Why I'll Never Buy An Adobe Product Again
Several people have heard me mention on Twitter that I’ve been looking for new development and design software to get away from Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop. Why would I want to replace these? Because they suck.
I’ve replaced Dreamweaver with Coda, but I’ve yet to find a replacement for Photoshop. So far, I’ve tried Pixelmator and although the interface was really nice, it was buggy and I would get the spinning beach ball every time I’d turn off a layer.
Why am I not going to buy any more Adobe products? Adobe reminds me of health insurance companies. They are super huge and know that everyone needs them, so they don’t have to care about us. They can charge us how ever much money they want and can give us all the crappy service they want, because they know there’s really no alternative to them.
An arm and a leg
One of the biggest turn offs to Adobe, is that they come out with a new Creative Suite every year to year and a half. This isn’t a bad thing in itself – technologies change rapidly and so should software. But the kicker is – they want you to pay…and I’m not talking $10′s of dollars. A new Creative Suite is $2500! The upgrade is $900 but only works if you have the last version – which means you’d have to buy every version. Also, it seems to get more expensive by the year.
Now, you might be saying, “Then don’t buy the new version every time and use the old one.” For the most part, this works fine. Until you have an important project created in CS4 that won’t open in your CS3 programs. Hmm. So Adobe purposefully makes their files not open in older versions? All of my other software is cross-compatible, so I know this is possible.
They don’t care about you
If my clients upgraded their WordPress site and my theme for it broke when it wasn’t supposed to – I’d have to fix it. If I told my clients I’d get around to it in a year or so – I’d be out of business. Yet this is what Adobe did to us.
For several months – almost a full year – Photoshop and Fireworks was useless for anyone using Snow Leopard. Useless because you could open a file (75% of the time) but only save it 5% of the time before it crashed. They just recently fixed this problem.
Ever since I bough Dreamweaver CS3, even before Snow Leoapard, I’ve had nothing but weird JS problems that wouldn’t allow me to do anything without 5 warning windows popping up. I searched around the internet and found this was a common problem – that Adobe never bothered to fix, instead I’m hacking my $2500 software’s core to get it to stop. Why should I have to do that with such expensive software?
Also, I’ve heard from several people (but haven’t experienced it myself yet – thankfully) that their customer service fails. Long wait times, unhelpful agents and rude answers to questions. How do they get away with this?
Bloated and buggy…what exactly are we paying for?
If I pay for a million dollar house, I expect it to look, contain and act different than a $50,000 house. Adobe Creative Suite is the million dollar house of design and development software. Yet their software is buggy and overly bloated – which makes it run like crap, especially if you have more than one program open at once.
Alternatives?
Whenever you think of design and development software, you most always think of Adobe Creative Suite. But there are alternatives. I reviewed Coda last week, which is a great alternative to Dreamweaver and contains similar functions, but has yet to crash or slow down on me. I’ve found lots of great Dreamweaver-replacements thanks to readers here and on Twitter.
Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve only looked at one other Photoshop alternative, Pixelmator, and it didn’t run well on my Snow Leopard MacBook. I’m going to look at Gimp as soon as I have a few free minutes and see if that works better. Other than that, I’m not sure of any similar Photoshop programs out there.
I don’t mean to whine but…
I feel like Adobe is missing out on a lot of buyers and I hope they see that soon and correct their mistakes. I don’t mind paying for software. But it should work, work well and crash less. It shouldn’t cost $2500 every year or so. It shouldn’t break 3 months after you purchase it. I’m a developer, so I know bugs and crashes happen – but there should be a high level of support, response and fixes on a product that expensive.
Your .02
How has your Adobe experience been? Any better or worse? Do you enjoy their products?
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
I’ve heard good things about Coda but I’m not totally sold on it. I’m more of a TextMate fan. Maybe I’m underestimating but I don’t think I’d use the other features in that bundle enough to purchase another editor that includes them. As far as Photoshop goes, the only other alternative I’m aware of is Gimp. Which if you believe the people who use it has everything that PS does. Without the cost. Good luck!
Yea there are parts to Coda I won’t use (preview, terminal, books) but I’m sure there’re parts to every program we don’t use
As long as it’s zippy and doesn’t crash!
