I held off on Windows 10 for as long as I could until Adobe, and therefore my job, required it. Now this nonsense. I hope this isn’t the start of them joining on the web DRM bandwagon.
Unless you’re a professional and want stuff like being able to set the white point of an image. 8 years and counting, stopped holding my breath.
Also, I think it’s noteworthy that they touted “Pay once, free updates forever!”, and then they release Version 2 which requires a new license. Oh, and has a new price.
I paid $100 for Designer, Photo and Publisher in 2021. The “full package” of V2 now costs $220 (although 25% off with existing license). Still cheaper than 4 months of Adobe sub, but I can’t use it for anything when they won’t implement simple features like white point selection, which I need multiple times daily.
I think this comment from the forum link above speaks volumes as to why serious graphic designers need to steer clear:
Another two years down the line - I bought Photo v2 and still there’s no picker to set white and black. Affinity’s ethos (with Photo Publisher and Designer) is clearly to de-monopolise Adobe and take a market share from Photoshop Illustrator and InDesign but when professionals have to Google just about every single new task, it’s very frustrating. I get the impression Affinity designers have spent too much time in the world of Linux where manipulating software is the challenge and bending it to your will is the achievement. We ex-Photoshop users want developers who help us to create images and documents. The endless puzzle of how to do things with Affinity Photo doesn’t interest us.
There are still so many bugs in the UI - annoying little things like having to click twice to activate a dialog, or typing in a value only to have the first digit ignored. Most of the tool icons are meaningless, jpg compression is so poor, native file sizes are so big, why can’t I simply open a jpg edit it and close with a save? Why can’t I batch save images as WEBP? I cannot move from the Develop Persona to Edit without committing the changes - and yet I can hit Undo when back to Edit - it’s just clunky geeky sloppy stuff that smells of Linux.
We all hate Adobe and their monopolistic dictatorial empire, I think we all want to love Affinity but jeez it’s really not working out for me. I could never recommend this to any of my clients.
Yeah, it’s a bit hard when you’re dealing with industry standards. I’m provided CC through work so it’s not really my choice, but it sounds like Affinity still isn’t a 1:1 option. I’ve been interested in it so I’m glad to hear the other side of things. It’s easy to go FOSS for most personal things, but not as much when it comes to doing business.
Flash was pretty significant in the web’s journey to where it is today. For things like online video, it was the least pain in the ass way, in a time when the alternative was crapware plug-ins like RealPlayer, QuickTime, or Windows Media Player.
YouTube probably wouldn’t have existed without Flash and FLV.
Many popular things are crappy. It is not an ideology, unless you consider the scientists who invented the WWW to be some freaks.
Flash wasn't really useful, because many people couldn't display these websites. It was the exact opposite of WWW. WWW enabled people to use hypertext and provided accessibility.
Google forcing people to use its browser or pushing companies to develop exclusively for its browsers has broad antitrust implications, especially if they are using their ad clout to push wider adoption.
What's extra stupid about these, is most of the time just using a user agent switcher to make the site think you're on chrome or opera makes it work just fine.
Sometimes it's as simple as something like "firefox doesn't support import maps", but now they do (in 108+) but nobody has the time or inclination to go back and validate that the site now works in firefox.
I do understand it. These are browsers that they decided during development that are not supported. Not supported means not tested by a full QA team for months. And users are generally stupid, soba simple warning (use at your own risk) is something that does not work.
So they decide to just not support the other browsers.
To be clear, I am definitely not a fan of Adobe of this mechanism, just explaining.
You can say browser X may cause issues on the website, but people will still complain that browser X doesn’t work properly and demand you to fix whatever issue they’re having.
Adobe reactivated my subscription without my permission and now won’t refund me. They have records of my subscription being cancelled in May but can’t explain why I was suddenly billed again in August.
I’m going to try Adobe customer service one more time, but this may be the route I go. I always try to avoid chargebacks because it can lead to stuff just getting sent to collections which is more harmful than eating the payment.
On all my Macs, Preview is set as the default app for handling PDFs, and I use it for signing, adding text, rearranging and deleting pages; works flawlessly. Fuck Acrobat Reader / Pro.
If I need to do something more complicated, I’ll open it in Illustrator.
Foxit Reader has decent PDF editing built in. I use it all the time. I think they call the pen mode “comments”, but you can also load your signature as an image file.
The only time I use (pirated) Adobe Acrobat is when I need to edit existing content in PDFs, like fixing layout or editing text.
I don’t get why PDFs are so hard to open. The format has been around for ever. Why does Adobe have such a grasp on it, and why isn’t it as common to open as a txt?
There are free programs that’ll open it, but it’s few and far between. It’s a pain in the ass to find one.
Edit.
I looked it up. Adobe created PDF, but:
Anyone may create applications that can read and write PDF files without having to pay royalties to Adobe Systems; Adobe holds patents to PDF, but licenses them for royalty-free use in developing software complying with its PDF specification.
Happy PDF-XChange user here. Fair pricing for home users / small businesses, great feature set, stable, regular updates that actually improve the product.
Actually had complaints of less-technical users at work when by some weird accident the Adobe product returned (sneakily bundled installer?) or when a Windows decided that PDFs are to be opened with Edge now, because the users wanted PDF-XChange back. Normally users either don’t notice or don’t care.
The NHS' virtual appointment service in the UK doesn't support Firefox either, only Chrome, Safari and Edge. The dark days of "please view this website in Internet Explorer 6" are creeping closer to the present again. I hate the modern internet.
Add comment