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Adobe burned all bridges with their customers when they introduced CreativeCloud, that universally hated DRM app that randomly maxes out your CPU. Also, before

Adobe burned all bridges with their customers when they introduced CreativeCloud, that universally hated DRM app that randomly maxes out your CPU. Also, before, companies, schools, and universities could purchase a few perpetual licenses and use those for teaching. Now, they would need to spend much more on person-bound license rentals. So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left. I'm still being held hostage by them to access my old files, but for every new project, I go out of my way to avoid using any Adobe-specific file format. If others do the same, then XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use. EDIT: If I remember correctly, I released my first self-developed plug-in for Photoshop 5 around 1999. So I've been using Adobe products for a long time. Back then, plugins for hobbyist power users were a big market. Nowadays, that market is dead. All the hobbyists went to Gimp and Inkscape. Similarly, the Substance3D communities became a ghost town more or less overnight when Adobe purchased the company and then removed Indie pricing. It went from $99 one-time on Steam to $49/month (min 12 months, so $588 annually) as part of Creative Cloud. Suddenly, Marmoset - their long-term competitor - became very attractive at a one-time $119 for students for a perpetual license. I also lost access to my old files there.

csmpltn 5y ago
Can anybody recommend an Audition alternative that does not require a monthly subscription to use?
- naskwo 5y ago
  Try Audacity?
  - Hendrikto 5y ago
    I don‘t think Audacity is a great option anymore [0][1]. You might want to consider one of the forks (e.g. [2]). [0]: https://hackaday.com/2021/07/13/muse-group-continues-tone-deaf-handling-of-audacity/ https://hackaday.com/2021/07/13/muse-group-continues-tone-de... [1]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-audacity-how-to-wreck-an-open-source-project-and-anger-a-community/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-audacity-how-to-wre... [2]: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity
    - nyanpasu64 5y ago
      Unfortunately Tenacity has mostly dropped off in commit activity. I wish it had taken off though.
    - valdiorn 5y ago
      Such an overblown issue IMO. And it was all rolled back anyway. They're actually trying really hard to improve audacity. Yes a few missteps happened but the backlash was way out of proportion, especially given how approachable and responsive they were about all the negative feedback. If they had stonewalled the community and told them to fuck off it would've been a different story but that is most certainly not what happened.
      - Hendrikto 5y ago
        > Yes a few missteps happened but the backlash was way out of proportion, especially given how approachable and responsive they were about all the negative feedback. This has become standard operating procedure. Push your agenda until you receive backlash, then claim it was all a big misunderstanding, and that you are listening to feedback. Let things calm down for a few months, then push the controversial changes anyway. People are picking up on that, and won‘t accept it anymore. I think that‘s great. Current leadership has shown their hand and the probable long-term direction they are headed. Maybe it‘s an honest mistake, but the community no longer seems to extend the benefit of the doubt, which is totally understandable. Fool me 42753 times, shame on me.
- just-tom 5y ago
  I'm a little bit in the music production scene, and literally never see or hear anyone uses Audition. Not on posts on reddit, not on tutorials on YT. On it's wikipedia page it says that it's a DAW (and not exclusively an editing station), so the best and most popular DAWs today are those that have been so for the last two decades: Cubase, Pro-tools, Logic, Ableton. The first three have top notch audio editing capabilities, and none of them require a subscription.
  - paavohtl 5y ago
    Audition isn't really a music-production DAW - in fact, it doesn't even support MIDI or VST generator plugins. It's mostly an audio recorder and editing software for movie dialogue, game audio, podcasts etc.
    - fxtentacle 5y ago
      Audacity then. It was open source until they got sold.
      - Joeboy 5y ago
        It's still open source.
      - eropple 5y ago