The only Adobe product I regularly use is Photoshop. Every now and then I’ll use Flash for something, but not often. When I am doing something that I want to scale well (like a logo) I use Illustrator.
The only thing that keeps me from switching to Gimp completely is that the UI in Photoshop is so much more intuitive.
I used to use Dreamweaver because it color-coded the syntax of my coding and made it much easier to find that semi-colon that I mistakenly replaced with a colon, but then I discovered Notepad++. So now when I finish a layout in Photoshop and want to get started coding it right away, I just start it in Notepad++. (Normally, I do my coding in gedit at home, or if I need a quick update and don’t want to wait on an upload I use vim over ssh.)
We have a lot of alternatives for Dreamweaver. a lot! Textmate, Coda, Expresso, NetBeans and more… How about Photoshop? None! I tried everything; Gimp, Pixelmator and so on.
Honestly, if i can replace Photoshop to an open source software, I will be just using OpenSolaris and will be happy!
I haven’t tried Gimp yet. What is it missing in terms of replacing Photoshop?
I use Gimp instead of Photoshop. It does everything I would need Photoshop to do, and it’s free/opensource.
http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html
http://www.gimp.org/
THanks, I’ve been thinking of checking them out
True as a coder you already know you don’t have to stay with a particular design software as you grow you tend to you use less tools more knowledge its just quicker.
I can agree with you with not being ready for the new OS systems whether it be Mac or Windows or any OS system you run aside can be frustrating but you can’t really fix bugs until you know what they are and as we know all OS systems run bugs themselves from time to time or require the software comply with certain upgrades basically the nature of the business of technology. Its unfortunate but I don’t think companies get the OS system upgrades faster then consumers and even then it may take months to find out the issues and work them out. I stuck with windows xp and will stay with it until they stop making software for it which I doubt even as windows 7 is out xp is still a better OS more windows users use it longer then probably any other Microsoft product I have to admit Windows Xp is very adaptable and reliable. I had more issues with plugins for DW then the software and then again you should have a back up computer you can’t hope for instant gratification it takes their crews time to work out the bugs. The new OS causes the same problems for you as for them.
I am going to stick with Adobe I liked the CS4 upgrades and believe it or not there are bonus programs involved that many never heard exists from them for free and helps a ton on development process. They will get better its just the economy slumped right on the CS4 release and many said minor upgrades but I do like that all my files are on mini tabs on one tabs instead of many big tabs minor but nice runs well too.
I don’t think “the economy” justifies their exorbitant prices and shoddy products. I’ve used Adobe since before Creative Suite came along and each version gets worse than the last.
Sorry I didn’t mean it that way at all. I meant weaker then expected cs4 sales we should have had cs5 come out about now and work on all the platforms so we don’t experience these issues. It was the time frame of the CS4 release Vista just out and now new Mac OS as well I mean Windows 7 already? its just been a crazy OS time line. Can’t blame anybody its been harder on software makers.
Amber, I’ve had similar experiences with their tech support. It wouldn’t be so bad if their support site weren’t so difficult to navigate. There’s currently a bug in Adobe’s Media Encoder that comes with Flash and AE, where it doesn’t properly encode .flv flash videos at 15fps. It took me a long time to figure out where to send a bug report (it’s not on their Support page, but clicking Feedback in the page footer) and I was also able to somehow submit a support report a while back on AME’s weird handling of alpha channels.
Reverting to an earlier version of AME was a pain as well; For those who deal with Flash video and .flv’s, I posted about it on http://www.sukimon.com/2010/01/fps-bug-in-adobe-media-encoder-cs4/
On OS X systems, I usually use textwrangler, MAMP, and the firebug and web developer firefox extensions, but CODA looks promising.
Even though I’m still on the trial period of Coda, I think I’m going to purchase it when it ends, it’s a great dev program..took a bit to get used to switching from Dreamweaver, but worth the time so far.
