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

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 Until it's out of date.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How screwed are you when things go out of date though?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).