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.
