn into long-term data storage (maybe only offer the download once, or add in a 30 day "thaw from storage" buffer, or maybe a fixed fee to retrieve that data).
There should be some sort of process for this, akin to safety deposit boxes. Image the machines to tape, store for a year or two. You may need to work in something to ensure you don't turn into long-term data storage (maybe only offer the download once, or add in a 30 day "thaw from storage" buffer, or maybe a fixed fee to retrieve that data).
also the right to keep our very own creative output.
This is exactly what creeps me the hell out about these subscription plans, and I don't see it discussed enough.
This is exactly what creeps me the hell out about these subscription plans, and I don't see it discussed enough.
I think GNU gets it right: SaaS would be more aptly termed Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS).[1] The Creative Suite used to work fine before they turned it into a cloud "service". There is no good reason to make software that runs as native binaries on two platforms (Mac and Windows) dependent on remote servers.
1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#SaaS
1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#SaaS
I don't know about you, but I happen to live in a place were those things are still mostly under government control, and we very, very rarely see blackouts of the kind that have hit eg parts of the US from time to time.
And I don't need banking 24/7 to do my job. I don't need water 24/7 to live, especially if an outage is made public in advance. I am (too) dependent on electricity -- but there are alternatives if I need them (eg: rent/buy a generator and gasoline -- probably not viable in a massive blackout, though. At any rate it is certainly easy to plan for (and not too expensive)).
So most of these fall squarely in the "viable alternative" or not-essential (24/7) category.
And I don't need banking 24/7 to do my job. I don't need water 24/7 to live, especially if an outage is made public in advance. I am (too) dependent on electricity -- but there are alternatives if I need them (eg: rent/buy a generator and gasoline -- probably not viable in a massive blackout, though. At any rate it is certainly easy to plan for (and not too expensive)).
So most of these fall squarely in the "viable alternative" or not-essential (24/7) category.
> I don't know about you, but I happen to live in a place were those things are still mostly under government control, and we very, very rarely see blackouts of the kind that have hit eg parts of the US from time to time.
That's just propaganda. I'm sure there's places where water and electricity are under government control and it still sucks, and i bet there's places where they aren't and everything works great.
It weakens the rest of your argument.
That's just propaganda. I'm sure there's places where water and electricity are under government control and it still sucks, and i bet there's places where they aren't and everything works great.
It weakens the rest of your argument.
And "I'm sure..." weakens your argument. Do you get the irony of saying the parent post is relying on propaganda while tacitly admitting you don't know whether what you're asserting is true?
Utilities and telcos are a weird industry, with issues of natural monopolies and last-mile issues. I don't know what the right way to handle them is, but the case against government intervention is much weaker.
Utilities and telcos are a weird industry, with issues of natural monopolies and last-mile issues. I don't know what the right way to handle them is, but the case against government intervention is much weaker.
I fail to see how it weakens the argument that none of the utilities are without viable backup (as opposed to a one-of-a-kind SaaS).
I happen to live in a place where utilities are deregulated and people can choose from any number of competitors for their supplier, and US-style blackouts are literally completely unheard of.
Are you sure that the deregulation is not just empty word?
Yes, you can usually pick your own retailer for you utilities. But you cannot pick the distributor (downstream of the retailer, owns cables or pipes in your street) or transmission (upstream of the retailer, owns the cables or pipes providing your city).
The sales/distribution company usually doesn't own anything, they are just sales and marketing office. Everything is physically provided by companies, that you cannot choose.
Yes, you can usually pick your own retailer for you utilities. But you cannot pick the distributor (downstream of the retailer, owns cables or pipes in your street) or transmission (upstream of the retailer, owns the cables or pipes providing your city).
The sales/distribution company usually doesn't own anything, they are just sales and marketing office. Everything is physically provided by companies, that you cannot choose.
No, but the sales balance on the National Grid is still based on competition, because it is regulated by the interaction of dozens of companies. The distributor has no control over who generates power, or how much is paid for it, and that is why there is no shortage [1].
With non-power utilities, even this isn't an issue - water or gas are never randomly shut off without warning.
[1] There is a small deficit of generation capacity under some conditions, primarily due to recent underinvestment in nuclear energy, so power is purchased from France routinely, who have a large surplus due to their much stronger generation infrastructure, but even if this became unavailable, the capacity is enough to prevent US-style grid failures.
With non-power utilities, even this isn't an issue - water or gas are never randomly shut off without warning.
[1] There is a small deficit of generation capacity under some conditions, primarily due to recent underinvestment in nuclear energy, so power is purchased from France routinely, who have a large surplus due to their much stronger generation infrastructure, but even if this became unavailable, the capacity is enough to prevent US-style grid failures.
I sure hope not. It's rare for me to encounter SaaS that provides a better service than something I can install and run natively.
Surely there is something? E.g. Google Maps was a breath of fresh air after MapPoint.
Since I have a Nokia phone, which permits me to download maps for specific countries and regions, I'm not dependent on Google - (or any other on-line) maps.
I'd wager that Nokia provides equal, if not - arguably - better quality than Google maps and I don't need to incur insane roaming charges when using a map abroad.
Granted, there are a few functions, that require a net connection, but basic map functionality and navigation works very well without being on-line.
Maps are only one example. I can't think of many applications, which I would prefer as a "cloud" based service as opposed to native.
I'd wager that Nokia provides equal, if not - arguably - better quality than Google maps and I don't need to incur insane roaming charges when using a map abroad.
Granted, there are a few functions, that require a net connection, but basic map functionality and navigation works very well without being on-line.
Maps are only one example. I can't think of many applications, which I would prefer as a "cloud" based service as opposed to native.
You know what Google Maps needs? Offline downloadable map functionality. They had that feature, then removed it, then put it back... now I honestly don't know where it's at.
Browsing offline maps is a breath of fresh air, it's so much quicker. Obviously you wouldn't download the whole world, only your home city or whatever. But it's lightning fast to zoom and pan around an offline map compared with connecting over mobile bandwidth.
Browsing maps in Airplane mode should be possible. It's a map after all, not a website.
