BeautifulOrb

finally switched to firefox. no regrets

I've used Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects constantly for 15 years. There have been no significant improvements and no meaningful competitors. The AI stuff is junky. The movement to expensive subscription plans sucks for artists. Shocked no one has moved into this space.

Procreate has been an amazing and affordable alternative to drawing in photoshop/illustrator, and Figma filled a space that Adobe ignored, and Blender can do some amazing video editing things. But with PS, AI, and AE there is so much opportunity for competition.

there's a well known artist named traceloops who has a prolific/longstanding body of work. why did you choose this name?

I'm a professional graphic designer and I think everyone I know pirates it. It's an insane amount of money to spend if you're freelancing. Freelance creative work is often a tough life with thin margins. The price point is egregious. I regularly use Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects. None of the software has had any meaningful update in over a decade, except for maybe some masking/selection tools. The AI stuff is trash and no professional would use it.

I also absolutely hated this, you can move it to the left somewhere in the settings, can't remember how I did it. Terrible design.

The bloatware on 11 is out of control. Feels like I'm using a Samsung phone. 8 was fine, 10 was bad too but not this bad. The start menu UI has been completely destroyed. My desktop folder was nested in a OneDrive folder and it took some googling to figure out how to delete OneDrive completely. Microsoft Edge is constantly running in the background and cannot be uninstalled. There were a bunch of icons for apps that had to be removed and were not actually installed like Tiktok and Kindle. Really big design by committee vibes. Not cool!!

I was scammed by a plumber with this scheme, dozens of fake reviews. No recourse. And the listing is still there, no way to remove it.

Giphy does not make an effort to pay or credit the artists whose gifs are on their site.