I am continuely surprised that someone hasn't come to undercut this market (besides pirating which might be a huge factor here). But can Adobe's offerings be so far and above others that people think $95 a month is a great deal?
Note: I obviously don't use this suite so I don't know the true benefits of the software.
raises hand
I'm planning on undercutting them with a subscription web app for the niche of web design and web animation. Maybe not such a niche, but as has been discussed in the community, Photoshop is overkill for laying out web pages, and not ideal in terms of workflow integration with developers, the folks who actually do the coding for web sites.
No doubt, but for 90 percent of the needs to build effective web communications (aka web sites), colored boxes, images, and text will do just fine... Especially with robust CSS3 support.
Care to list what a web design application really needs? It would be a big help. I've kind of referenced Jason Santa Maria's "A Real Web Design Application" article (http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/a-real-web-design-applic...) for some of my goals with my app...
Maybe it will take some time to get there, but it's good to have goals, and incremental improvement is the way to go, at least for a solo developer effort :)
I'm a web developer, not a designer, but I work for a very small software company, so end up doing a lot of the ui design work myself. I think for this type of work Adobe Fireworks has a lot of the right tools. There are vector tools that are really useful for building ui elements (rectangles with rounded corners, triangles, etc.). Then there are effects that can be applied to layers like stroke (line around the edge), drop shadow, glow etc. Fireworks also has a pretty decent way of organizing your work using a hierarchy of "folders" that can contain different pieces of the image. It sort of falls somewhere between Photoshop and Illustrator and at least in concept is a great tool for building ui mock-ups and actual ui elements.
Fireworks does seem expensive, but my main complaint is how bloated it is. There are tons of tools I don't need and some operations take longer than you would think they should. For example on the OS X version of Fireworks, clicking the close file button makes the whole app lockup for about a second while it tries to bring up the dialog to ask if you want to save or not. Not a huge deal on it's own
Basically I would love to see a tool that competes with Fireworks for the ui design. Preferably it would be a bit cheaper, but I am much more concerned that it has a more targeted feature set and doesn't feel sluggish while using it.
GIMP: http://gimp.org - Gimp is for doing photo editing work. People hate on the gimp for not have 16 bit color support, but this point should be moot for the overwhelming majority of users. I've used GIMP to edit photos, then sold them on iStockphoto where they have been used in advertising.
I've been using gimp for ~10 years and I've never come across something that I can't do with it. (Including the "content aware fill" thing from about a year ago: http://newslily.com/blogs/96). I'm a pretty big GIMP fan.
People also hate on it's interface. If you've grown up on photoshop, sure, but I can work faster in GIMP than I can in anything (including photoshop).
Inkscape: http://inkscape.org/ - I use inkscape every single day for doing advertising materials at my job. I've done ads that have been published in nationally-syndicated magazines with this, and have done work for enormous, internationally-recognized brands with this. Inkscape is a fantastic piece of software.
Scribus: http://scribus.org - Scribus is for doing page layouts. While I don't use it extensively anymore, I have used it for publishing work in the past. It is a fantastic, very complete piece of software that will do everything that you want to do with it.
This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work. The only things you're going to get with Adobe's products is support for their proprietary formats.
> This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work.
That depends on the work you need to do. I don't pirate software on principle, so I used to use exactly those three applications, along with OpenOffice, for my everyday needs. However, when I started needing tools to do real work for real money, my perspective changed: the glaring weaknesses in the OSS software compared to the serious professional tools made it easily worth dropping £1,000+ on things like CS5.
In the interests of fairness, since "glaring weaknesses" is a somewhat strong term, I will list a few of the more obvious ones:
- No serious typography support (e.g., using OpenType features; flexible antialiasing for screen graphics; flexible H&J settings).
- No serious colour support (e.g., integrating Pantone spot colours).
- No layer styles.
The Adobe apps have their problems, to be sure, but on even these basic points the "competition" is lagging many years behind.
This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work. The only things you're going to get with Adobe's products is support for their proprietary formats.
Actually, the one thing i think most people are paying for when it comes to indesign is adobe's type engine, which behaves predictably and also supports the kitchen sink of opentype features. It's easy to dismiss ot support as a convenience function (it is at some level), but it's the killer feature for any typographic application where you want to use the full range of type available to you in the font (family?) you paid oh so much money for.
I once designed using a version of futura that had the small caps & osfs in the glyphs menu (untagged!) and was livid when i had to set nearly a paragraph of text by inserting each one at a time. Since the last time i checked when i was in grad school [1], this was still an outstanding issue in scribus (shaky opentype smcp/dlig/salt support) and it's really the one that kept me from ditching indesign. As it was, i would probably have jumped ship and used latex/xetex had i not been trying to individually rag each line.