I´ve been using gimp for mac and works pretty good!!
http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/
Btw Coda is better than Dreamweaver, i changed it a few months ago and no problems, very fast and easy to use
Hi Amber,
check out these possible alternatives to Photoshop:
- http://www.gimp.org
- http://www.cinepaint.org/
- http://www.koffice.org/
- http://www.artweaver.de/
- http://www.getpaint.net/
- http://www.photoscape.org/
- http://www.chocoflop.com/
- http://www.splashup.com/ (online)
- http://www.picnik.com/ (online)
Their feature level varies **a lot** and of course you will spend a decent time figuring out how to transfer your workflows from Photoshop to them – if possible at all. In all fairness, Photoshop has an impressive feature range. The main problem you might be facing with these alternatives is getting Photoshop files to work in them. Afaik, Photoshop files are closed source and I am sure, the lack of interoperability is on purpose.
I’ve had very similar experiences to yours, and agree that each subsequent release of CS is worse than before. But we keep buying the next one hoping it will solve the problems of it’s predecessor.
I’ll share an anecdote about trying to convert a Mac CS4 license to a Windows CS4 license. The EULA lets you do this once per license, so I called their customer support to make the change (no way to do it online). I sat on hold for over an hour before giving up and calling again. This time I called tech support, who answered right away, but told me they couldn’t do it and I needed to call Customer Support. So I called Customer support again, waited on hold for 3 hours and then had to give up. I passed this task to someone else in my company who waited nearly 4 hours before giving up. As far as we can tell, there IS NO customer service at all. A quick search on google showed that many other people had tried waiting hours as well without ever getting through to speak to anyone. That to me is simply unacceptable – but like you’re seeing, there isn’t much alternative.
Adobe needs an anti-trust investigation way more than Microsoft ever did.
Whenever I need customer service I don’t ever call because they try to push sales a little to hard for my liking sometimes. A year ago at least I haven’t ever had problems getting in contact with anyone. Best tip for these situations is to email them through your profile log in they almost always answer at least in a one day time period as disappointing as that seems but they do answer all my questions in a professional manner.
Yeah I think those are some pretty good reasons. Let us know how you get on with GIMP as a proper photoshop replacement. I use it on and off if I’m in linux and need to make some quick edits but can’t be bothered booting into windows.
Another program you might want to look at, although I wouldn’t actually recommend it, is paintshop pro. It’s a bit fiddly and you’ll be comparing it to photoshop while you’re using it, but it is an alternative.
LOL It’s funny you mentioned Paint Shop Pro…that’s the program I used to use as a kid before the Photoshop days LOL.
I still use Paint Shop Pro. Not even the newest version.
PSP 5.2, back when it was owned by Jasc.
It’s my primary graphics tool for the web.
I only switch to Photoshop and Illustrator when I’m working on print graphics.
I think that my experiences with Adobe software are not so bad, but I work in PC’s! Macromedia was at first Win native software (DW, FW, FH & Flash) I have worked on Mac’s for 12 years and always pagemaker, indesign, acrobat, golive and the OS from 9.2 to 10.4 gives me hard times and lately all the macromedia ones, but never had mayor problems with the same software in my PC.
In one thing I agree is very expensive, here in el salvador the CS4 cost $4,500 + tax, import it is a little bit cheaper, since I do print stuff like packaging and vignettes Gimp doesn’t work for me since has no CMYK mode, for PC I can tell you my replacements for Adobe, I have killed Illustrator with Xara Xtreme is an excellent option for drawing and illustration with many photoshop options and plugins like the Alien Skin ones (ans is cheap $89, Pro version $249), the only down side is that when you export in cmyk deviates the colors a bit, since I had Ps I use it only to make my Xtreme images to cmyk, and if you use Fireworks y have reclaced it with Xara Web Designer very practical (and cheap $49 + VAT) automatically fix png transparency for IE a real WYSIWYG, my site is done in Web Designer.
I still searching for a replacement for Flash, Acrobat and Indesign (tried Serif Page Plus but was disappointing), but no signs or hope and completelly no option for flashpaper that I use in my interactive CD’s, so if you have options for these software for PC let me know.
There are a couple different Gimp plugins that support CMYK now:
http://registry.gimp.org/taxonomy/term/258
Who buys their software..? you didn’t know.. everything is free nowadays..
What about the Snow Leopard update released on november 2009?
Where’s finally the problem: on Adobe soft or Mac OS?
Regards.
