Adobe Creative Suite 2.0?

[mcarvin]

I think they'd call it Mac Paint. I really really want to see Mac Paint return for OS X!

(I'm pretty sure Mac Paint preceded MS Paint historically).

Holy A$$, I remember learning that before either PS or AI. Oh, those were the days of shape layers and such.

 

[HiRez]

The thing I really don't like about the suite option is that you tend to get products that are rushed, and you get products that are delayed all grouped into a package. Rather being released "when ready" programs are forced to speed up development, or slow down development..

That's a great point, I hadn't considered that aspect before.

 

[HiRez]

I remember when steve gave a Tiger demo at one of the major shows last year where he was showing off the whole core image thing. He said "I hope adobe utilizes this technology in their next version of photoshop etc." or something like that. A few weeks later I was at an Adobe seminar and I asked one of the Adobe reps what he thought about that. He said it will never happen, not because they can't do it for the mac version, but because they can't add it to the windows version.

That is depressing, however, third-party plugin and filter developers can still access CoreImage from within PS, can't they?

 

[decksnap]

If you're a visual communications (graphic design, web design, motion graphics) pro, then you can't possibly make the argument that they're the worst Mac developer.

Macromedia gets my vote because they actually, by virtue of their crappiness starting with MX, steered me to be an almost 100% Adobe user.

Agreed. Macromedia gets my vote as worst developer. Their programs have gotten slower and more error prone- specifically Fireworks. I don't mind the new Dreamweaver, but Flash MX, for all its new 'features' is such a pain in the butt. As a designer who only spends about 10% of their time doing flash work, I hate how much they've changed the features and goals of this program, and the way actionscript is handled. I constantly find myself running Flash 5 through classic because I can script so much easier in that environment.

MM- if you're listening, why is Fireworks so buggy?

 

[HiRez]

i can tell you that personally i could get the same work done with Photoshop 4 (if thats when layers were introduced) than i can in CS.

I was on a job a few months ago where I was forced to do a bunch of emergency Photoshop work (destined for video). Unfortunately, I had not brought my PowerBook, so I was stuck using Photoshop 4 on a PC laptop running Windoze 95, believe it or not. The Windoze part was painful (dealing with the file system), and the RAM situation was dire, but I was surprised by how much I could still do on this ancient version of Photoshop. Hey, it has layers, that's the most important thing. Actually worked quite well and I didn't feel lost at all.

 

[bluemonkey]

Illustrator 12 "vectorize" tool. Holy crap, that sounds cool! I just hope the stupid CS2 will run on my machine since I bought my ibook more than, say, a month ago...

I'll get it regardless because my company is an Adobe Service Provider, and we get all upgrades, whether we use them (PS, Illy, ID) or not (PageMaker when it existed).

-Jason

 

[alexf]

GoLive?

Well, all I can say is that I hope the new version of GoLive will be much better than the pathetic GoLive CS, and that Adobe can revive this once great application. If not, I fear it may finally be time to switch over to Dreamweaver...

 

[trip]

ba howabout photoshop upgrading it's old filters... Like make everything preview like displacement mapping and such...

 

[solidGas]

Mac software needs no activation

I got this from the Adobe website.

Adobe software with activation

Adobe® Acrobat® 7.0 for Windows®

- Chinese Simplified
- Chinese Traditional
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Italian
- Korean
- Japanese
- Norwegian
- Spanish
- Swedish

Adobe Photoshop® CS for Windows

- Chinese
- English
- French
- German
- Korean
- Japanese
Photoshop CS may also be part of the Adobe Creative Suite or the Adobe Video Collection Professional version 2.5.

Adobe Photoshop CS for Macintosh

-*Chinese

Adobe Premiere® Pro 1.5

- Canadian*French
- English
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese

Here is the link if you don't believe me:
http://www.adobe.com/activation/productsactiv.html

 

[iGav]

AE is on its way out - Motion is just too powerful - that gap will be closed within 6 months

No it won't... Motion is in need of a major update before it can even be uttered in the same breath as After Effects.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Avid better than FCP?

