Adobe Gets Bullied Off Bluesky

And they bought Macromedia’s suite and destroyed it.

I miss macromedia flash so bad, actionscript for life
- I once built a website preloader that was so large that I made a pre-preloader for it. Good times indeed.
  
  A flash preloader was my first real tech job! As I recall, they stiffed my last paycheck and went under later.
  
  But it was incredibly fun and I made connections that steered my career to a new direction for the next decade.
  
  Awesome, what’s keeping you busy these days? (If this is an account where it’s OK to share that on)
  
  <insert outdated xzibit meme here> Agreed, the wildest of wests.
- Fireworks for me. I miss that whole suite though.
  
  Now there's a name I haven't seen in a while and that makes me a little bit sad.
- Good I hated working in actionscript so much.
RIP Fireworks...
- Fireworks had so much potential as a web design app and they threw it away.
  
  Illustrator and InDesign were too focused on print media and Photoshop could barely comprehend anything unless it was rasterized.
That's what big tech companies do, they buy small and promissing companies they think that once can become a competitor and then.... destroy it. The young startups just take the money and can retire early.
And they bought Cool Edit and destroyed it.
And they bought Paintshop pro and destroyed it
- Corel bought Paint Shop Pro and destroyed it, not Adobe, though it was an Adobe-style move to be sure.
  
  I think he is old, like me and means aldus photostyler. Which was light years ahead of adobe in background separation.

GIMP 3, Krita, Darktable, Inkscape, Kdenlive

if you poke around graphic design as a hobby, these might be fine, but not for professional use from what I've read :/

e.g. apparently Inkscape still can't really do CMYK
Blender
- The people editing their images in Blender are the same people who edit their videos in Blender lol.
  
  You say that like it’s a bad thing lol
  
  Has it gotten better with editing? I tried a couple of years ago and just couldn't. It's amazing for the 3d software. If they could make it easier to measure things, I'd use it for CAD too.
  
  FreeCAD for CAD as others mentioned.
  
  Sadly FreeCAD is absolutely shit compared to what commercial CAD products offer - and sadly even 1.0 didn't change their problems.
  
  Depends on your needs. I probably wouldn't consider it good enough yet for commercial but the improvements on 1.0 take care of pretty much all of my needs. The "free" licenses for Fusion360 and OnShape are garbage and feel like nothing more than attempts to get hobbyists and small businesses locked in before changing terms. Plus, last I checked, they pull the same kinda data vacuum bullshit that social media companies did in their terms - "free" license holders should expect any and all of their work to be resold by the companies for profit.
  
  But we are talking about a commercial level here - Adobe Photoshop is primarily a professional software that is also used by prosumers/hobbyists,not vice versa. We all judge e.g. Affinity on that level (rightfully).
  
  And seen from that level FreeCAD is,well, what I said. Sure,it might do for some hobbyists and even some small companies, but even then it shows it's massive structural flaws. Which partly, and this is why I am so openly critical of it, exist for 5+ years and are there due to the ongoing infighting in the development community.
  
  The problem with is roughness is also a problem in terms of commercial use. When I do things as a hobbyist it's just my time that is consumed. Not ideal,but it is what it is. In a commercial setting my staff takes more time due to this roughness and that costs money - much more money than commercial solutions cost. Which is bad - especially as it forces people to stick with Windows as there are no properly working alternatives on Linux.
  
  And yes, onshape and fusion are horrible to hobbyists in that regard, but Solidedge(free) and to some extend Solidworks(cheap) are decent.
  
  I have to agree with pretty much everything that you've said there. Since I don't use CAD professionally, and I'm not about to suffer through the windows experience voluntarily, I'm pretty much such with FreeCAD and (when I get around to it) CADquery. Hopefully more companies will start supporting Linux and free CAD devs from all the MS fuckery - might even get FreeCAD (or a fork) to be more productive and prioritize things necessary to be competitive for SMB/hobbyists.
  
  Yeah, it's a real pain, sadly. Tbh, I don't think we will ever find a major CAD company support Linux again - even Siemens, who supported NX on Linux for ages have stopped.
  