Yes, the update released mainly fixed the problem (although Photoshop still crashes on me ALL the time). OSX isn’t responsible for changing the whole operating system for one program, it’s the program’s responsibility to work on the OS.
I won’t buy Adobe products anymore either.
I’m having so many problems with Fireworks and Flash bugs that exist since several versions and never get fixed.
Adobe really doesn’t care about their customers and just expect them to buy next versions of their products to get a bug fix.
Once a new version is released, they just don’t support the previous one anymore. And they release a new version every year or so!
Do you know a site where I could post all the bugs I’m experiencing so that other people can tell if they’re experiencing them too. Maybe then, if there are lots of people complaining Adobe might do something.
Sorry, You will never find a replacement for photoshop.
What i’ve been looking for – and I’ve never heard anyone else mention any alternatives to – is adobe bridge. As a designer I’ve got folders fully of 1000s stock images, vectors, brushes, snippets, inspiration, etc, and need some way of quickly viewing and managing these folders. Finder doesn’t do enough but bridge can be slow and crashy – especially on cs3 which i have at work.
I’ve recently discovered snippets.app and brush pilot for snippets and photoshop brushes but it’s not ideal having a seperate program for viewing each thing and the cost builds up this way. Does anyone know of any alternatives to bridge?
Sorry Amber, Photoshop is in its own realm of possibilities. With that said though, don’t give up hope. I use the Gimp and Inkscape almost exclusively and can achieve mostly the same results.
Unfortunately you can’t use GIMP for anything other than basic image editing (and maybe if you do your own PSDs). The PSDs I get from clients look terrible in GIMP and PIxelmator because neither of them support some of the most important features PS has.
That’s a good point and makes a different approach to this topic: if you’re making your own graphic files or if you’re just processing some other’s files (i.e. from customers).
If you’re receiving and processing psd files, you don’t have any other chance, you must use PS. Even using Fireworks to open/manage psd sometimes it’s a headache (and in theory both are compatible…!). Sad but true.
I got the Adobe Master Suite (CS3) at my last job for free. That’s pretty much the only reason why I don’t complain about the price. I’ve never used Dreamweaver, nor have I ever been a fan of it, or any extensive IDE for web development. For everything from C++ to Java, to XHTML and CSS, to javascript and Perl, I’ve always just used a browser, text editor, and my server for testing. And since I always use Drupal for any sites bigger than medium, and I know Drupal in and out, I just know where everything is and I don’t need a big IDE to keep track of processes/workflows/files. I still love Photoshop, though. I used to use JASC PSP, and after switching to PS in 2006 I wish I had used it sooner. Don’t think I’ll ever stop using it.
Would it be possible to get permission to use some of your posts on forums with a link?
Another reason I agree with this article is this simple fact.
The Australian Dollar at the moment is higher than the US Dollar and has been for a long time now.
However the US Adobe store lists (as a download) lightroom as $299.
The Australian Adobe store lists (as a download) lightroom as $412.
If they’re going to rip me off, I’ll rip them off. Simple.
100% agree Abode is way overpriced… luckily my Mrs is a teacher so I get her to buy the education version, which is identical and a faction of the cost and then we both use it.
Debatable. While I suffer some of the same problems, here’s how I see it.
I have a contact in San Francisco who works for Marketing at Adobe. At the moment, Adobe is slammed. They’ve obviously got Edge and Muse getting Beta releases, also working on the next Creative Suite, and apps, so of course they’re concentrating on that more and while it’s not perfect, Adobe is an en masse corporation and there are causes for concern but what it falls down to is hierarchy, the customer, and economics.
Note: This is an inspired guess.
1) Hierarchy: While there are many employers at Adobe Systems working on the products every day, a lot of these people are bottom ladder/new people working on these tools. It’s obviously not a team of 5 people who know Objective C and write the tool in 6 months. A lot of bottom ladder people work on it while under leadership of a few people. However, this is also a point in their never ending learning curve, so OF COURSE the code’s going to go wrong in one of the lines out of the odd thousand.
Also, a lot of third party products aren’t perfect, as you’ve stated, Pixelmator gives you the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, so this is in the same boat.
While some third party products are well done, Corporate products are bound to fail as there’s a lot of “Yes” men to go through, constant change of ideas, extremely tight deadlines etc. etc. so of course it’s going to go wrong to a point.
