Up until 2 years ago I never paid for software. Having a MSDN subscription on Windows gave me access to all Microsoft stuff I needed, and on Linux things were always free.<p>But Adobe managed to fork $600 out of me for Photoshop CS3. After a few months their RAW converter stopped working demanding CS4 and my new SLR wasn't supported otherwise. So essentially I feel like they fooled me into renting Photoshop for $600 per year.<p>Needless to say, if I want to run my purchased copy on Windows (I paid for the Mac version), I'll have to pay for it again, the license covers only one OS.<p>Oh, and the only software that <i>ever</i> manages to crash my computers into must-be-turned-off-and-on state (I have Linux and a Mac) is Flash. Freezing the entire OS is <i>hard</i>, they surely have an engineering muscle to pull that off.
When Fireworks CS4 was first released it was easily the buggiest piece of major software I'd ever tried to use. This bug was just insane:<p><a href="http://blogs.adobe.com/sarthak/Text_Issue.png" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.adobe.com/sarthak/Text_Issue.png</a><p>I immediately downgraded back to CS3 and only reupgraded 9 months later, when they finally released an update. Unfortunately, I use Fireworks for all my front-end work and it seems buggier than ever in Snow Leopard.<p>I've experimented with every app that looks like it could be a potential replacement -- most recently Opacity (<a href="http://likethought.com/opacity/" rel="nofollow">http://likethought.com/opacity/</a>) -- with none quite hitting the web design niche that it was able to fill. Usually because it's only one or two guys working on it. Why a company like Panic hasn't tried to take advantage of the obvious demand is beyond me.
Some of our products are plug-ins for InDesign, and other than occasional PS work, I ignore everything else in the suite.<p>InDesign itself is rock solid, and a pretty impressive piece of work. (Even if they are slowing down on development--I guess there's not all that much to do with it.)<p>On the UI, yes, it's a kinda half-way house. But most print-oriented designers live in InDesign, so they probably get used to it as their own little world.<p>That said, everything else about Adobe's suite (updating, serialization, etc.) is just punishingly bad, as Merlin points out.<p>It does tend to make one despair.<p>The main problem with Adobe that I can see is that the suits took over once Chuck Geschke and John Warnock left. These guys were consummate engineers, and their products reflected that fact.<p>And, then, to add insult to injury, Macromedia took over Adobe, and pretty much turned the company into a Flash-only place. I <i>hate</i> Flash and all that it stands for.<p>Oh well, maybe I'll whine privately at Chuck...
Reasonable critique but I think it sidesteps a few things. Indesign and Photoshop are stable as hell, pretty much always have been.<p>I think most of the stability problems he points at arose when integrating Fireworks, Flash and Dreamweaver into CS. Basically created a split of differing UI standards and buggy software.<p>I think the single best point made here is that not everyone uses every single feature in every single app. If they could give us quicker access to our oft-used features I'd likely be happier (and they've started addressing this with the new panels structure, I just want some keyboard functions to toggle them now)!
If it weren't for Lightroom (truly great with its very own style - not Mac-like, not Win-like, just plain cool) I would long have despaired. Maybe there is some hope, but the task would be huge.
Oh, c'mon. It's easy to say "strip down all the cruft" ... but people actually use all of those tools. You'd be pretty unhappy if they removed a feature you use every day because people thought it made the menu bar look too crowded.
I love the term "Groan Pile". There's definitely software that I try as hard as possible to avoid opening and software that I get excited about and look forward to opening. Start-up time usually has a lot to do with it.
Perhaps i am the only one, but i never experienced even one single crash using Flash CS4 / Fireworks CS4 (mac). I use Flash CS4 everyday. Sometimes a session last for almost a whole week. No crash yet!!<p>But Fireworks does have tonns of annoying bugs.