  From my POV we have two choices: Either we make FreeCAD a viable alternative that beats the competition or at least is on the same page as them - which I find highly unlikely with the current system, so a fork+someone who finances it would be needed- or we find ways to optimise/enable Windows based CAD on Linux*. The former worked for the other tool we regularly use: QGIS. That has become the de facto standard in a lot of fields and has sometimes even pushed out commercial competition.
  
  The later is imho the better way for CAD as it is really really hard for companies to change their CAD (even within windows and with a commercial product) - I have a business estimate for an medical product company who estimated 30k € per employee under ideal conditions, possibly more if something goes wrong(Training, loss of production, licencing, converting of files, integration of external databases,etc.). We have done it for games (tbf,with a lot of help from valve) and surely can do it with CAD (which in theory should be easier).
  
  The last option is a bad one: In theory we could use FreeCAD as a backengine and develop themes that replicate the workflow of other products. But for that FreeCAD would need to improve on so many points beforehand...
  
  Maybe I'm doing too much engineering - I found Open SCAD to be way easier than Blender for making stuff, and that's saying something because Open SCAD is quite a pain.
  
  I can see why for engineering, it allows you to be super precise. I'm not sure the people who developed the CAD side of Blender have ever used it for anything precise or to build details and drawings of any kind. They just seem clueless, there is no other way to put it. AutoSketch used to be so great, maybe the paid version is now. That was different than AutoCAD and Revit, but I loved it.
  
  I’ve always seen Blender as a 3D art tool but never as a precise 3D engineering tool. Didn’t even know Blender had CAD features
  
  Me too. As I said before, it's just on my wish list. I've learned Blender pretty darn well. If it could do CAD in a decent way, it would be perfect. There are too many UI's in my head as it is.
  
  I hate the syntax in OpenSCAD. It LOOKS like something object-oriented but it is procedural, causing oh so many footguns, if one expects it to act like OOP.
  
  I'm a mostly procedural thinker, even though I program in OOP all day long. OpenSCAD works a lot like the rest of my code: write it, try it, look at the results, curse, revise it, try it, look at the results, curse differently... you get there eventually. I do highly suggest not coding a masterpiece in OpenSCAD without visualizing the components first.
  
  It doesn't do it natively, but it does have plugins for CAD features
  
  I believe i recall there being an update specifically to the video editor within the past year or two, but don’t quote me on that. They have done updates to post processing, the timeline functionality, grease pencil, and i believe some other things that would apply to video editing, so i imagine it would be easier to work with. There are cad and measuring add-ons as well, i believe some free within blender itself.
  
  I bought Davinci, so I'm happy with that, but I'll still check out the Blender version. I can't really complain about it, it does so much and is free.
  
  As far as CAD goes, they aren't really usable to be fast in CAD. It's super cumbersome. You should be able to move things 1" to the right or left, put things at certain heights and move around the space in an easy way. I haven't found anything that can do that for imperial. Also, the tools for making dimensions is really bad and I don't think there's a way to make a blueprint unless you come up with something yourself. That being said, it's free and it's not their focus. They concentrate on the 3D portions.
  
  I've started using FreeCAD for CAD work, I've used Fusion 360 for 5 years before trying FreeCAD (again, I tried it a few years ago) and it works pretty good.
  
  It's different and it's taking some getting used to but it's working out quite nicely so far.
  
  I'll give that a try again. I tried that about 3 or 4 years ago and couldn't make that switch, but I can't remember why, lol.
  
  The 1.0 release helps a lot. They got a bit of a kick in the pants while Ondsel existed.
  
  Oh definitely do. The recent improvements (in the last 1-2 years) have made it much more useable, and sometimes even intuitive.
  
  If the units are set to inches for length. You can just type G (grab), X (or Y or Z), and 1 to move an inch in any direction. I think it used to be worse.
  
  Unless they've changed it in the last 2 releases, it's still that you have to decimal out the inches. So 1" would be .0833333. I don't have time for that shit. It's so easy in any other cad program from decades ago. Like I said, it's obviously not their focus and that's fine. It's just on my wish list.
  
