I feel like the software Adobe puts out is extraordinarily bad and goes unrepaired. Do others have this impression too? I've never used Photoshop--is it better?
When I was on Windows, I found the Acrobat plugin to be a hog and hated looking at pdf's. On a mac, without Adobe software involved, pdf's are pleasant. Almost nothing makes my Macbook's fan run except Flash. However, YouTube never seems to do this, so is it just that Flash gives developers more rope to hang their apps with?
This actually angers me a lot, but I understand people who run case sensitive file systems on their mac's are a strong minority. I can't help but think it's due to Adobe being lazy.
I actually do use Photoshop and Illustrator quite a bit, but mostly because I work with a few people who are quite skilled at these programs. Personally I'd stick with graphicsmagick.
Illustrator is the most confusing program I have ever seen, but that's because I don't know what I'm doing. If you do vector art for a living it's features cannot be beat. It's mainly because its so feature rich that once you learn the subset that will be useful for your workflow, you're golden. I haven't been able to get a comparison to inkscape yet.
Photoshop is pretty intuitive, I mostly use it for resizing and touching up pictures. I'm far from a power user. The Gimp is like a 5 year old photoshop, I can't stand it.
if you do vector art, use Inkscape. it is easier to pick up and has more features than Illustrator, and it supports SVG.
I also find many of the Gimps features more intuitive than Photoshop's. For instance, to rotate an image in The Gimp, it is under the Image menu, which is also where resize is. Resize is also in the Image menu in potoshop, but to resize you need to go to the Edit menu, the the Transform submenu. It took me far too long to figure that one out.
Frankly i think the most confusing aspect of The Gimp is its windowing model on desktops that don't properly support toolboxes. They are working on a SWM though, and it will be out in a year.
Adobe isn't the only company that doesn't support case sensitive file systems on Mac OS. None of Blizzard's games will install, although some of them will run if you install them elsewhere and copy them over. Apple's developer tools used to have a bug that caused an assertion failure in the linker on case sensitive filesystems as well so that development with the latest version of Xcode was impossible.
> I couldn't install Photoshop on my Mac because my file system is case sensitive.
How do you run your Mac off a non-HFS filesystem? I thought Mac OS would only install on an HFS+-formatted drive. (Or maybe you just wanted to install Photoshop on a non-boot disk?)
As jacobolus said, you can format HFS+ as case-sensitive when you install OS X. I do this because I need to compile code that assumes a case-sensitive FS (for example, the Haiku OS).
Oh, that's interesting --it never occurred to me to do so (although I am sufficiently often bitten by the old `mv a A` pseudo-bug that I think I'll consider it). It's also an interesting reason to do so.
I understand why code might assume a case-sensitive FS, but am puzzled how it might make use of case-insensitivity. Do you know what happens with the Photoshop installer? Is it doing something silly like `touch a; cp A b`?
I read an account of how a guy managed to move his Photoshop installation from a case-insensitive FS to a case-sensitive one. It mostly involved just renaming files, so I don't see why Adobe can't spend a few moments fixing their files.
Adobe seems to focus on putting out new features first and fixing existing work second. I've seen it before in companies whose development schedules are dictated by sales. "Hey, I spoke to this guy, he said he'd buy 100 units if we ...".
Out of interest, I've recently discovered the Sumatra PDF viewer:
Personally I think Photoshop has gotten a lot better with the latest releases. The interface is worlds better. Unfortunately this only applies to the Windows version of Photoshop. The Mac version is a stinking pile of crap that I refuse to use.
Photoshop used to be better. But with time it has become terrible. It seems as though Adobe focus mostly on putting out new features, and not enough on just making present features work better, faster and more reliably.
It's a bit of both of course, but I'd say mostly the latter.
As you point out, Youtube can make Flash apps that don't kill your cpu, and so can I and many other people. But there's a ton of developers out there for whom Flash is just too flexible.
There's been a big backlash recently against Flash, mostly I feel by people who have never actually done any Flash work. Having done plenty of it myself, here's my opinion - for what it's worth: If we ever manage to get rid of Flash, it will be because browsers finally catch up and do all of the things that Flash does, with the same amount of flexibility. That will be good, because the standards and most of the implementations will be open. But it won't fix the problem of spinning fans. The same bad developers who are currently making your fans spin with Flash will just move on and do the exact same things in javascript.
As an amateur photographer and Photoshop “power user” for about half my life now, and wannabe interface/information designer, I’ve done a lot of thinking about Photoshop’s interface.
I love it, and I hate it. It’s by far the best tool around for the kinds of things I want to do to my pictures (I could write several pages about why the GIMP is inadequate). It’s an extremely deep program – the deepest I’m very familiar with – full of all kinds of little thoughtful touches that make it smooth to operate for experienced users. It has several very powerful abstractions for dealing with numerical manipulation of images, which when mixed and matched support a broad diversity of workflows and needs.
But – Adobe has been unwilling to ever remove anything from it, or change any existing feature very dramatically. With the result that it has accreted features and grown into a newbie-unfriendly mess, to some extent. Many of its features end up superfluous because there are better ways of accomplishing the same thing, and so they sit there in the menus and palettes crowding out the rest. The majority of the earliest tools should be radically redesigned to account for the more sophisticated interfaces (which is not to say more complex) and more computationally expensive algorithms possible on modern hardware. Many of these tools have literally barely changed in 15 years, even though users’ needs and hardware tools have changed dramatically: digital cameras have become ubiquitous and much better, etc.
I don’t have much use for Photoshop haters, but I’m deeply saddened that Adobe hasn’t faced much real innovative competition, and the whole image editor field has kind of stagnated as a result.
I've also been a great hater of Acrobat Reader on my Vista machine, and used to use some alternatives like Sumatra. But lately I've not noticed that it seem to work nicely, so either some upgrade has significantly improved its speed or my brain has adjusted to it. Could be both.
I found Sumatra PDF was viewing quite a lot of things (transparent images and similar) totally wrong, which made me go back to Actobat in the first place.
I think selectively disabling flash is an excellent move. For a lot of people the only flash heavy site they use on their phones is youtube or hulu, so the add-on should be a perfect solution to the piece of crap that the Flash runtime is.
They do allow the option to enable flash through the about:config page, they're just disabling it by default. Flash has always been a little shaky on my N810, but it's not really a powerhouse of a device, so I never expected it to handle much more than a youtube video or flash based menus.
Considering FF with Flash on Youtube can bring my well-powered linux desktop to it's knees, I'd be floored if any mobile device could handle it in an even remotely reasonable way.
It should be noted that the default Maemo browser (MicroB), also using the Gecko engine (but presumably older one than the newest Firefox mobile?), has support for Flash by default, at least on the N900 device (I'm not certain about the older ones).
Seems like the only mobile device promising flash support now is the Pre... will be watching that one with interest. I suspect its performance won't be fantastic either.
When I was on Windows, I found the Acrobat plugin to be a hog and hated looking at pdf's. On a mac, without Adobe software involved, pdf's are pleasant. Almost nothing makes my Macbook's fan run except Flash. However, YouTube never seems to do this, so is it just that Flash gives developers more rope to hang their apps with?