        Audacity is audio Notepad. That it runs everywhere is a plus; on the other hand, it's super clunky, it doesn't act like any other DAW, and its editing behaviors are well behind the curve. I use Logic Pro for most things and have a dedicated, old Mac to run it, but Reaper is quite good and like $60 if one's on Windows or Linux (and isn't nearly as inscrutable as Ardour). Ableton Live is another stand-by and it runs on a Mac. But in 2022 it's hard to recommend Audacity for much of anything, even aside from their drama problems.
    - Fr0styMatt88 5y ago
      Audition used to be Cool Edit Pro. I really loved the UI of that program back in the day. I don't know what it's like these days, but back then (either the late 90s or the early 2000s, I can't quite remember) it was great as a wave file editor and a multi-track mixer.
- Joeboy 5y ago
  There are many "Audition alternatives", but it's hard to recommend anything without knowing what you want it for. Audacity might be OK if your needs are very basic. Pro-tools is kind of the industry standard DAW. Reaper is sort-of-free and quite popular. Ardour is FLOSS and good (although with paid binaries). Izotope RX9 is brilliant for cleaning up audio clips. Mixbus is supposed to have a great emulation of classic analogue mixers. Hindenburg is popular with podcasters. Etc.
  - schrijver 5y ago
    I might add that if you’re looking purely for a sample editor, so no multitrack, on OS X, Twistedwave for me feels closest to the CoolEdit I grew up on. Audacity’s is probably the first one to try because FLOSS. I struggle with its UI at times—although maybe they’ve implemented scroll to zoom since I last tried it. And I don’t like how everything’s conceptualised as a ‘project’ that needs to be exported, even when working on a single file. I just want to open a file, modify and save it. Gimp made a similar mistake at some point…
- delgaudm 5y ago
  Not knowing your specific use case, I use Reaper as my DAW, I'm a voice actor. No subscription required, very reasonable pricing.
- ahofmann 5y ago
  I used audition before it was bought by adobe, and it was a very good audio editor. But today, almost anything is better than audition. A wonderful, if a bit ugly and “raw” DAW is Reaper. I use it for everything. The big contenders are Ableton Live and Apple Logic Pro. A lot of people, that create music, are using them. I like reaper the most because it is nimble and is still pretty complete.
- telesilla 5y ago
  Reaper. Seriously, it's amazing and solid and professional. Do a few tutorials to figure out its quirks and you are set for life. https://www.reaper.fm https://www.reaper.fm
- rthomas6 5y ago
  * FL Studio * Ableton Live * Reaper
- adwi 5y ago
  Fairlight inside Blackmagic’s Davinci Resolve. Completely free. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fairlight https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fai...
- seanw444 5y ago
  For simple audio track editing (not music production), use one of the forks of Audacity. Audacity started going spooky by adding telemetry and age restrictions. Good ones are Tenacity [1], and Audacium [2]. For music production, I've been using Studio One [3] for the last couple years, and it's truly the mosf straightforward and beautiful DAW I've ever used. Though, it's not free and open source, which is a downside for me. It's one of the few proprietary software I care to own. Zrythm [4], however, has been catching my eye lately, and I'm looking forward to it maturing to the point where I can finally move to a FOSS DAW. [1] https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity [2] https://github.com/SartoxSoftware/audacium https://github.com/SartoxSoftware/audacium [3] https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-One https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-One [4] https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html
bbarn 5y ago
CC was the second time they burned people who loved their products. Pagemaker being replaced with InDesign drove a lot of us crazy too. I had been using Pagemaker since it was called Aldus pagemaker, stuck with it through quark becoming more popular, then when Adobe breathed new life into it, and also offered Photoshop.. I was all in. InDesign didn't just make me leave Adobe, it made me realize it was time to give ownership of that little newspaper hobby to someone else and do something else with my extra time. I hear from friends it's now a pretty decent tool, but I just lost interest in the whole field, since it was never something I did professionally anyway.
- prox 5y ago
  I am currently very happy with the Affinity Suite. Lots of updates, one time payment that does not cost a fortune. It’s great for both pro work and doing some hobby work.
  - pseingatl 5y ago
    No footnote support means it has limited uses. It's too bad.
  - 52-6F-62 5y ago
