So... how much money should I spend on Adobe software?

I forgot how great max is. a nice vacation away from the annoying devs at work.

Yep. Beats being in the office for sure.

haha yeah, I meant it the other way though.

Ha! In my case it is a break from some awful marketing people.

yeah, I guarantee that's how they feel about me

max on fire

so much for 32/mo. I think my special intro rates that I've had for ages has worn off because it just jumped to 50/mo

http://www.gimp.org

Noticed that CC is available now. I reckon this is where I get off the train (at least for now)

I think CS5 will probably do me just fine for a few years mire, but it would be good to get Retina support at some point so maybe I'll look into a second hand licence for 6.5 at some point.

Installed all the new software last night. Some cool new features in After Effects, Premiere Pro & Muse, but you're not missing much w/InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop.

InDesign is darker, lets you make QR codes and better font searching. Will probably keep using 6 so I don't have to worry about IDML files and all that.

Typekit for desktop seems to work really well

https://creative.adobe.com/earlyaccess

Wish the creative cloud program would recognise my work network's PAC file though. It constantly asks me for my proxy password, refuses to remember it and won't let you tab between text fields or hit return to type the details in. Sometimes it just refuses to connect at all. Fucking adobe.

Photoshop/Lightroom/Behance/20 gigs for 10$/mo for registered users:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/2013/09/04/adobe-introduces-cheaper-creative-cloud-with-photoshop-and-lightroom

Lots of photographers and light users complaining I guess. That's a pretty good deal I guess if you just use those programs.

Still want the Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign only bundle.

Just posted this on the Questions about printing thread:

Speaking of InDesign...I didn't initially notice the slowdown of ID CC w/ OSX Mavericks. Just got more and more frustrated and thought my computers were old (2008 Mac Pro and 2010 Macbook Pro) but recently upgraded both (SSDs in both, 8gig ram in Macbook) and it just got worse and worse until it was really frustrating me, so I started searching online and found TONS of people complaining. I went back to CS6 and it was 1000% better. It's totally buggy and a total mess. I saw people were signing up for a pre-release program so I emailed Adobe via facebook and they let me into the program to get test/beta builds. You KNOW Adobe is aware they've fucked up and have caused issues if they're just letting any random person who emails them into their beta program. This is a major problem for them and they really need to fix it.

They really have no competitors and it's definitely showing. So much bloat. I recently had to deal with this conflict between the old application updater and the CC one where I had to quit the later and rename it so I could open up the former just to get it out of my menu bar. The amount of Adobe crap on my computer is shameful.

CC updater app has given me nothing but probs on Windows and OSX. Seems like really basic stuff they're not fixing, too - like, when an update's ready on OSX the app's icon changes to let you know, but this whole other different adobe icon (that leads to a different updater) pops up from nowhere too!

That's the problem I'm talking about in the second part of my post. The other icon is the old updater program, which gives you a different update count than the CC updater, but when you click on it, just opens the CC updater. I had to do this total hack of quitting CC updater and renaming the file, which confused the original updater, but the original updater finally opened so I was able to click on it's preference to remove it's notifier from the menu bar, then reopen CC updater. So you don't see the orig anymore, but I'm sure it's there in the background somewhere, messing things up.

Oh I misunderstood. The whole thing's just a massive balls-up. Still waiting for them to fix the problem where it arbitrarily changes space in fullscreen mode, too.

Really eyeing that student-rate $450 CS6 PS/ID/Illustrator bundle. The whole cloud thing seems like the biggest most obvious scam ever, and that right there is all I need! (Plus Lightroom, and I'm still doing fine with the $70 3.6 I bought a couple years ago.) Should I plunk down and grab this? Is there a good chance they'll outright delete these soon?

Normally I'd say I'm a fan of the cloud. See above. I still say that despite my issues. That bundle looks good. Until it's out of date. Then you're screwed and will have to go CC anyway. So why not start just paying the 30/mo (for the first year) now and get the recent stuff?

How screwed are you when things go out of date though? For the time being, all I need ID for is access to projects I worked on from 07 to 12, and a collaborative joint with a guy who'll also be using CS6 or lower. Are there any game-changing new features in the CC versions?

Also, wouldn't the programs stop working if I stopped paying the monthly fee? So after x months, it'd definitely be more expensive.

No, CS6 is pretty good. CC probably adds some great features I'm not thinking of right now, but it also made things uglier and is mostly pretty annoying. But sometimes, esp with Photoshop, new features quickly become essential/killer features. And w/ InDesign having to juggle versions, saving files as XML or IDML etc can be such a hassle.

Just depends on your priorities. I never felt like I had the almost 1k it would've cost me to get CS, and new I'd always want to be up to date.

http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2014/04/lightroom-goes-mobile-with-new-ipad-solution.html

Outage of Adobe Creative Cloud, more than a day old, locked out app users

I was wondering about that

can't believe these fucks *still* haven't bothered to fix the spaces issue on osx

lol CC update erasing data on osx. these fucking people

https://twitter.com/backblaze

wow. just talked to our IT guy about this. he's going to put an automated somethingerother on everyone's machine that will automatically add an empty folder with a name like " .AAAAA" to make sure that gets deleted and not a folder that might be important.

i haven't used them but just learned about Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. Really going for the gold as far as Adobe replacements. 50 bucks each.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/

Thank you, dan selzer, for the tip.

They ain't Adobe, but they're getting there. I tried the Photo first. It was all right, definitely as advertised as somewhere between PicMe and Photoshop. Would very likely buy it if I didn't already have Elements at home and Photoshop at work.

The Designer app though... it is sweet. I've been using Adobe products for years, and trying to use Illustrator in earnest for the past couple. I just couldn't ever get my head around how Illustrator wants to behave. You can't preview anything. You have to jump through hoops to get something as simple as numbers to show automatically on a bar chart. It's an amazing tool when used correctly, but nothing intuitive about it.

So maybe with that blank slate and open mind, Affinity Design has worked pretty well for me. I'll likely get it for the $50, a very fair price, especially without all that cloud crap. There's a lot of stuff that's going to take getting used to, but unlike Illustrator where you were feeling along a marble wall in the darkness, Designer offers you a velvet rope to hang on to.

Here's a few things I messed around with, just playing with the tools. The 10-year-old original on the left, the Affinity Design panel on the right.

http://i.imgur.com/qwRStw5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Kb66UkD.jpg

(Feel free to comment on the strip itself in What's the worst online comic strip? )

AEM is pretty sick

Converted the last of my InDesign documents last week. For the first time in 30 years, I no longer have Adobe software on my computer (well, maybe some fonts are left).