Browsing offline maps is a breath of fresh air, it's so much quicker. Obviously you wouldn't download the whole world, only your home city or whatever. But it's lightning fast to zoom and pan around an offline map compared with connecting over mobile bandwidth.
Browsing maps in Airplane mode should be possible. It's a map after all, not a website.
With the new version (v8 in Android) of Google maps, just click on the search and scroll down to end.
There is an option "Save map to use offline". Alas, it has an expiry period of 30 days.
There is an option "Save map to use offline". Alas, it has an expiry period of 30 days.
Just discovered google maps on my ipad only lets you save an offline map if youre logged in. Nice job Google, you've managed to make signing in to google a requirement even for offline functionality.
It does,
"ok maps"
Not anymore. They became reasonable again and both the search and any selected location description has a "save for offline use" button at the bottom.
But you can't search the resulting map or get directions. I have an Android phone, and the last good Maps for it was version 6. I do two things: (1) use copilot GPS with the whole U.S. and Canada (takes 1.8 GB); (2) keep my old Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.2 which cannot be upgraded and has Maps 6.
It's mostly a question of storage.
Here's a great tool for getting a feel:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox...
Z=18 is rarely used, so for Z<=17 you're looking at roughly 300MB for raster tiles a city the size of Calgary. You also don't get routing information with purely raster data.
You could try vector data which would be smaller, but then you have to display it, which can be computationally expensive if you want it to look pretty, and you'd lose the snappiness you're seeking.
Here's a great tool for getting a feel:
http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox...
Z=18 is rarely used, so for Z<=17 you're looking at roughly 300MB for raster tiles a city the size of Calgary. You also don't get routing information with purely raster data.
You could try vector data which would be smaller, but then you have to display it, which can be computationally expensive if you want it to look pretty, and you'd lose the snappiness you're seeking.
You've just told us a good-sized city fits in about 1/200th of my phone's storage. I'll take a dozen.
Actually, you could fit the entirety of the state of Washington in <50% of my phone's storage.
I'm not seeing a problem.
Actually, you could fit the entirety of the state of Washington in <50% of my phone's storage.
I'm not seeing a problem.
>Actually, you could fit the entirety of the state of Washington in <50% of my phone's storage. I'm not seeing a problem.
Well, most people don't want to lose even 20% of their phone's storage in a single app, much less 50%.
And that's just for those satisfied to only have info for one state. What about people regularly travelling between 1-2 states?
That said, I question the OP storage math. At least with vector information, I know that something like Navigon's GPS/map app, can store the whole of US (including the smallest of towns and cities) in around 1GB.
Well, most people don't want to lose even 20% of their phone's storage in a single app, much less 50%.
And that's just for those satisfied to only have info for one state. What about people regularly travelling between 1-2 states?
That said, I question the OP storage math. At least with vector information, I know that something like Navigon's GPS/map app, can store the whole of US (including the smallest of towns and cities) in around 1GB.
Vector data has a much smaller footprint in most cases, but takes lots of processing to render, and even more if you need to be able to zoom around the map. Rendering the US down to z17 as raster tiles allows for efficient processing, but could easily get into 10s of GB (which makes sense, since it is creating thousands and thousands of png images). The size grows exponentially with each zoom level though, so if you only need something like z12, you might be able get it into the 10s of MB range.
[deleted]
I wasn't saying I would want the entirety of Washington on my phone. Quite the contrary. I was pointing out the sheer area that fits in that amount of storage. It's 71,362 square miles.
If you're traveling regularly between two states, you'd want your origin city, destination city, and your route with maybe a couple miles on either side. Say a 250-mile route, and 200 square miles at either end. I bet it fits in <2GB.
If you're traveling regularly between two states, you'd want your origin city, destination city, and your route with maybe a couple miles on either side. Say a 250-mile route, and 200 square miles at either end. I bet it fits in <2GB.
The OpenStreetMap vector data for Calgary is about 6.2MB-20MB, depending on the format.
You demonstrated quite eloquently that in this case, offline is superior.
Off the top of my head, GMail is the only one. Mostly because Outlook's/Thunderbird's UI and UX are absolute ass.
SAAS is inferior in:
* games
* text editors
* photo editors
* IDEs
Backup storage is okay, but I live in a country with tight bandwidth caps so I can't really use things, plus I don't want Google or Dropbox or MeGa snooping at what I upload.
So I would never pay to use any of the above things, and I would certainly NEVER pay Adobe for anything. I'm fortunate that I don't need to use their products.
SAAS is inferior in:
* games
* text editors
* photo editors
* IDEs
Backup storage is okay, but I live in a country with tight bandwidth caps so I can't really use things, plus I don't want Google or Dropbox or MeGa snooping at what I upload.
So I would never pay to use any of the above things, and I would certainly NEVER pay Adobe for anything. I'm fortunate that I don't need to use their products.
> SAAS is inferior in:
> * games
Isn't steam like this? The bits get downloaded to your machine, but if Steam goes offline your SOL.
What steam could use is better download management. If they moved over to an on-demand streaming architecture it'd be really huge. The days you'd need to preload software could be over. This sort of thing has been solved many times before, so it's technically possible. In fact, as I type this I wonder why they haven't done it already.
> * games
Isn't steam like this? The bits get downloaded to your machine, but if Steam goes offline your SOL.
What steam could use is better download management. If they moved over to an on-demand streaming architecture it'd be really huge. The days you'd need to preload software could be over. This sort of thing has been solved many times before, so it's technically possible. In fact, as I type this I wonder why they haven't done it already.
Well, Steam is inferior for that exact reason.
It does have an "offline mode" where it will pre-decrypt the games or whatever it does behind the scenes.
Why would on-demand streaming be a good thing? Now you have to worry about ISPs and bandwidth, it doesn't solve the problem.
It does have an "offline mode" where it will pre-decrypt the games or whatever it does behind the scenes.
Why would on-demand streaming be a good thing? Now you have to worry about ISPs and bandwidth, it doesn't solve the problem.
I think it would be a good thing because if I have a hankering to play a game I don't have installed, I wouldn't need to wait for an hour for it to download.