    I worked extensively with Adobe InDesign, InCopy, and Photoshop while working in magazines. Not much on designs but worked on existing files and templates form the designers as well as integrations. After I left I was looking for a solution and couldn’t justify Adobe’s pricing for my own small project and picked up the Affinity suite for a song while it was on sale last autumn. It’s great. It doesn’t have absolutely everything and I’ve had to learn new controls and all that but it’s not hard to learn and they’ve done everything I’ve needed them to do. For a seasoned user of InDesign it’s entirely different and I could understand hesitation—I’ve known designers who tried and just couldn’t get the workflow down but for me it’s been fantastic.
    - prox 5y ago
      Absolutely, and they are only on version 1 yet, with 10 free updates.
paavohtl 5y ago
Perpetual licenses to Substance products are still available on Steam [1], at least for now. They are more expensive, but so far there has always been a -33% discount on release. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1775400/Substance_3D_Designer_2022/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1775400/Substance_3D_Desi...
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  That's just 1 out of 4 apps. You need at least Painter, Designer and B2M. Plus it seems that in addition to buying this app, you also need to rent a subscription if you want access to the preset library (which used to be included for free).
  - paavohtl 5y ago
    Painter, Designer, Sampler and Stager are all on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Adobe https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Adobe. B2M is no longer available anywhere, but I guess sampler is a replacement for it. But yeah, it sucks that you have to get a subscription for the material library.
- prox 5y ago
  If you buy it, do you also have to have a CC account or do business with Adobe?
  - paavohtl 5y ago
    No, I don't think so. They activate using your Steam account.
    - prox 5y ago
      That is good to know! Ty.
open-source-ux 5y ago
"Adobe burned all bridges with their customers when they introduced CreativeCloud" I don't like Adobe and don't use their apps any more, but their apps continue to dominate the design, illustration and publishing fields. That is unlikely to change any time in the near future. I'm using the Affinity apps - the apps are successful and thriving, but making little dent on Adobe's influence on the industry. (Affinity proves an app doesn't need to displace or overtake an existing app, but can carve out their own successful market segment.) Adobe were caught-out with the success of Sketch and Figma for UI design, and with the Procreate painting app on the iPad. My impression is that Adobe's alternatives (XD and Fresco for the iPad) don't share the same "mindshare" among designers as those other apps. However, there are some Adobe apps like After Effects that simply don't have any serious competition. Also, there are thousands of tutorials for Adobe apps that continue to make them attractive to learn. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more tutorials for Photoshop than any other software (or even programming language) in existence. Interesting aside: The file specification for .sketch files is available on the Sketch website. This means Adobe XD and Figma can import Sketch files. The reverse is not true: neither Figma or XD publish their file format specifications.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > Adobe were caught-out with the success of Sketch and Figma for UI design, and with the Procreate painting app on the iPad. My impression is that Adobe's alternatives - XD and Fresco for the iPad - don't share the same "mindshare" among designers as those other apps. Yes, but that’s not because they were late to the party. They had the app for this kind of work in Adobe Fireworks and they shut it down with no migration path. That’s what opened the market up for Sketch and later Figma. Now that the latter exist, there’s no reason to pay Adobe’s extortionate prices, or buy into their monopolistic business practices.
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    It’s insane they didn’t see what they had with Fireworks, it had absolutely everything people gushed over with Sketch but a decade earlier. They killed it and half arsed added a few features to Il/PS and said “there just use those instead”
ChildOfChaos 5y ago
