SaaS
Fuck that.
Adobe is struggling to correct a global outage that has already locked customers out of its Creative Cloud online services for nearly 24 hours. The Photoshop maker first tweeted that users were unable to login to their Adobe accounts at 2:22pm Pacific time on Wednesday, and the service was still offline as of 1pm on Thursday …
Just a really, really poor implementation of it, it's not like the actual installed binaries need to phone home for anything other than checking up on your payment status - whereas the system could be designed to have some fail over/exception management as opposed to just terrifying and alienating business power users (the pirates were of course still unaffected)
There is no reason for these apps to be in the "Cloud" other than Adobe using it as a DRM and a way of extracting money from peoples wallets every month.
As a long time user of Creative Suite I am clinging on for dear life to my copy of CS6. No double Adobe will hobble it at some point when it stops working after an OS update and they refuse to patch it.
Which is fine if you only need RGB support for digital/web media or desktop printing. Show me the industry-standard Open Source CMYK solutions for commercial print.
No one in Open Source land has got around to cracking CMYK yet (there's Separate+, but if CMYK matters that much to you, then it's not up to snuff - yet), and until they do Adobe will retain their strange hold on the industry
Wouldn't it be possible for them to re-configured the licenses to last for 48-72 hours or so? So when (not if) their cloud fails again, users will not be forced to just sit on their thumbs while waiting for the cloud to come back online. Then there are the other reasons a user might not have an internet connection: Working from the road, flying, or even just their internet connection going down.
This is one of the reasons I try and steer customers away from 'The Cloud', if there is a break in your connection, now you have almost all your workers sitting around doing nothing until they can connect again, especially if you are using something like Google Apps or Office 365. I've always felt that clouds should only be used by those who couldn't otherwise run these services.
Grace period is not relevant. Some of Adobe's services are strictly cloud-based, such as Adobe DPS. This means no DPS-based iPad and Android editions of magazines or newspapers can be being published at the moment - hugely expensive for some, a financial disaster for others. Some national newspapers were unable to publish this morning.
I love OSS, but there simply aren't equivalents to Adobe's software. Photoshop runs circles around the competition. InDesign is better than anything else I've used. Illustrator same. Adobe Edge Animate? Excellent.
The only one that I'd question the need of is Dreamweaver, but then I do more web coding than design, so Notepad++ suits just as well for me. Or Vim.
>But although Adobe is adept at creating industry-leading creative software...
If they had some competition, they might sort out their software for high DPI displays on Windows. There has been a fair few high DPI laptops arrive on the market in the last year, but no reviewer will recommend them until 3rd party software behaves itself.
I'm only picking on Adobe because one would have thought that people working on photographs would be the first to adopt high res displays. FFS, even niche software like Solidworks allows the user to select 'large icons' as an option.
This application [Photoshop Elements] is the worst example of usability on a High DPI system that I’ve seen. Adobe has even replaced the file menu with a custom UI, meaning every single element of this application doesn’t scale at all.
The biggest travesty of Adobe applications not scaling is that their intended market is often media professionals, who are frequently early adopters of things like 4k displays and ultra-high resolution laptops
- http://www.anandtech.com/show/7939/scaling-windows-the-dpi-arms-race/4
I drove 30 miles to a client to help them set up Photoshop - they couldn't even download and install Teamviewer or my own VNC app - just to find that I couldn't even create an Adobe ID.
So I've effectively driven a round trip to install some remote support software so I can attempt the install later. Ffs.
People saying that apps should not be in the cloud really should read up on what they are talking about before making complete fools of themselves. The apps are not in the cloud, they are installed on your machine.
The subscription part is in the cloud. I've been a little low on cash lately and my payment failed. I finally had enough to top up my credit card and even after the subscription expiring I have been given an extra five days grace period to sort out my billing. You are given plenty of warning and it's only your own fault if you cannot sort out your own finances.
I love that I can pay £28 monthly and have the full creative cloud with all the bells and whistles (inc 50GB of cloud storage). I could not afford the £3000 or whatever it was for the master collection on dvd while it was still around. I thought a subscription model would be great in about 2008, at least for small businesses. And finally Adobe now provides that.
And finally, for people saying I should just use some other software... they have not heard of the killer features in the CC editions. One example is Content-Aware. I did a club flyer this week and had to clean up bits of an old newspaper. I remember doing this years ago with the cloning tool and it would take hours and still not look right. Content-Aware did it perfectly for me in about 5 seconds. Do that in GIMP......
>> "I love that I can pay £28 monthly"
>They have you well trained...
All other issues (reliability etc) aside, £28 per month makes it possible to just use the software for one job if you don't use it all the time (product designers, for example, might only have use for it at certain stages of a project); It is more manageable than an initial outlay of £hundreds.
>> "GIMP"
>Yup.
Right up to the point that you want to manipulate EXR or other HDR files for environment lighting maps. Or use use free transform to quickly mock-up a three-quarter view packaging design. If you are chasing a deadline, these niggles are worth spending a quid a day to avoid.
You might find that the GIMP fulfills your needs 95% of the time, until you require a feature it lacks. At which point, being able to rent Photoshop by the month becomes attractive.
This post has been deleted by its author
@Jan Hargreavees
I love that I can pay £28 monthly and have the full creative cloud with all the bells and whistles (inc 50GB of cloud storage). I could not afford the £3000 or whatever it was for the master collection on dvd while it was still around. I thought a subscription model would be great in about 2008, at least for small businesses. And finally Adobe now provides that.
That's great for you, and there's nothing wrong with offering a subscription model. The problem that upsets people is that there is *only* a subscription model being offerred. You have your choice but unfortunately other people only have that choice too, especially as you have pointed out there are no real alternatives. Remember 1 choice is no choice.
I haven't voted you down but I'm guessing the sizable down voting is for assuming people haven't understood, when you haven't understood their complaint.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ..............
<This is a massive FU to all the sleazy salesmen peddling the cloud>
<Yeah I know the numbers look good Mr Salesman but your service sucks>
This is why I will never update to a cloud based service (especially for job critical tools like MSoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite).
Also why I always talk companies out of cloud services - though in that case it also often involves schools as the services cannot ensure data security for childrens details etc both in transmission and storage same goes for business data and bank details for companies.
Disambiguation: Cloud = A puff of methane erupting from the "talking hole" (re: arse) of an insane salesperson. The purpose of which is to provide amusement when someone strikes a match...
I've never felt happy in the idea that the tools people need to use are rented from the supplier, at whatever price they want to charge. Let alone in the idea of keeping the product locked in their store.
But that's just what cloud computing is, With the added bonus of breaks in service continuity and security.