I need to worry about ISPs and bandwidth before, it's just that now I can be more frivolous with what I have installed on my machine (no sense leaving something installed "just in case").
I need to worry about ISPs and bandwidth before, it's just that now I can be more frivolous with what I have installed on my machine (no sense leaving something installed "just in case").
My self-hosted apps work on my laptop when I have no network connectivity. That's a big win for me.
Funny you mention Mappoint. It's exactly what I use when I'm navigating for my wife on trips. It works fine in areas with poor wireless data coverage. (We supplement with Waze to get traffic reports, but "self-hosted" Mappoint guarantees we won't lose map coverage because of radio issues.)
Funny you mention Mappoint. It's exactly what I use when I'm navigating for my wife on trips. It works fine in areas with poor wireless data coverage. (We supplement with Waze to get traffic reports, but "self-hosted" Mappoint guarantees we won't lose map coverage because of radio issues.)
You've perhaps never been in the "damn, where am I...... Bollocks no signal, I still don't know", situation and that was just 30 miles from home. I bought a gps with the maps loaded at the first opportunity.
OsmAnd+ works great offline ;)
"We've learned to live with centralized water and electricity and banking, all outside of our control, rather than rely on on-premises solutions."
Not necessarily true. I'd argue that banking is much less centralized (clearing behind the various banks you might choose from is, of course, but in the meanwhile I can get most of what I need done if their independent system is up), and I grew up on a property at the edge of my town of ~50K with only electricity and phone as centralized services. We were on our own for everything else, water from a well, sewage treatment with a septic tank, heating from a big propane tank, which can be filled by various vendors, although the systems behind them are centralized, but there's plenty of reserves so that short term outages aren't an issue, we even burned our trash....
A lot of us believe in having a greater degree of self-reliance, e.g. I do backups to disk and LTO tape (some tapes of which live in a safe deposit box), and use rsync.net, a very low level SaaS provider for further redundancy.
I'd never allow my livelihood to depend on 24x7 external services except for electricity (no electricity == no modern civilization, which would eventually kill me for medical reasons).
Not necessarily true. I'd argue that banking is much less centralized (clearing behind the various banks you might choose from is, of course, but in the meanwhile I can get most of what I need done if their independent system is up), and I grew up on a property at the edge of my town of ~50K with only electricity and phone as centralized services. We were on our own for everything else, water from a well, sewage treatment with a septic tank, heating from a big propane tank, which can be filled by various vendors, although the systems behind them are centralized, but there's plenty of reserves so that short term outages aren't an issue, we even burned our trash....
A lot of us believe in having a greater degree of self-reliance, e.g. I do backups to disk and LTO tape (some tapes of which live in a safe deposit box), and use rsync.net, a very low level SaaS provider for further redundancy.
I'd never allow my livelihood to depend on 24x7 external services except for electricity (no electricity == no modern civilization, which would eventually kill me for medical reasons).
I don't completely agree with this. Many homes and probably even some business are on well water and/or septic systems. Backup electrical generators on-site are commonplace at offices. Lots of noise (but maybe less substance) is being made of bitcoin taking banking back into the individual's control.
[deleted]
I don't have the data to back it up, but (for example) data loss as a whole have probably considerably gone down with transitions to SaaS.
Sure you can self-host, but who do you trust more: some guy on your team who has other things to do, or a team that does only that? And a team whose livelyhood depends on uptime/data protection.
Here people can't work, but imagine the amount of work if there was a data failure on your machine? Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.
Sure you can self-host, but who do you trust more: some guy on your team who has other things to do, or a team that does only that? And a team whose livelyhood depends on uptime/data protection.
Here people can't work, but imagine the amount of work if there was a data failure on your machine? Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.
time machine
in the event of a theft, I can walk into an apple store, purchase an in stock macbook, let time machine recover for ~30 minutes, and get back to work
edit: just to be clear, I bet the vast majority of users will, even after this 24+ hours, experience less net downtime. Nonetheless, when I need to hit a deadline, with installed software, I have a viable plan b. The viable plan b here appears to be to grovel before clients whose deadlines you've blown...
in the event of a theft, I can walk into an apple store, purchase an in stock macbook, let time machine recover for ~30 minutes, and get back to work
edit: just to be clear, I bet the vast majority of users will, even after this 24+ hours, experience less net downtime. Nonetheless, when I need to hit a deadline, with installed software, I have a viable plan b. The viable plan b here appears to be to grovel before clients whose deadlines you've blown...
Check out Carbon Copy Cloner [1] if you haven't already. It will create a bootable clone of your drive, with deltas and versions and all that good stuff. During fast-moving projects I usually clone daily. In the event of a drive failure I can simply reboot the Mac from the clone as if nothing happened, cloning back to new internal drive (or machine in case of theft).
[1] http://www.bombich.com/
[1] http://www.bombich.com/
good point, maybe the minimum for backups and the like have gotten so good that Toy Story-style "We have lost everything" situations don't really happen as much anymore.
Design tools are definitely a different category than some other enterprise-y software though. At least Evernote still allows me to use it if the servers were down.
Design tools are definitely a different category than some other enterprise-y software though. At least Evernote still allows me to use it if the servers were down.
I'm sitting in work right now (PC repair shop) and they really really do. We get students coming in the week before thesis deadlines with dead hard drives and no backups of a years work. We get about 2 or 3 people daily coming in asking about replacing a dead hard drive and recovering data.
I recently spilled a little coffee on a MacBook Air. As the screen flickered its last flicks, I zipped up my .ssh directory and put it on Dropbox. Got off the bus, went to the Apple Store...I Was back to work in the time it took to install homebrew.
> Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.
Err.. what? I confess I've not looked into Adobe too closely, but why would you keep your data (only) on their servers? You'd need backup -- just as you'd have to have backup in place for your personal machines.
A typical scenario is a photographer that edits images -- you have maybe a terabyte of data you need access to, and have backed up, in the day-to-day -- and you need access to editing software.
Also, you seem to misunderstand -- I'm not saying I won't use or pay for SaaS (be that Software or Storage as-a-service) -- I'm saying I want a viable self-host alternative -- where self-host might mean that I can pay someone -- anyone -- to get things up and running quickly if I need it, and not be limited to whatever support any one vendor is willing/able to provide.
