After I left I was looking for a solution and couldn’t justify Adobe’s pricing for my own small project and picked up the Affinity suite for a song while it was on sale last autumn.
It’s great. It doesn’t have absolutely everything and I’ve had to learn new controls and all that but it’s not hard to learn and they’ve done everything I’ve needed them to do.
For a seasoned user of InDesign it’s entirely different and I could understand hesitation—I’ve known designers who tried and just couldn’t get the workflow down but for me it’s been fantastic.
I am very much a hobbyist, but I'm missing things I got used to in Photoshop.
If there's that one way to get a look that you've developed, it's disruptive to move to a different tool.
I've found this to be more difficult for creative work than for more procedural tasks. I can roughly translate between AppleScript or shell scripting or Python. But if a particular filter or plug-in isn't there, it's a lot of work to force it through a different pipeline.
‘ So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left’, according to my search Creative Cloud has 26 million paid members and is only increasing, at a fairly healthy rate too.
I hate it too and so do most that pay it but there customers certainly didn’t leave and this certainly has nothing to do with XD failing, the post explains quite clearly the issues.
A lot of creatives that use/would use XD already have a subscription to creative cloud that would pay for it, so it’s irrelevant, you just wanted to moan about the subscription and attach that complaint to this.
Yes, their cloud subscription is growing in numbers. And my company pays for a subscription for me, so I'm 1 additional user and $200 (or whatever) in additional monthly revenue. But we are only subscribers because they are holding our data hostage with their proprietary file format. As soon as any app with good enough Photoshop PSD and Adobe Illustrator AI import comes around, we'll jump ship.
With that in mind, the fact that XD would lock us into yet another proprietary file format from Adobe is a death blow. We decided not to use it before even evaluating it, because it would increase our vendor lock-in. That's why I said in my original comment: "XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use". If XD files become worthless without an Adobe subscription, then we're not interested in producing them.
So technically you are correct that we're still a paying customer so we technically haven't left yet. But our mind and our loyalty is long gone. That's what I tried to say. People like my company do not wish to continue being a customer. Accordingly, they don't care about new products.
"you just wanted to moan about the subscription". No, I see this as a strategy mistake. Photoshop became popular because it was so easy for everyone to get a cheap old copy and start using it. Now that Adobe has locked out most of the hobbyists, where is the next generation of experts going to come from? Who is going to pay $600 annually just to practice with Adobe XD instead of using a free competitor?
I'd say you can see the same with 3ds max, which once was the undoubted king of 3d content creation software. By now, all the young people use Blender. It's free and almost as good. I predict in 10 years 3ds max will be obsolete and Blender will become the new standard.
"After the customers left" might mean "after the customers who thrived in the previous era left", and then you would both be right.
Enterprise loves SaaS, because it solves problems they had (smoothing out purchasing, avoiding endless reauthorization and upgrade planning coordination), while not creating any problems (because they were always going to upgrade anyway). Hence the uptake and good numbers.
A lot of consumers hate SaaS, because it solves no problems they had (purchasing and upgrading were easy, if they chose), and creates new problems. They had previously been able to create indistinguishable output with an older version, albeit missing some features, to minimize recurring cost. And now that's no longer an option.
So you've made things easier for a group that spends a ton of money, but doesn't speak publicly on the internet (enterprise), which makes your metrics look nice. And you've made things harder / impossible for a group that does speak publicly on the internet (consumers), which makes your sentiment look bad.
So yes, both.
Very frustrating. Extremely hard to deploy via management tools.
This was discussed frequently inside Abobe, but the solutions always flowed back to more control instead of more openness. Now Adobe is going to push tech exoticism while suites like Affinity eat up the market.
I don't like Adobe and don't use their apps any more, but their apps continue to dominate the design, illustration and publishing fields. That is unlikely to change any time in the near future.
I'm using the Affinity apps - the apps are successful and thriving, but making little dent on Adobe's influence on the industry. (Affinity proves an app doesn't need to displace or overtake an existing app, but can carve out their own successful market segment.)
Adobe were caught-out with the success of Sketch and Figma for UI design, and with the Procreate painting app on the iPad. My impression is that Adobe's alternatives (XD and Fresco for the iPad) don't share the same "mindshare" among designers as those other apps.