I understand your frustration in what Adobe is doing, but your post is just flat out wrong. Your projecting this annoyance onto everyone and this product too. ‘ So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left’, according to my search Creative Cloud has 26 million paid members and is only increasing, at a fairly healthy rate too. I hate it too and so do most that pay it but there customers certainly didn’t leave and this certainly has nothing to do with XD failing, the post explains quite clearly the issues. A lot of creatives that use/would use XD already have a subscription to creative cloud that would pay for it, so it’s irrelevant, you just wanted to moan about the subscription and attach that complaint to this.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  as someone from the 90s desktop publishing scene myself, I would say that the parent post is accurate from the seat of a person faced with the transition to cloud. 26 million subscribers and growing, reflects network power, ease of acquisition of new customers, institutional users, and just basically people on the further edges of the original "boom". Just because the current model does build and grow subscriptions per month, at those prices, under those terms, does not mean that the observations from the seat of an individual person, is wrong or invalid. "After the customers left" might mean "after the customers who thrived in the previous era left", and then you would both be right.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Enterprise / consumer split perspective. Enterprise loves SaaS, because it solves problems they had (smoothing out purchasing, avoiding endless reauthorization and upgrade planning coordination), while not creating any problems (because they were always going to upgrade anyway). Hence the uptake and good numbers. A lot of consumers hate SaaS, because it solves no problems they had (purchasing and upgrading were easy, if they chose), and creates new problems. They had previously been able to create indistinguishable output with an older version, albeit missing some features, to minimize recurring cost. And now that's no longer an option. So you've made things easier for a group that spends a ton of money, but doesn't speak publicly on the internet (enterprise), which makes your metrics look nice. And you've made things harder / impossible for a group that does speak publicly on the internet (consumers), which makes your sentiment look bad. So yes, both.
noduerme 5y ago
>> the Substance3D communities became a ghost town This is the same time they added a dark pattern removing 3D support from Photoshop, which most of us had taken for granted for the last 10 years. Like we need to pay for a new subscription now and break our pipeline for fast painting models? They can fuck off.
mekster 5y ago
> after the customers left. Where's the data to back that up? ADBE was $180 in 2018 and now $470 after maxing at below $700.
pjmlp 5y ago
Adobe is well settled in creative agencies, enough bridges still available.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> after the customers left This is delusional. Creative Cloud is bigger than ever.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  Yes, but look at Krita, for example. All of it functions are what people traditionally used Photoshop for. It has grown to be 25% of the Photoshop user base [1]. Adobe's revenue can grow even while its user-base is shrinking. [1] https://krita-artists.org/t/krita-usage-statistics/29184 https://krita-artists.org/t/krita-usage-statistics/29184
- o_____________o 5y ago
  The market is bigger. And more fragmented, luckily.
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
whiddershins 5y ago
Creative Cloud is an incredible deal if you want to do professional work. And you can, last I check, get it at a monthly rate or get licenses for smaller packages, so it makes doing intermittent professional or hobbyist work more accessible to a wider range of people. Previously it was $1k+ software costs barrier to entry for almost any professional or semi-pro activity via most software publishers. So I really appreciate Creative Cloud.
- chefandy 5y ago
  Yeah. The subscription pricing is a bummer for hobbyists or people who infrequently need it professionally. But professional users bought updates regularly anyway and probably ended up spending more money. Beyond the actual total price tag, there was a zero percent chance I’d have been able to fork over a lump sum of well over a grand for Illustrator, Photoshop, Bridge, InDesign, Premier and Acrobat/Distiller. Now for $60/mo I get all those with constant updates, support in case something goes FuBar the night before a deadline, plus the option to pop into After Effects or Audition or anything else I need to. Heck, Adobe Fonts probably saves me more than $60 in some months. I don’t have any loyalty to Adobe and would jump ship if a professionally viable alternative came out that was less proprietary, let alone cheaper, but most of the alternatives just aren’t. I do think that’s changing, so we’ll see though.