Now, personally, I'd probably take self-hostable to mean there's a tested ansible recipe that I can plug into a fresh vps, and be up and running. But not everyone wants to, or knows how to, be their own sysadmin -- but having someone guarantee that, yes, if you need it, this and that company can get you up and running in an hour for $amount.
> Here people can't work, but imagine the amount of work if there was a data failure on your machine? Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.
Ok, so lets say we're a small team of 5 non-technical designers, and I've lost my laptop. I have yesterdays backup, and my team mates can work. I'll have to spend an hour installing Photoshop on a new macbook pro I went to the store and got. Maybe an hour restoring backups or whatever. Lets say I loose 4 hours of work, and make up 2 in the evening. So we've lost one quarter of a total of 5 work-days today, due to catastrophic failure.
Now consider this outage: the whole team is down, and we've lost (more than) 5 work-days. If there was a viable self-host option, maybe we could've all squeezed in 6 hours of work after throwing dollars at Whomever Inc to set up a fallback solution for us. Also much better than all eggs in one basket.
Err.. what? I confess I've not looked into Adobe too closely, but why would you keep your data (only) on their servers? You'd need backup -- just as you'd have to have backup in place for your personal machines.
A typical scenario is a photographer that edits images -- you have maybe a terabyte of data you need access to, and have backed up, in the day-to-day -- and you need access to editing software.
Also, you seem to misunderstand -- I'm not saying I won't use or pay for SaaS (be that Software or Storage as-a-service) -- I'm saying I want a viable self-host alternative -- where self-host might mean that I can pay someone -- anyone -- to get things up and running quickly if I need it, and not be limited to whatever support any one vendor is willing/able to provide.
Now, personally, I'd probably take self-hostable to mean there's a tested ansible recipe that I can plug into a fresh vps, and be up and running. But not everyone wants to, or knows how to, be their own sysadmin -- but having someone guarantee that, yes, if you need it, this and that company can get you up and running in an hour for $amount.
> Here people can't work, but imagine the amount of work if there was a data failure on your machine? Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.
Ok, so lets say we're a small team of 5 non-technical designers, and I've lost my laptop. I have yesterdays backup, and my team mates can work. I'll have to spend an hour installing Photoshop on a new macbook pro I went to the store and got. Maybe an hour restoring backups or whatever. Lets say I loose 4 hours of work, and make up 2 in the evening. So we've lost one quarter of a total of 5 work-days today, due to catastrophic failure.
Now consider this outage: the whole team is down, and we've lost (more than) 5 work-days. If there was a viable self-host option, maybe we could've all squeezed in 6 hours of work after throwing dollars at Whomever Inc to set up a fallback solution for us. Also much better than all eggs in one basket.
The other thing is that this outage is affecting whole departments. If you lose your laptop, that's one person out. If the SaaS goes down, all users lose out. In a department heavy with photoshop users, it brings that department to a halt.
Actually, the situation isn't that bad: the outage hasn't affected whole departments, it's affected a whole industry. Which means that your competitors' design departments are just as screwed as yours, so you have nothing to worry about.
What if the SaaS closes? Everyone but the people using non SaaS will be in big trouble, maybe enough to cause bankruptcy if they are very centric as that's all lost too.
Sure you can self-host, but who do you trust more: some guy on your team who has other things to do, or a team that does only that? And a team whose livelyhood depends on uptime/data protection.
I think this is the fundamental fallacy that SaaS companies are promoting.
Objectively, the answer is quite obvious in my experience: self-hosted systems are much more reliable than external ones, as soon as you have a reasonably competent person to run them and a second person with basic competence who can take over in an emergency if the first person is not around.
For a start, one of the most consistently unreliable things in many business environments I've worked in was the Internet connection. Workmen cut through underground cables while they're building the new office block down the road. Someone at your ISP accidentally disconnects you while they're in the cabinet hooking up their new customer. Someone moves in across the street with a badly configured wireless router and screws up the wireless frequency for everyone until the regulatory agency gets someone on-site to track down the problem and make them fix their router a week later. Relying on any Internet-based service for something you need full-time adds one more potential point of failure with a demonstrable risk that it will actually fail from time to time.
That is quite separate to the unfavourable track record of many large cloud/SaaS/PaaS companies, including almost all of the big names, compared to running systems in-house. I was genuinely surprised by some of the comments when GitHub was down the other day, where some people were complaining about not even being able to push changes to production because they were so entangled in dependencies on GH and related on-line services like CI systems that they couldn't extricate themselves.
I think this is the fundamental fallacy that SaaS companies are promoting.
Objectively, the answer is quite obvious in my experience: self-hosted systems are much more reliable than external ones, as soon as you have a reasonably competent person to run them and a second person with basic competence who can take over in an emergency if the first person is not around.
For a start, one of the most consistently unreliable things in many business environments I've worked in was the Internet connection. Workmen cut through underground cables while they're building the new office block down the road. Someone at your ISP accidentally disconnects you while they're in the cabinet hooking up their new customer. Someone moves in across the street with a badly configured wireless router and screws up the wireless frequency for everyone until the regulatory agency gets someone on-site to track down the problem and make them fix their router a week later. Relying on any Internet-based service for something you need full-time adds one more potential point of failure with a demonstrable risk that it will actually fail from time to time.
That is quite separate to the unfavourable track record of many large cloud/SaaS/PaaS companies, including almost all of the big names, compared to running systems in-house. I was genuinely surprised by some of the comments when GitHub was down the other day, where some people were complaining about not even being able to push changes to production because they were so entangled in dependencies on GH and related on-line services like CI systems that they couldn't extricate themselves.
And a way to get the DATA.
I'm building a POS app for the invoice. One of the main requirements (self impose) is that the data is local-first and sync with the cloud. THIS point is one of the hardest to implement for me, and I still have not figured how do it well.
But still can't release this app without this. I believe that have a exit strategy for the app data is too important (the data is stored in a sqlite database, with decent naming and very simple structure).