That's news to me

As a Filmmaker, I MUCH MORE prefer FCP over Avid

Avid is, in some cases, more stable and has 'some' better media management - however, FCP has closed the gap, in my opinion, with its ease of use, power, compression options (which is HUGE in the internet age) and its ability to play nice (DVDSP, Motion, etc)

In addition - all Hollywood studios are outfitted for Avid..... however, The American Film Institute (one of two film schools, including Chapman University, that has its own editing department) trains all of Hollywood's future editors on FCP, since the year 2000

AE is on its way out - Motion is just too powerful - that gap will be closed within 6 months

Otherwise, I would love for Apple to build a competition to Photoshop

Hey - they totally displaced Premier, are on their way to displacing AE.... they could DEFINITELY displace Photoshop

If it's news to you and your a filmmaker (especially in LA) you need to pay attention a bit more to the industry as a whole. FCP has made great in roads, but Avid is still the standard. I prefer cutting w/FCP as well, but there's no reason to be blind fanboy about the situation.

"Prefering" is subjective. FCP is not the number 1 editing app (which was the statement I replied to). I prefer Dr Pepper over Coke but that doesn't mean Dr Pepper is the #1.

Of course it makes sense for schools to lean towards FCP because for their intents and purposes FCP and Avid are equals, and FCP is much cheaper. If you can afford 100 FCP seats or 75 Avid seats of course you should choose 100 FCP seats. Learning the craft is more important than learning the tool.

FCP is a strong enough product that for many people it can replace Avid because it does the same job (or near enough) at a fraction of the price. But it's not, in an all around sense, a completely equal solution (yet). Like I said before, I think by version 7 the choice between FCP and Avid will be based completely on preference.


Lethal

 

[steveh]

{GoLive} dead. Dreamweaver killed it.

It's not close to being dead.

Granted, it smells a little, sometimes.

 

[mcarvin]

It's not close to being dead.

Granted, it smells a little, sometimes.

And the vultures are circling too. I really love GoLive's feature set, particularly the site layout window where you make a reviewable flowchart of the site, define what pages get which template, and GoLive creates the folder structure. On the other hand, I really hate their FTP process because I flat out don't understand parts of it. IMO, Dreamweaver always had a good management tool hindered by a slow and buggy UI.

 

[dashiel]

I had heard a rumor or read something a few years ago where a MM dev came out and said that the execs rush things out, then have mass layoffs once the major release is out. Wash, rinse, repeat.

And you've really nailed my sentiment about Flash - I use it, but not because I want to.

they didn't quite come out and say that, but here's the story as i know it: macromedia was typically, like most major software developers, on an 18 month release cycle. you could usually expect to see a new version of flash every other march and every other september, or thereabouts.

the MX initiative was huge for macromedia and they upped the schedule for dreamweaver and fireworks (they still missed the release date). flash MX debuted about on time, studio followed a few months later. it was a gigantic success. notably because the price to get in to studio was ridiculously cheap if you had a flash MX license (i think it was $200 for the entire suite). when i say big, i beleive that the MX suite led to macromedia having their best year in history. flash is suddenly becoming ubiquitous and macromedia see dollar signs.

at the same time macromedia was working in the background on a whole slew of "flash based" things. they were really pushing for flash to become a platform, like java. so in the space of about 12 months we get: flash communication server, flash remoting, flash paper, central, flash lite, flex and so on. unfortunately not only did this take away resources from their core products (which were already showing signs of neglect) but also spread their talent base way, way too thin. flash remoting is almost still borne with the advances in MX 2004, communication server was a neat idea, but in real world use it didn't quite fly. flash paper was a joke as was central, etc...

so then 2004 comes out, and believe me when i say it wasn't ready. the developers were somewhat indignant about the countless bugs, i don't know if this was because they felt the whips of marketing/managers or if they genuinely felt it was a good product. anyway it's released and it is the buggy, document-less, slow and bloated piece of junk we have today. word spread really, really fast about exactly how bad it was and how the feature set just wasn't compelling. additionally the upgrade price was really expensive compared to MX. the result, come their quarterly financial report they were way behind what they expected. in the meeting with analysts they played down how bad the software was, but did mention it (rare, especially as MM has stated publicly that "they don't do dot releases"). amongst developer channels MM started being much more open and showing off their work and where they're at. they've released a decent upgrade to flash (7.2) that makes things okay, but still not great.