However, there are some Adobe apps like After Effects that simply don't have any serious competition. Also, there are thousands of tutorials for Adobe apps that continue to make them attractive to learn. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more tutorials for Photoshop than any other software (or even programming language) in existence.
Interesting aside: The file specification for .sketch files is available on the Sketch website. This means Adobe XD and Figma can import Sketch files. The reverse is not true: neither Figma or XD publish their file format specifications.
Yes, but that’s not because they were late to the party. They had the app for this kind of work in Adobe Fireworks and they shut it down with no migration path. That’s what opened the market up for Sketch and later Figma. Now that the latter exist, there’s no reason to pay Adobe’s extortionate prices, or buy into their monopolistic business practices.
They killed it and half arsed added a few features to Il/PS and said “there just use those instead”
This is the same time they added a dark pattern removing 3D support from Photoshop, which most of us had taken for granted for the last 10 years. Like we need to pay for a new subscription now and break our pipeline for fast painting models? They can fuck off.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1775400/Substance_3D_Desi...
Plus it seems that in addition to buying this app, you also need to rent a subscription if you want access to the preset library (which used to be included for free).
But yeah, it sucks that you have to get a subscription for the material library.
I also don't know how it has changed when it got taken over.
I use Logic Pro for most things and have a dedicated, old Mac to run it, but Reaper is quite good and like $60 if one's on Windows or Linux (and isn't nearly as inscrutable as Ardour). Ableton Live is another stand-by and it runs on a Mac.
But in 2022 it's hard to recommend Audacity for much of anything, even aside from their drama problems.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fai...
For music production, I've been using Studio One [3] for the last couple years, and it's truly the mosf straightforward and beautiful DAW I've ever used. Though, it's not free and open source, which is a downside for me. It's one of the few proprietary software I care to own.
Zrythm [4], however, has been catching my eye lately, and I'm looking forward to it maturing to the point where I can finally move to a FOSS DAW.
[1] https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity [2] https://github.com/SartoxSoftware/audacium [3] https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-One [4] https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html
No subscription required, very reasonable pricing.
* Ableton Live
* Reaper
[0]: https://hackaday.com/2021/07/13/muse-group-continues-tone-de...
[1]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-audacity-how-to-wre...
This has become standard operating procedure. Push your agenda until you receive backlash, then claim it was all a big misunderstanding, and that you are listening to feedback. Let things calm down for a few months, then push the controversial changes anyway.
People are picking up on that, and won‘t accept it anymore. I think that‘s great.
Current leadership has shown their hand and the probable long-term direction they are headed.
Maybe it‘s an honest mistake, but the community no longer seems to extend the benefit of the doubt, which is totally understandable. Fool me 42753 times, shame on me.
This is delusional. Creative Cloud is bigger than ever.
[1] https://krita-artists.org/t/krita-usage-statistics/29184
And you can, last I check, get it at a monthly rate or get licenses for smaller packages, so it makes doing intermittent professional or hobbyist work more accessible to a wider range of people.
Previously it was $1k+ software costs barrier to entry for almost any professional or semi-pro activity via most software publishers.
So I really appreciate Creative Cloud.
I don’t have any loyalty to Adobe and would jump ship if a professionally viable alternative came out that was less proprietary, let alone cheaper, but most of the alternatives just aren’t. I do think that’s changing, so we’ll see though.
Also, before, companies, schools, and universities could purchase a few perpetual licenses and use those for teaching. Now, they would need to spend much more on person-bound license rentals.
So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left.
I'm still being held hostage by them to access my old files, but for every new project, I go out of my way to avoid using any Adobe-specific file format. If others do the same, then XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use.
EDIT: If I remember correctly, I released my first self-developed plug-in for Photoshop 5 around 1999. So I've been using Adobe products for a long time. Back then, plugins for hobbyist power users were a big market. Nowadays, that market is dead. All the hobbyists went to Gimp and Inkscape.
Similarly, the Substance3D communities became a ghost town more or less overnight when Adobe purchased the company and then removed Indie pricing. It went from $99 one-time on Steam to $49/month (min 12 months, so $588 annually) as part of Creative Cloud. Suddenly, Marmoset - their long-term competitor - became very attractive at a one-time $119 for students for a perpetual license. I also lost access to my old files there.