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

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).