I'm building a POS app for the invoice. One of the main requirements (self impose) is that the data is local-first and sync with the cloud. THIS point is one of the hardest to implement for me, and I still have not figured how do it well.
But still can't release this app without this. I believe that have a exit strategy for the app data is too important (the data is stored in a sqlite database, with decent naming and very simple structure).
Something but not everything is suit for SaaS, not nothing either.
I think Adobe CC is an example of useless cloud service. In fact I think the only reason Adobe insist on providing a cloud service is to avoid piracy.
I think Adobe CC is an example of useless cloud service. In fact I think the only reason Adobe insist on providing a cloud service is to avoid piracy.
Adobe CC is a sales experiment if you can extract subscription fees from tradition desktop software users.
As a user I hope they fail. As a traditional desktop software vendor I hope they succeed.
As a user I hope they fail. As a traditional desktop software vendor I hope they succeed.
Other companies have proven that subscription models work when you get it right.
I pay a yearly subscription for my IDE so I can get major updates.
If I stop paying the software doesn't stop working.
Adobe is just doing what adobe does best - extracting the most amount of money with the worst possible product they can.
I pay a yearly subscription for my IDE so I can get major updates.
If I stop paying the software doesn't stop working.
Adobe is just doing what adobe does best - extracting the most amount of money with the worst possible product they can.
It is potentially relevant that Adobe are reportedly stopping selling traditional boxed versions of older CS versions in a few days, leaving CC the only option for new purchasers [but see edit below]. In the announcement, they claimed this was being done earlier than they had originally expected (implying in passing that they always intended to do this) and this was because CC had been so popular with their customers. However, they didn't seem to give any sort of data to back up that claim, which makes me rather skeptical about how much of this is driven by accounting and how much of it is driven by PR.
I agree CC is a sales experiment, and as both a user and a software developer it's an interesting one. I do wonder how much of any initial success has been a honeymoon period, though. Another interesting dichotomy was seeing that on the one hand there was a related statement from someone at Adobe about how customers had been worried that they would double their price once everyone is locked in but of course they'd never do that because it would be a betrayal of trust, while on the other hand anyone who signed up on the $30/month plan is about to hit the end of their first year's special offer and go up to the normal $50/month (but this is OK with Adobe because the offer was always advertised as limited up-front). That may all be true and legally above board, but I'm not sure how many people who did the maths at the $30 price point are still going to be as happy in their second year as they were in their first.
In other news, our existing installations of boxed CS products cost us nothing extra this month and didn't go down this week, and we're still waiting to meet either the client who we couldn't work with because we didn't have CC or the killer feature that Adobe have rolled out in a CC upgrade over the past year that would have made anything we do significantly more productive.
Ironically, there are plenty of ways Adobe could have got more money from us without going the subscription route. There are several features on our wish list that would have justified the cost of a traditional upgrade alone, even with no other changes. However, since Adobe don't seem to be going in any of those directions with CC, we're quite happy to exercise our choice not to pay them for the (worthless, to us) changes they are making instead.
Edit: It appears from other sources, including Adobe's own FAQ on their site, that CS6 will still be available to individual customers via download, just not in boxed media. It's the volume licensing programmes for perpetual purchases that are being discontinued on 30 May to push business and government users towards CC. There are some other interesting data points mentioned in this write-up:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/enterprise/387724/adobe-to-halt-...
I agree CC is a sales experiment, and as both a user and a software developer it's an interesting one. I do wonder how much of any initial success has been a honeymoon period, though. Another interesting dichotomy was seeing that on the one hand there was a related statement from someone at Adobe about how customers had been worried that they would double their price once everyone is locked in but of course they'd never do that because it would be a betrayal of trust, while on the other hand anyone who signed up on the $30/month plan is about to hit the end of their first year's special offer and go up to the normal $50/month (but this is OK with Adobe because the offer was always advertised as limited up-front). That may all be true and legally above board, but I'm not sure how many people who did the maths at the $30 price point are still going to be as happy in their second year as they were in their first.
In other news, our existing installations of boxed CS products cost us nothing extra this month and didn't go down this week, and we're still waiting to meet either the client who we couldn't work with because we didn't have CC or the killer feature that Adobe have rolled out in a CC upgrade over the past year that would have made anything we do significantly more productive.
Ironically, there are plenty of ways Adobe could have got more money from us without going the subscription route. There are several features on our wish list that would have justified the cost of a traditional upgrade alone, even with no other changes. However, since Adobe don't seem to be going in any of those directions with CC, we're quite happy to exercise our choice not to pay them for the (worthless, to us) changes they are making instead.
Edit: It appears from other sources, including Adobe's own FAQ on their site, that CS6 will still be available to individual customers via download, just not in boxed media. It's the volume licensing programmes for perpetual purchases that are being discontinued on 30 May to push business and government users towards CC. There are some other interesting data points mentioned in this write-up:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/enterprise/387724/adobe-to-halt-...
I'm not sure to understand your point. Does it boil down to "single point of failure are bad"?
There are alternatives to each of the Adobe products, self hosted and available offline. People going the Creative Cloud route for their daily job are in a situation where the alternative costed too much or doesn't allow them to do their job in a sufficient way, so there was no real viable options from the start.
The problem is not really to trust Adobe or not. Adobe doesnt have any track record of great online services, I don't think they have an image of high quality software either, they do some amazing things and bring killer features, but I harldy heard anyone being loyal to Adobe itself.
I think this whole discussion would have taken a different turn if it wasn't Adobe but Amazon AWS or Google. When S3 is down, I don't remember seeing more than a few comments in the 'you should have self hosted your data' line. Why is it so different for Adobe ?
There are alternatives to each of the Adobe products, self hosted and available offline. People going the Creative Cloud route for their daily job are in a situation where the alternative costed too much or doesn't allow them to do their job in a sufficient way, so there was no real viable options from the start.
The problem is not really to trust Adobe or not. Adobe doesnt have any track record of great online services, I don't think they have an image of high quality software either, they do some amazing things and bring killer features, but I harldy heard anyone being loyal to Adobe itself.