i do think that they've learned their lesson, though what reaction they're capable of is yet to be seen. i am cautiously optimistic based on the information they've released so far:

http://www.markme.com/flashteam/

 

[wdlove]

I think that it is a real missed opportunity on the part of Adobe. They should wait and take advantage of Tiger. It would be quite a coupe for them to be among the first to use the advantages of 64 bit.

 

[mcarvin]

they didn't quite come out and say that, but here's the story as i know it: macromedia was typically, like most major software developers, on an 18 month release cycle. you could usually expect to see a new version of flash every other march and every other september, or thereabouts.

the MX initiative was huge for macromedia and they upped the schedule for dreamweaver and fireworks (they still missed the release date). flash MX debuted about on time, studio followed a few months later. it was a gigantic success. notably because the price to get in to studio was ridiculously cheap if you had a flash MX license (i think it was $200 for the entire suite). when i say big, i beleive that the MX suite led to macromedia having their best year in history. flash is suddenly becoming ubiquitous and macromedia see dollar signs.

at the same time macromedia was working in the background on a whole slew of "flash based" things. they were really pushing for flash to become a platform, like java. so in the space of about 12 months we get: flash communication server, flash remoting, flash paper, central, flash lite, flex and so on. unfortunately not only did this take away resources from their core products (which were already showing signs of neglect) but also spread their talent base way, way too thin. flash remoting is almost still borne with the advances in MX 2004, communication server was a neat idea, but in real world use it didn't quite fly. flash paper was a joke as was central, etc...

so then 2004 comes out, and believe me when i say it wasn't ready. the developers were somewhat indignant about the countless bugs, i don't know if this was because they felt the whips of marketing/managers or if they genuinely felt it was a good product. anyway it's released and it is the buggy, document-less, slow and bloated piece of junk we have today. word spread really, really fast about exactly how bad it was and how the feature set just wasn't compelling. additionally the upgrade price was really expensive compared to MX. the result, come their quarterly financial report they were way behind what they expected. in the meeting with analysts they played down how bad the software was, but did mention it (rare, especially as MM has stated publicly that "they don't do dot releases"). amongst developer channels MM started being much more open and showing off their work and where they're at. they've released a decent upgrade to flash (7.2) that makes things okay, but still not great.

i do think that they've learned their lesson, though what reaction they're capable of is yet to be seen. i am cautiously optimistic based on the information they've released so far:

http://www.markme.com/flashteam/

WOW!!!!!

So Flash has gone from a designer's tool (v1-4) to a developer-oriented tool (v5-7), and 8-ball looks like they're going back to their designer-friendly roots. I gotta say, if half of 8-ball actually sees the light of day and is not overly buggy out of the box, my opinion will change dramatically.

That being said, part of me dreads the day that alpha filters are part of Flash. While there's plenty of great Flash stuff, there's also an abundance of Flash crap.

<cynicism>I see tons of script kiddies discovering the joys of drop shadows, glows, bevels and alpha filters. Won't someone please think of the poor filters?</cynicism>

 

[pubwvj]

product activation

Hmm....? I've missed this. What are they doing now? I've not upgraded for quite a few cycles....

 

[Blue Velvet]

Hmm....? I've missed this. What are they doing now? I've not upgraded for quite a few cycles....

Coming to a store near you.
If not now, then soon...

http://www.adobe.com/activation/main.html

Still... got nothing to hide, have you?

Go on... tell it to the judge.

 

[pubwvj]

This version is too early. It needs to come after Tiger and support some of Tiger's new features. Perhaps release at the same time as Tiger.

That was my thought too when I heard Adobe would release new upgrades. Last time I wanted to upgrade they pulled this also with the new version not being native MacOSX compatible. I haven't upgraded since - still running Photoshop and Illustrator in Classic. A mild bother but I've not seen anything, asside from going OSX native, that makes me want to upgrade.