csmpltn 5y ago

Can anybody recommend an Audition alternative that does not require a monthly subscription to use?

naskwo 5y ago
Try Audacity?
- Hendrikto 5y ago
  I don‘t think Audacity is a great option anymore [0][1]. You might want to consider one of the forks (e.g. [2]). [0]: https://hackaday.com/2021/07/13/muse-group-continues-tone-deaf-handling-of-audacity/ https://hackaday.com/2021/07/13/muse-group-continues-tone-de... [1]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-audacity-how-to-wreck-an-open-source-project-and-anger-a-community/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-audacity-how-to-wre... [2]: https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    Unfortunately Tenacity has mostly dropped off in commit activity. I wish it had taken off though.
  - valdiorn 5y ago
    Such an overblown issue IMO. And it was all rolled back anyway. They're actually trying really hard to improve audacity. Yes a few missteps happened but the backlash was way out of proportion, especially given how approachable and responsive they were about all the negative feedback. If they had stonewalled the community and told them to fuck off it would've been a different story but that is most certainly not what happened.
    - Hendrikto 5y ago
      > Yes a few missteps happened but the backlash was way out of proportion, especially given how approachable and responsive they were about all the negative feedback. This has become standard operating procedure. Push your agenda until you receive backlash, then claim it was all a big misunderstanding, and that you are listening to feedback. Let things calm down for a few months, then push the controversial changes anyway. People are picking up on that, and won‘t accept it anymore. I think that‘s great. Current leadership has shown their hand and the probable long-term direction they are headed. Maybe it‘s an honest mistake, but the community no longer seems to extend the benefit of the doubt, which is totally understandable. Fool me 42753 times, shame on me.
just-tom 5y ago
I'm a little bit in the music production scene, and literally never see or hear anyone uses Audition. Not on posts on reddit, not on tutorials on YT. On it's wikipedia page it says that it's a DAW (and not exclusively an editing station), so the best and most popular DAWs today are those that have been so for the last two decades: Cubase, Pro-tools, Logic, Ableton. The first three have top notch audio editing capabilities, and none of them require a subscription.
- paavohtl 5y ago
  Audition isn't really a music-production DAW - in fact, it doesn't even support MIDI or VST generator plugins. It's mostly an audio recorder and editing software for movie dialogue, game audio, podcasts etc.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    Audacity then. It was open source until they got sold.
    - Joeboy 5y ago
      It's still open source.
    - eropple 5y ago
      Audacity is audio Notepad. That it runs everywhere is a plus; on the other hand, it's super clunky, it doesn't act like any other DAW, and its editing behaviors are well behind the curve. I use Logic Pro for most things and have a dedicated, old Mac to run it, but Reaper is quite good and like $60 if one's on Windows or Linux (and isn't nearly as inscrutable as Ardour). Ableton Live is another stand-by and it runs on a Mac. But in 2022 it's hard to recommend Audacity for much of anything, even aside from their drama problems.
  - Fr0styMatt88 5y ago
    Audition used to be Cool Edit Pro. I really loved the UI of that program back in the day. I don't know what it's like these days, but back then (either the late 90s or the early 2000s, I can't quite remember) it was great as a wave file editor and a multi-track mixer.
Joeboy 5y ago
There are many "Audition alternatives", but it's hard to recommend anything without knowing what you want it for. Audacity might be OK if your needs are very basic. Pro-tools is kind of the industry standard DAW. Reaper is sort-of-free and quite popular. Ardour is FLOSS and good (although with paid binaries). Izotope RX9 is brilliant for cleaning up audio clips. Mixbus is supposed to have a great emulation of classic analogue mixers. Hindenburg is popular with podcasters. Etc.
- schrijver 5y ago
  I might add that if you’re looking purely for a sample editor, so no multitrack, on OS X, Twistedwave for me feels closest to the CoolEdit I grew up on. Audacity’s is probably the first one to try because FLOSS. I struggle with its UI at times—although maybe they’ve implemented scroll to zoom since I last tried it. And I don’t like how everything’s conceptualised as a ‘project’ that needs to be exported, even when working on a single file. I just want to open a file, modify and save it. Gimp made a similar mistake at some point…
delgaudm 5y ago
Not knowing your specific use case, I use Reaper as my DAW, I'm a voice actor. No subscription required, very reasonable pricing.
ahofmann 5y ago
I used audition before it was bought by adobe, and it was a very good audio editor. But today, almost anything is better than audition. A wonderful, if a bit ugly and “raw” DAW is Reaper. I use it for everything. The big contenders are Ableton Live and Apple Logic Pro. A lot of people, that create music, are using them. I like reaper the most because it is nimble and is still pretty complete.
telesilla 5y ago
Reaper. Seriously, it's amazing and solid and professional. Do a few tutorials to figure out its quirks and you are set for life. https://www.reaper.fm https://www.reaper.fm
rthomas6 5y ago
* FL Studio * Ableton Live * Reaper
adwi 5y ago
Fairlight inside Blackmagic’s Davinci Resolve. Completely free. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fairlight https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fai...
seanw444 5y ago
For simple audio track editing (not music production), use one of the forks of Audacity. Audacity started going spooky by adding telemetry and age restrictions. Good ones are Tenacity [1], and Audacium [2]. For music production, I've been using Studio One [3] for the last couple years, and it's truly the mosf straightforward and beautiful DAW I've ever used. Though, it's not free and open source, which is a downside for me. It's one of the few proprietary software I care to own. Zrythm [4], however, has been catching my eye lately, and I'm looking forward to it maturing to the point where I can finally move to a FOSS DAW. [1] https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity [2] https://github.com/SartoxSoftware/audacium https://github.com/SartoxSoftware/audacium [3] https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-One https://www.presonus.com/products/Studio-One [4] https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html https://www.zrythm.org/en/index.html