2) The customer: I believe the user tends to have a naive point of view of HOW and WHY these products should be perfect. Again, point 1; no one knows the every day goings on of that company, yet are well prepared to judge, just because it’s a multi-million dollar company, it has to be well done or not at all.
It’s an enormous company, it’s not as simple as that. Hell, even Apple has problems with their products eventhough there are thousands working on it everyday! There will always be a problem, somewhere.
3) Economics: Sure, Adobe sell their products for hundreds, even thousands of dollars, however how are they going to earn all of that when they offer discounts and editions that are cheaper, i.e. for Education or Students*? How can they earn all that when they can’t bolt up the price when some versions are cheaper than the other?
(Adobe Design Premium Student Edition is £250 over here – that’s pretty much making Photoshop cheaper than Pixelmator!)
Also, there is demand. We live in a time where people are pirating this software everyday. So of course they need the high price, third–party applications don’t necessarily have this problem as they’re only used by so many people, however, massive industry–standard software does. So the price needs to be kept up, otherwise Adobe won’t have as many offices let alone workers.
Also, on this whole “They don’t care about you” point of view – I’m a bit annoyed if their customer service is rude and unhelpful, however that’s not 100% the problem, Adobe has to think of the end user and while it is their fault it’s not perfect, it’s never going to be perfect. Nothing ever is.
As for them not updating CS3 BEFORE Snow Leopard, I think it’s more of a case they just started working on CS4 as well as working out certain problems, it’s a never–stopping ball, but if you’re still using CS3 I think it’s time to abandon ship; it’s pretty much obselete.
In short: I know it’s easy to just attack the big, evil corporation, there’s a bigger picture to all of this. There’s a lot of layers and people behind this whole thing, and while I agree to some points, like they should be updating these problems and fixing them, I don’t know 100% what goes on everyday but I’m giving a really inspired guess. Ever since I’ve had this contact, it’s given me a big picture on how corporations really work, it’s just not as simple as that, sadly.
On your Photoshop problem though; have you tried certain things like deleting a .plist file to make it work? I’ve heard that can be a common problem for applications. Also, trying to change your Photoshop settings i.e. take up less memory and less cache. I think it sounds more the system is being a whiny b!7ch and not wanting to work with it.
I had a similar problem in College, except with CS2. My College bought new Snow Leopard Macs yet they installed old CS2 software, and it was such a bad idea. The OS kept crashing and dying, the applications kept quitting, so it was either a case of old software on current OS or the OS not wanting to work with certain aspects of old software. However, your problem sounds more down to the OS than the software as I think CS3 can work even on Lion so I don’t see why this shouldn’t work on Snow Leopard.
As for Dreamweaver…..I’ve been working with Dreamweaver for the better part of 3 years, but now I think it’s time for me to move on and use something more code–friendly, like Textmate or Coda, so I think it’s a no–brainer you’re doing the right thing on that front.
I use Netbeans for my codeing environment. If you need more of a WYSIWYG I’d recommend using Firefox with Firebug installed as something that compliments Netbeans VERY well.
I’ve used the gimp. Unfortunately it’s no where as good as photoshop. Especially now Photoshop has content aware fill there is nothing that even comes close.
The only programs I typically use from Adobe are: Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator.
I’m not sure you are putting the blame where it needs to be. I’ve heard a lot of Mac users who said everything was working great untill the last upgrade of OSX. I know from the server side us Admins are not even recommending people upgrade the server because of how many Severe issues that are plaguing the software.
I know you hate PC’s but I can’t remember a time Photoshop has ever crashed on my machine. Actually I can’t remember the last time something crashed on my Windows 7 machine. My Machine’s uptime is almost 3 weeks. The only reason why it isn’t longer is that there was updates.
The only software from Adobe I have (that I use regularly) is Photoshop – I have the rest of the CS apps but only keep them around in case I have to open someone else’s work (which happens… but very rarely).
If I knew Pixelmator could do everything (to my intermediate/advanced knowledge) that Photoshop does – forging the new 3D abilities that I never use) I’d switch in a heartbeat because I prefer to support smaller developers if for no other reason.
Well written, and very good points, Amber.