I think this whole discussion would have taken a different turn if it wasn't Adobe but Amazon AWS or Google. When S3 is down, I don't remember seeing more than a few comments in the 'you should have self hosted your data' line. Why is it so different for Adobe ?
> I don't think they have an image of high quality software either, they do some amazing things and bring killer features, but I harldy heard anyone being loyal to Adobe itself.
Having worked with designers I'm going to disagree. For most designers Photoshop or Illustrator are the only tools they'll even consider using because they're so much more powerful than the competition. That's changing a little with things like Pixelmator, but even then people have to learn a new workflow after decades of using Photoshop.
Having worked with designers I'm going to disagree. For most designers Photoshop or Illustrator are the only tools they'll even consider using because they're so much more powerful than the competition. That's changing a little with things like Pixelmator, but even then people have to learn a new workflow after decades of using Photoshop.
Photoshop and Illustrator are not quality software in many ways, but for professional designers they contain features that competitors do not. And a bigger issue locking people in is that if you are collaborating with anyone, everyone has to use the same thing. Competitors to Illustrator are generally not fully compatible and can't perfectly open an Illustrator file.
I agree with the power of Photoshop or Illustrator. But do you consider it highly well designed, solid and polished software ?
I am not a Photoshop user so my image is from hearsay, feel free to state your opinion. But what I heard was it's bloated, doesn't fully integrate/take advantage of the OS and hardware potential, crashes every once in a while and you'll have nothing to do about it.
To make a parrallel with coding tools, I feel it's on the same league as Eclipse. It's the very obvious choice for some application stacks, has tons of feature and it's plenty powerful. But I don't think most people love working with it (at least I don't), there's just no good enough alternative for the thing they want to do.
I am not a Photoshop user so my image is from hearsay, feel free to state your opinion. But what I heard was it's bloated, doesn't fully integrate/take advantage of the OS and hardware potential, crashes every once in a while and you'll have nothing to do about it.
To make a parrallel with coding tools, I feel it's on the same league as Eclipse. It's the very obvious choice for some application stacks, has tons of feature and it's plenty powerful. But I don't think most people love working with it (at least I don't), there's just no good enough alternative for the thing they want to do.
> Does it boil down to "single point of failure are bad"?
In the sense that "trust in a single entity as a single point of failure" - sure. Adobe can cut you off for any number of reasons, an outage being just one.
> When S3 is down, I don't remember seeing more than a few comments in the 'you should have self hosted your data' line .
One of those comments might have been mine. Still, I'm not saying that you should self-host, I'm saying you should use solutions that you could realistically self-host should the need arise.
So if you use s3 for your (non-web-related) data, maybe have riak-cs ready to go as a backup (it's a bit of a contrived example, because you probably either need a "cloud fs" of some sort, or mercurial/git or whatnot, not "s3" to be able to keep working).
I absolutely think one should have an alternative ready if one is heavily based on amazon -- at least have the option to spin up a minimal set of equivalent services as an openstack/nebula solution.
There are many reasons why you might get into trouble with any one provider, not just that their infrastructure goes down. If they hold all your data (and your backups) -- you pretty much have no leverage at all.
In the sense that "trust in a single entity as a single point of failure" - sure. Adobe can cut you off for any number of reasons, an outage being just one.
> When S3 is down, I don't remember seeing more than a few comments in the 'you should have self hosted your data' line .
One of those comments might have been mine. Still, I'm not saying that you should self-host, I'm saying you should use solutions that you could realistically self-host should the need arise.
So if you use s3 for your (non-web-related) data, maybe have riak-cs ready to go as a backup (it's a bit of a contrived example, because you probably either need a "cloud fs" of some sort, or mercurial/git or whatnot, not "s3" to be able to keep working).
I absolutely think one should have an alternative ready if one is heavily based on amazon -- at least have the option to spin up a minimal set of equivalent services as an openstack/nebula solution.
There are many reasons why you might get into trouble with any one provider, not just that their infrastructure goes down. If they hold all your data (and your backups) -- you pretty much have no leverage at all.
For professionals working in design there Is no real alternative to Photoshop.
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And this is the sticking point for cloud-focussed systems. It's too early to implement an "always-on" attitude in so many parts of the world. I hope the backlash to this 24-hour outage (which in some cases will lose clients over) acts as the poster-child for would-be cloud-only services.
As a result of this outage today, I found myself switching Pixelmator and Sketch. So far, so good.
I'm a developer, and I only use Adobes products to pull images and the like out of Photoshop/Illustrator files given to me by my design team. I don't want to use Adobes software, as its entirely wasted on me. But I don't think any of the other apps handle PSD's (a horrid file format) well enough to allow me to replace them :( Anyone in my position that has replaced them? What should I look at?
I've had fair success using Gimp for similar use-cases -- with the caveat that that is mostly for design mock-ups made in photoshop (no vector graphics to speak of).
There's definitely a learning curve, and Gimp still has a long way to go -- but it's passed into "usable" quite a while ago for my uses.
[edit: if anyone knows of other alternatives (preferably that runs on Linux and/or under Wine, preferably Free software - but also closed source -- I'd love to hear about it]
There's definitely a learning curve, and Gimp still has a long way to go -- but it's passed into "usable" quite a while ago for my uses.
[edit: if anyone knows of other alternatives (preferably that runs on Linux and/or under Wine, preferably Free software - but also closed source -- I'd love to hear about it]
I used to do this until somebody sent me an Illustrator file. GIMP or any other free alternative (e.g. Inkscape) I've found won't handle those correctly.
I recently had to open a simple Illustrator file in Inkscape and it worked well enough. But yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if it choked on more complicated stuff. You can of course always ask your clients to save as SVG.
I found that SVGs between Illustrator and InkScape aren't fully compatible either. Sometimes objects wouldn't get filled in the same way. Most problems seemed to be on the Illustrator side, though, not InkScape. Or maybe the other guy didn't quite know what he was doing, but still that's a real problem, and he isn't dumb either.
I bet you'd get all sorts of minor glitches and artefacts with even more complicated vector imagery.
I bet you'd get all sorts of minor glitches and artefacts with even more complicated vector imagery.