bbarn 5y ago

CC was the second time they burned people who loved their products. Pagemaker being replaced with InDesign drove a lot of us crazy too. I had been using Pagemaker since it was called Aldus pagemaker, stuck with it through quark becoming more popular, then when Adobe breathed new life into it, and also offered Photoshop.. I was all in. InDesign didn't just make me leave Adobe, it made me realize it was time to give ownership of that little newspaper hobby to someone else and do something else with my extra time. I hear from friends it's now a pretty decent tool, but I just lost interest in the whole field, since it was never something I did professionally anyway.

prox 5y ago
I am currently very happy with the Affinity Suite. Lots of updates, one time payment that does not cost a fortune. It’s great for both pro work and doing some hobby work.
- pseingatl 5y ago
  No footnote support means it has limited uses. It's too bad.
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  I worked extensively with Adobe InDesign, InCopy, and Photoshop while working in magazines. Not much on designs but worked on existing files and templates form the designers as well as integrations. After I left I was looking for a solution and couldn’t justify Adobe’s pricing for my own small project and picked up the Affinity suite for a song while it was on sale last autumn. It’s great. It doesn’t have absolutely everything and I’ve had to learn new controls and all that but it’s not hard to learn and they’ve done everything I’ve needed them to do. For a seasoned user of InDesign it’s entirely different and I could understand hesitation—I’ve known designers who tried and just couldn’t get the workflow down but for me it’s been fantastic.
  - prox 5y ago
    Absolutely, and they are only on version 1 yet, with 10 free updates.

paavohtl 5y ago

Perpetual licenses to Substance products are still available on Steam [1], at least for now. They are more expensive, but so far there has always been a -33% discount on release. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1775400/Substance_3D_Designer_2022/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1775400/Substance_3D_Desi...

fxtentacle 5y ago
That's just 1 out of 4 apps. You need at least Painter, Designer and B2M. Plus it seems that in addition to buying this app, you also need to rent a subscription if you want access to the preset library (which used to be included for free).
- paavohtl 5y ago
  Painter, Designer, Sampler and Stager are all on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Adobe https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Adobe. B2M is no longer available anywhere, but I guess sampler is a replacement for it. But yeah, it sucks that you have to get a subscription for the material library.
prox 5y ago
If you buy it, do you also have to have a CC account or do business with Adobe?
- paavohtl 5y ago
  No, I don't think so. They activate using your Steam account.
  - prox 5y ago
    That is good to know! Ty.

open-source-ux 5y ago

"Adobe burned all bridges with their customers when they introduced CreativeCloud" I don't like Adobe and don't use their apps any more, but their apps continue to dominate the design, illustration and publishing fields. That is unlikely to change any time in the near future. I'm using the Affinity apps - the apps are successful and thriving, but making little dent on Adobe's influence on the industry. (Affinity proves an app doesn't need to displace or overtake an existing app, but can carve out their own successful market segment.) Adobe were caught-out with the success of Sketch and Figma for UI design, and with the Procreate painting app on the iPad. My impression is that Adobe's alternatives (XD and Fresco for the iPad) don't share the same "mindshare" among designers as those other apps. However, there are some Adobe apps like After Effects that simply don't have any serious competition. Also, there are thousands of tutorials for Adobe apps that continue to make them attractive to learn. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more tutorials for Photoshop than any other software (or even programming language) in existence. Interesting aside: The file specification for .sketch files is available on the Sketch website. This means Adobe XD and Figma can import Sketch files. The reverse is not true: neither Figma or XD publish their file format specifications.

nicoburns 5y ago
> Adobe were caught-out with the success of Sketch and Figma for UI design, and with the Procreate painting app on the iPad. My impression is that Adobe's alternatives - XD and Fresco for the iPad - don't share the same "mindshare" among designers as those other apps. Yes, but that’s not because they were late to the party. They had the app for this kind of work in Adobe Fireworks and they shut it down with no migration path. That’s what opened the market up for Sketch and later Figma. Now that the latter exist, there’s no reason to pay Adobe’s extortionate prices, or buy into their monopolistic business practices.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  It’s insane they didn’t see what they had with Fireworks, it had absolutely everything people gushed over with Sketch but a decade earlier. They killed it and half arsed added a few features to Il/PS and said “there just use those instead”