 

[pubwvj]

Coming to a store near you. If not now, then soon...
http://www.adobe.com/activation/main.html

Note likely, no stores near me... I'm in the sticks. Mountain top in the middle of Vermont.

The Adobe web page says "The activation process supports installation on two machines." which is actually pretty generous of them. In the past they and just about all other vendors have said only one machine.

It also says "The activation process will allow you to install your Adobe software that requires activation on a new computer. After you install the software on your new computer, you will be asked to reactivate the software." which I don't particularly like since I don't trust Adobe, or any vendor, to be there for me in the future. All to many big businesses have gone out of business. This leaves the user a loser in the lurch. Not good.

The Adobe web page also says "As long as you don't "low-level" reformat your hard drive, you will not be required to reactivate your Adobe software. Please note that utilities (provided by the operating system vendor) typically used for reformatting the hard drive do not perform a "low-level" reformat." which I don't like for the same above reason.

Adobe needs to address these two problems.

Still... got nothing to hide, have you? Go on... tell it to the judge.

I have no worry. I have bought every copy I own, directly from Adobe no in fact, right from the first version of Photoshop and Illustrator. I still have my old manuals, floppies and CD's from each step - clutter. I even beta tested Illustrator. It's a great tool. Both of them are, but they aren't worth upgrading every time Adobe comes out with a new version. I'm still using Photoshop 6 and Illustrator 9 under Classic in MacOS X 10.3.5. Aside from going native in OSX I haven't seen any new features that make me drool.

Maybe this time I'll go for the upgrade... We'll see.

-Walter
in Vermont
on a Mountain
in the middle of a long dirt road

 

[ipedro]

ATTENTION:

I can confirm that Adobe Creative Suite will be launching at the same time as Tiger. CS 2 will take advantage of Core Image in Tiger and the announcement will be made next week.

Launch date: March 2005.

My professor works at Adobe and I got all this info by first asking her if CS2 would have Tiger features which she confirmed. I then proposed that CS2 would have to be launched after or at the same time as Tiger. She agreed. I then speculated to when CS2 would be lauched: March 2005. She confirmed. So not only do we have a launch date for CS2, we also have a launch for OS X Tiger!

 

[pubwvj]

My professor works at Adobe and I got all this info by first asking her if CS2 would have Tiger features which she confirmed. I then proposed that CS2 would have to be launched after or at the same time as Tiger. She agreed. I then speculated to when CS2 would be lauched: March 2005. She confirmed.

Or your professor is just very agreeable...

 

[Akira]

Or your professor is just very agreeable...

Or really violated his NDA with that little chat

 

[mcarvin]

The Adobe web page says "The activation process supports installation on two machines." which is actually pretty generous of them. In the past they and just about all other vendors have said only one machine.

It also says "The activation process will allow you to install your Adobe software that requires activation on a new computer. After you install the software on your new computer, you will be asked to reactivate the software." which I don't particularly like since I don't trust Adobe, or any vendor, to be there for me in the future. All to many big businesses have gone out of business. This leaves the user a loser in the lurch. Not good.

Nobody here is really fond of product activation, but I think the concerns are less about Adobe going under and more of how activations make a legit customer feel (you know, like a thief). In this case though, I would hope that Adobe learned by Quark's mistake - specifically, Quark allowing customers to buy a "laptop license" for an extra $75 after making the customer jump through hoops just to activate the original license. Ditto Macromedia, who made me do a little dance to reactivate my Freehand MX license last year.

/Still on my anti-MM kick from last night

 

[Blue Velvet]

In this case though, I would hope that Adobe learned by Quark's mistake - specifically, Quark allowing customers to buy a "laptop license" for an extra $75 after making the customer jump through hoops just to activate the original license.

That stupid move by Quark lasted about 2-3 months. It has, most definitely, been removed... you can now install Quark 6.x on a 2nd machine for free, zip, nada.

A lucky recipient writes...