Sadly Gimp doesn't really work. I tried to use it but always were differences when showing the psd. (Missing effects, bad colored layers, etc. )
what made Fireworks cool is that it used png as native file format,so even if you didnt have the software installed,you could open the file with any soft that support PNG. And guess what ,that wonderfull piece of software was retired by adobe.
Everything Macromedia made, I loved. Then Adobe bought them, and killed all the software that I loved using. Sigh.
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I just bought acorn and idraw but everyone here is recommending pixelmator and sketch :(
FWIW, I moved from Pixelmator to Acorn and prefer Acorn immensely. Don't feel so bad.
For what little I do that doesn't require spinning up Photoshop on the Windows beast, I use Acorn on the MBPr. It just feels nicer than Pixelmator to me.
You can still use CC software, you just can't update or have access to their shitty sync software.
But all the apps work, they don't require an internet connection (for 30 days at least), so it's not the disaster everyone is making it out to be.
But all the apps work, they don't require an internet connection (for 30 days at least), so it's not the disaster everyone is making it out to be.
No, if you read the very fine article, you'd see that users specifically were encountering problems running apps. Some users were unable to run the apps getting unexpected errors when trying to do so despite what you say.
Not true. I couldn't launch any of the applications.
Totally false. Many people are unable to launch the applications at all.
No, about a dozen designers here couldn't even launch Photoshop for a solid hour. Something really broke today it seems.
It really is the moments like this when I look at my stack of Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, and Darktable, and am glad that I invested in the alternate solution.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted for this: I’d say you’re allowed your little moment of schadenfreude after having invested all these time in tools many designers won’t yet take seriously!
The real catch though, is that design work is almost always done in collaboration—so that it’s not just enough to switch yourself, you need to find other people to work with who use similar tools.
The real catch though, is that design work is almost always done in collaboration—so that it’s not just enough to switch yourself, you need to find other people to work with who use similar tools.
That's what you get when a business has a monopole on a market.You're now free to go to competition... not.Put the industry itself is responsible for this.
Bohemian Coding has finally fixed the grid snapping bug that plagued all previous versions of Sketch so I will definitely not be renewing my CC subscription when it expires. CC feels like it has much more do with Adobe's needs than mine.
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
- Leslie Lamport
- Leslie Lamport
I consider this quote tounge in cheek. A properly distributed system will keep your system functioning even when remote components are down.
Unless you require both consistent data and partition-tolerance ;-)
http://www.slideshare.net/alekbr/cap-theorem
http://www.slideshare.net/alekbr/cap-theorem
They keyword here being "properly".
Complete non-hacked photoshop CS2 is freely available with serial - http://www.techspot.com/downloads/3689-adobe-photoshop-cs2.h...
It works pretty well in Wine as well, if you fiddle with the settings.
It works pretty well in Wine as well, if you fiddle with the settings.
If you Google around Adobe released a statement saying that those CS2 downloads and provided serial number are for customers who bought CS2. Adobe switched off their activation servers but made the serial numbers available to mitigate that.
Adobe's actions and disclaimer on the downloads is interesting - they seem to be using vague legal language, e.g. using "may not" instead of "must not", deleting posts on its forum that claim using those downloads without a license is illegal, etc. To me it looks like they're just trying to discourage it somewhat officially; given their rather lax stance on piracy, they probably believe it's better that someone uses unlicensed CS2 than something non-Adobe.
They are undoubtedly for those customers, but legally you have to enforce copyrights to keep them. There is no way that Adobe could argue that they are still enforcing copyright restrictions on the binaries of CS2.
You're confusing copyright with trademarks. Trademarks must be defended if you want to keep them (this is logical: if other people are using them, they are no longer a mark of your trade). That doesn't apply to copyright; it's an entirely automatic process.
You are right. Thinking it through you can of course put a restrictive license on stuff that is publicly available, otherwise of course open source would not work. What Adobe may have done is confused their original license terms by posting a download with key, so a court is very unlikely to award more than nominal damages should Adobe get annoyed with it being used, but you are perfectly correct, their copyright still holds up.
If you're happy using software you don't have a license for, why not grab CS6 off of the your favorite torrent site.
People bitch and bitch about DRM (and god knows I do as well), but as soon as a company tries to release software without any licensing hoops or other checks, people jump all over it and shout "Hey everybody, this company isn't going out of their way stop me from using their software, it must be free!!!!" Just because you can download and run some piece of software from a companies website doesn't mean you have a license to freely use it.
People bitch and bitch about DRM (and god knows I do as well), but as soon as a company tries to release software without any licensing hoops or other checks, people jump all over it and shout "Hey everybody, this company isn't going out of their way stop me from using their software, it must be free!!!!" Just because you can download and run some piece of software from a companies website doesn't mean you have a license to freely use it.
It seems like you are ignoring the context in which this is happening. People aren't going for the CS2 or cracked CS6 because they want to, they are going for it because the service they have paid for is gone.
I am recommending this on a thread for people who can't use their paid for software from Adobe. Sure, some other people might use it as well, but seeing as Adobe have already calculated that they can afford the risk before they started offering CS2 plus serials for download, I don't think I need to worry too much. As far as downloading a cracked version, well there is no way I am going to recommend to people to try out random cracked stuff off torrent sites.
And CS2 is more than enough for most folks.
Cloud computing is a great theoretical idea, but extremely fragile in the face of serious crisis, like economic meltdown, wars, sanctions or even natural disasters.
All the websites, always-on apps, mobile operating systems, etc will be worthless if (when) the shit hits the fan. In case of global economic meltdown, the companies would be unable to pay for the huge data-centers, the providers will go belly up and it would be next to impossible to restore or recover the data stored in the 'cloud'.
Imagine waking up one day and not having access to the Internet. Try it and see how much you can do with your computer.
And with Russia under KGB dictatorship (read: insane, evil people), that shit can hit the fan as soon as this year.
That's why it is imperative to create an offline database of important things which would be available even when the clouds evaporate.