ChildOfChaos 5y ago

I understand your frustration in what Adobe is doing, but your post is just flat out wrong. Your projecting this annoyance onto everyone and this product too. ‘ So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left’, according to my search Creative Cloud has 26 million paid members and is only increasing, at a fairly healthy rate too. I hate it too and so do most that pay it but there customers certainly didn’t leave and this certainly has nothing to do with XD failing, the post explains quite clearly the issues. A lot of creatives that use/would use XD already have a subscription to creative cloud that would pay for it, so it’s irrelevant, you just wanted to moan about the subscription and attach that complaint to this.

mistrial9 5y ago
as someone from the 90s desktop publishing scene myself, I would say that the parent post is accurate from the seat of a person faced with the transition to cloud. 26 million subscribers and growing, reflects network power, ease of acquisition of new customers, institutional users, and just basically people on the further edges of the original "boom". Just because the current model does build and grow subscriptions per month, at those prices, under those terms, does not mean that the observations from the seat of an individual person, is wrong or invalid. "After the customers left" might mean "after the customers who thrived in the previous era left", and then you would both be right.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Enterprise / consumer split perspective. Enterprise loves SaaS, because it solves problems they had (smoothing out purchasing, avoiding endless reauthorization and upgrade planning coordination), while not creating any problems (because they were always going to upgrade anyway). Hence the uptake and good numbers. A lot of consumers hate SaaS, because it solves no problems they had (purchasing and upgrading were easy, if they chose), and creates new problems. They had previously been able to create indistinguishable output with an older version, albeit missing some features, to minimize recurring cost. And now that's no longer an option. So you've made things easier for a group that spends a ton of money, but doesn't speak publicly on the internet (enterprise), which makes your metrics look nice. And you've made things harder / impossible for a group that does speak publicly on the internet (consumers), which makes your sentiment look bad. So yes, both.

noduerme 5y ago

>> the Substance3D communities became a ghost town This is the same time they added a dark pattern removing 3D support from Photoshop, which most of us had taken for granted for the last 10 years. Like we need to pay for a new subscription now and break our pipeline for fast painting models? They can fuck off.

mekster 5y ago

> after the customers left. Where's the data to back that up? ADBE was $180 in 2018 and now $470 after maxing at below $700.

pjmlp 5y ago

Adobe is well settled in creative agencies, enough bridges still available.

chrisseaton 5y ago

> after the customers left This is delusional. Creative Cloud is bigger than ever.

fxtentacle 5y ago
Yes, but look at Krita, for example. All of it functions are what people traditionally used Photoshop for. It has grown to be 25% of the Photoshop user base [1]. Adobe's revenue can grow even while its user-base is shrinking. [1] https://krita-artists.org/t/krita-usage-statistics/29184 https://krita-artists.org/t/krita-usage-statistics/29184
o_____________o 5y ago
The market is bigger. And more fragmented, luckily.
toiletfuneral 5y ago

whiddershins 5y ago

Creative Cloud is an incredible deal if you want to do professional work. And you can, last I check, get it at a monthly rate or get licenses for smaller packages, so it makes doing intermittent professional or hobbyist work more accessible to a wider range of people. Previously it was $1k+ software costs barrier to entry for almost any professional or semi-pro activity via most software publishers. So I really appreciate Creative Cloud.

chefandy 5y ago
Yeah. The subscription pricing is a bummer for hobbyists or people who infrequently need it professionally. But professional users bought updates regularly anyway and probably ended up spending more money. Beyond the actual total price tag, there was a zero percent chance I’d have been able to fork over a lump sum of well over a grand for Illustrator, Photoshop, Bridge, InDesign, Premier and Acrobat/Distiller. Now for $60/mo I get all those with constant updates, support in case something goes FuBar the night before a deadline, plus the option to pop into After Effects or Audition or anything else I need to. Heck, Adobe Fonts probably saves me more than $60 in some months. I don’t have any loyalty to Adobe and would jump ship if a professionally viable alternative came out that was less proprietary, let alone cheaper, but most of the alternatives just aren’t. I do think that’s changing, so we’ll see though.