It's not like you can't make nice work in scribus, but it may also be more convenient to do it in a program that has solid support (and mostly tuned ui) for the features that many typographers use.
I think it really depends on your background. I'm a much better artist using pencils or even brushes than I am on a computer, but I have been doing some work on a tablet and I find I'm adapting fairly well.
For someone like me, Pixelmator has some serious drawbacks. For one thing the pressure sensitivity curve isn't quite right for the pens. Worse yet, it often interprets rapidly drawn curves as straight lines! It also had some serious UI problems which I understand have improved somewhat in the most recent version. If I had to chose, I'd take Pixelmator over GIMP for simple everyday tasks, but seriously, the only reasonable replacement I've seen for what I want out of Photoshp would be Corel Painter.
I don't think it's an accident that Wacom has worked out a deal with both companies and ships PSE and Painter Essentials with their Bamboo tablets.
Hence Sketchbook, I use Sketchbook with my Bamboo tablet (I've heard good thinks about ArtRage). I'm no artist, but Sketchbook feels much more like real drawing than Photoshop/Pixelmator.
I've never used Sketchbook, but after reading your post I googled it and it looks really good. Does it support all the standard bamboo productivity features (e.g. the eraser, clicking the lower pencil button to drag, zooming and rotating w/ multi-touch, etc..)?
So far, I've been really pleased with the software wacom bundled in, but if there is a weakness it would be a good pencil sketching interface, as opposed to painting. Especially the smudge feature on PSE feels like it's for paints, not pencil.
Unfortunately, it looks like Sketchbook licenses are only usable in a single country, which doesn't work for me. Pretty much anything on my laptop is going to get used in China, Taiwan and the US.
Adobe's suite is the standard for the creative industry: anything from publishing (Indesign) to ad agencies to web design shops to (landscape) architects uses it. Often they do seem to use older versions than the latest: there's a significant cost involved in continually upgrading for a few so/so features.
Summary: It's probably not that any given customer actually uses even a third of the features, but that for any customer there is a feature that is very important to them, and those "I need X" features span the whole set of creative suite functionality.
30%? There's nothing that comes close to matching 10% of Photoshop's features, and InDesign's closest competitor is Quark -- so don't hold your breath for cavalry from that direction.
Adobe and Autodesk have both effectively monopolized their niches. When Adobe acquired Macromedia that was pretty much it for viable competitors. When Autodesk got both Maya and Softimage, likewise.
There is simply no credible replacement for Flash, if you need to author Flash. I hope that Apple has dented Flash enough to make it irrelevant moving forward.
Photoshop has so many deep features that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously shaking it in the next few years. (Photoshop Elements has more functionality than Photoshop's high profile "competitors" and is given away free with scanners).
As for the rest of Adobe's empire -- it's pretty brittle. Illustrator is actually pretty dated. Dreamweaver -- well some folks like it. Fireworks -- it's the rotting carcass of XRes, an unsuccessful Photoshop competitor. After Effects has tons of competition, and its killer feature is CS integration. Premiere ditto (not even sure it has good CS integration). Acrobat is a joke -- it should be Adobe's crown jewel but it seems like almost anyone can write a better Acrobat clone than Adobe.
I think Adobe pirating is pretty rife, although they do also offer heavily discounted student editions for junior designers. My understanding is that the people that buy Adobe software at the commercial price are design studios, and this is one of the most essential tools to their profession. It's comparable to asking why .NET shops pay the similar prices for Visual Studio.
I own and love pixelmator, especially given the price, but I think it bears mentioning that it doesn't have full PSD support. While understandable, not being able to edit a type layer within a PSD (type is rasterized upon import) can be problematic when working with others or updating a file.
There's lots of cute tools that attempt to cut out a niche at the low end of the difficulty curve - minor editing/creation for web but Photoshop has an incredibly sophisticated engine for handling the complexities and complications of professional colour space and printing work, the investment needed to recreate that code would be millions.
Lots of people here think nothing of paying $10-30 per month for a whole variety of services. To have photo/print/vector editing, video & effects, flash etc etc doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch. I'd wager than most people who used these tools professionally could cover the rental price with their first hour's work.
Designers are only part of the design product pipeline. Their clients provide legacy content in Adobe formats. Print shops demand certain file formats for their print workflow. The ends of the pipeline are reluctant to invest in new or different software for the designer's convenience.
I've wondered this myself as well, as I do not use it myself either. However, my girlfriend does animation with Flash and some Photoshop and she uses it because that's what she learned with, so I think part of it is vendor lock-in.
Note: I obviously don't use this suite so I don't know the true benefits of the software.