By 'important' things, I mean open source code (eg. offline github), wikipedia and other encyclopaedias, scientific works, books, music, movies. From this angle, I consider thepiratebay to be the most important archive of art that humanity has collectively produced. I've even started working on some sketches of a distributed read-only filesystem based partly on the concepts in the bitcoin blockchain, but I guess a simple solution using torrents plus a distributed offline index, can do the job just fine. Anyone else thought about this ?
All the websites, always-on apps, mobile operating systems, etc will be worthless if (when) the shit hits the fan. In case of global economic meltdown, the companies would be unable to pay for the huge data-centers, the providers will go belly up and it would be next to impossible to restore or recover the data stored in the 'cloud'.
Imagine waking up one day and not having access to the Internet. Try it and see how much you can do with your computer.
And with Russia under KGB dictatorship (read: insane, evil people), that shit can hit the fan as soon as this year.
That's why it is imperative to create an offline database of important things which would be available even when the clouds evaporate.
By 'important' things, I mean open source code (eg. offline github), wikipedia and other encyclopaedias, scientific works, books, music, movies. From this angle, I consider thepiratebay to be the most important archive of art that humanity has collectively produced. I've even started working on some sketches of a distributed read-only filesystem based partly on the concepts in the bitcoin blockchain, but I guess a simple solution using torrents plus a distributed offline index, can do the job just fine. Anyone else thought about this ?
A simple solution that works now tends to beat a complex solution still on the drawing board. I'd say go ahead with the torrents plus distributed off-line index.
Could this be grounds for a class action?
> Adobe had categorically assured users and journalists, when replacing Creative Suite with Creative Cloud in May 2013, that apps only needed to check in with the server every 30 days, telling MacUser in a written reply that products would continue to work for 99 days in the absence of a server connection.
> Adobe had categorically assured users and journalists, when replacing Creative Suite with Creative Cloud in May 2013, that apps only needed to check in with the server every 30 days, telling MacUser in a written reply that products would continue to work for 99 days in the absence of a server connection.
I find it funny that my graphics card is now faster than the world's fastest supercomputer in 1997, yet I am forced to "offload" stuff to cloud.
I bought CS6 suite as it became clear Adobe is moving full steam ahead with CC. I think it is one of those examples where the move serves only company's interests and doesn't make much sense to users (except for continuous updates that might accidentally break things as well). The initial pricing might have been competitive for some packages, for many users however caused substantial increase if they used to skip one cycle for upgrades. I understand Adobe needs a predictable revenue stream though I consider this as a flop.
I bought CS6 suite as it became clear Adobe is moving full steam ahead with CC. I think it is one of those examples where the move serves only company's interests and doesn't make much sense to users (except for continuous updates that might accidentally break things as well). The initial pricing might have been competitive for some packages, for many users however caused substantial increase if they used to skip one cycle for upgrades. I understand Adobe needs a predictable revenue stream though I consider this as a flop.
When I had to go out to buy licenses a few months ago for an intern at our company and found out that it is no longer possible to buy the regular Adobe licenses for the latest products we solved this by using competitor products and open source projects to give us a patched together set of tools.
The money was not an issue, what was an issue is that I think that tools should not be shoehorned against all logic into a pay-to-play model, they should just work. Imagine your c compiler or your editor failing to work because some third party service is down. To me that is not an option.
I hope Adobe learns their lesson and re-instates the licensing model they used in the past and gets rid of their 'Creative Cloud' nonsense asap.
And if they don't then I hope some competitor will realize this is a huge opportunity and will jump into the gap opened up here.
Adobe is good, but they can be beaten, especially if they shoot themselves in the foot (repeatedly).
The money was not an issue, what was an issue is that I think that tools should not be shoehorned against all logic into a pay-to-play model, they should just work. Imagine your c compiler or your editor failing to work because some third party service is down. To me that is not an option.
I hope Adobe learns their lesson and re-instates the licensing model they used in the past and gets rid of their 'Creative Cloud' nonsense asap.
And if they don't then I hope some competitor will realize this is a huge opportunity and will jump into the gap opened up here.
Adobe is good, but they can be beaten, especially if they shoot themselves in the foot (repeatedly).
Meanwhile, sensible people who don't rent their software are laughing from CS6.
Until CS6 stops being supported by some operating system or processor architecture in the future.
x86_64 will never die, it's too pervasive, and as much as mobile fans think the future is underpowered ARM with the actual processing being done by a third party sifting through your personal data (who generally use x86_64 anyway), reality isn't following their expectations.
I don't know about that.
And anyway, I've had 2 expensive pieces of software meant for professional production, that just stopped working over the years for various reasons. "Old" versions of Vegas Video don't work in anything past Windows XP. Same goes for "old" versions of Pro Tools. Also, with the old Pro Tools, make sure you don't have a dual core processor, because that breaks it too.
My point is, there are many factors which can suddenly render software obsolete. I wouldn't expect CS6 to run on anything but really old unsupported hardware in 5 - 10 years.
One of the best things you can do for your career is to remain flexible about the tools you use. Always be on the lookout for alternatives.
And anyway, I've had 2 expensive pieces of software meant for professional production, that just stopped working over the years for various reasons. "Old" versions of Vegas Video don't work in anything past Windows XP. Same goes for "old" versions of Pro Tools. Also, with the old Pro Tools, make sure you don't have a dual core processor, because that breaks it too.
My point is, there are many factors which can suddenly render software obsolete. I wouldn't expect CS6 to run on anything but really old unsupported hardware in 5 - 10 years.
One of the best things you can do for your career is to remain flexible about the tools you use. Always be on the lookout for alternatives.
Then virtualise it - by the time it doesn't, someone will have Linux-style containers working in windows.
Step 1. Buy CC subscription and install what you need.
Step 2. Look for a good patch/crack that makes everything work ofline, and that still allows you to update.
Step 3. Make peace with the risk of having installed some possible malware on your machine with the patch/crack (ie. do the sensible thing of doing you shopping and ebanking on the other dedicated machine you only use for this).
Step 4. Stop caring that step 2 is illegal and get on with your life, you paid for the damn thing and nobody will really sue you for using it in a way that breaks the damn EULA anyway...