  The imperial units still default to feet, but you can append a " to type in inches! You can also get fractions with one in the numerator by typing /x, and if you go into preferences -> input -> keyboard and check "Default to Advanced Numeric Input" you can type in e.g. 3/8" as well as do things like addition, subtraction, and multiplication in your numeric inputs. ^-^
  
  Please don't take this the wrong way, but I have no idea what you're trying to communicate. You seem to know Blender really well and can modify it easily. That is my worst nightmare. I wish there was a way for them to just have an architectural drawing units button, it would be so freaking easy to use. Making drawings would still be a pain, because you can't print to scale, but building things the right way in 3D would be a start.
- FreeCAD (for less-organic modeling)
Photopea, Shotcut

I (distantly) knew an indie software developer who was putting up a pretty good Photoshop alternative in 1996: ONE GUY alone in his bedroom was making a decent living selling a Photoshop alternative that he wrote himself. And he wasn't exactly a super-wunderkind coder, just a guy who knew the photo manipulation space well enough to get enough customers to float selling his software for a few years - in direct competition with Photoshop.

Adobe isn't selling magic dust ground from precious gemstones by thousands of artisans. They had a decent product that they marketed the hell out of and eventually got overly greedy.

GIMP, Krita, and many others are right up there if you haven't been sucked into the Adobe addiction vortex.

Krita is awesome with a drawing pad

And I'm not like even good at doing anything
- Yeah, I got my son a draw-on monitor explicitly for use with Krita. It's a normal PC too, but it makes Krita much easier to use well.
I use GIMP, but you can't compare it to Photoshop. GIMP has a horrible GUI and it has very strange design choices.

The Affinity suite is comparable to Photoshop, but it's a paid product.
- I compare today's GIMP to the Photoshop I used in the 1990s, and they're not very different at all.
- whatever happened to photopea

Photopea represent

Affinity Photo for me!

I'd prefer FOSS but...GIMP ain't it.

Have used Photopea in* a bind in the past, it's also pretty good especially the clone GUI.
- Bought out by Canva, I also currently love it, but I don't expect that to last.
  
  FUCK.
- I moved to Affinity early this year, and it has been amazing!! I was expecting a long adjustment period after decades with Photoshop, but it's so similar that I picked it up super quick!
  
  Another vote for Affinity. Excellent Adobe alternatives 1-time reasonable price. Such a breath of fresh air after so many subs.
  
  Just an FYI that you might want to get some practice in with some Affinity alternatives, because they've been purchased by Canva, and so enshittification might set in any time.
  
  It may enshittify, but since it's a one time purchase and not a subscription, you can keep using your version.
  
  Oh that's really good.
  
  I have been using it for the past 5+ years. It is good enough, and its perpetual license.
Krita is my graphics app of choice these days. But there are many alternatives that are great (like Gimp and Photopea).
- Krita is my graphics app of choice these days.
  
  So much of Krita is great and then there is the text tool which is still a heap of trash.
  
  New update coming for that soon!
  
  New update coming for that soon!
  
  I'm fully aware of the feature that has been promised for years and is supposed to land in 5.3. I'm still using Krita, just not solely.

I still remember when they bought Macromedia Flash and all my animator friends and I simply couldn't stand Adobe Flash CS3 or whatever it was called. It used more resources, crashed more often and didn't exactly bring anything revolutionary to the table in terms of new functions.

I use Affinity Suite for work. Paid for it once, have it forever. Free updates until new editions, which are discounted if you own an older edition. Buy it for one platform (Windows), that's a license for that edition of any other platform too. AND they regularly go on special, often to 50% off.

It doesn't have AI content generation, but it does a few things Adobe doesn't - like being able to use Photo and Designer from INSIDE Publisher, seamless like its a single program!

Affinity Photo (Photoshop), Designer (Illustrator), and Publisher (InDesign). Then Krita for raster illustration. That's all I need as a professional

I have some artist friends who saw the writing on the wall after Adobe told Apple to fuck off with the iPad and Affinity said hold my beer. One owns her own publishing company and as of a few years ago all new projects were Adobe-free workflows. She still has Adobe but will only use it for older shit that might still need something later. Going forward, she (and therefore her entire operation) are fucking done with Adobe. Another friend learned both so he could adapt to whatever the market has in store for him and since the market sucks for artists he’s going freelance too and has said absolutely no to Adobe.

Adobe is officially legacy software. Vendor lock in won’t save it as the creatives don’t need industry titans to survive.
- Moat of the teams I see hiring designers are still using Adobe, and printshops take .ai files. But most of the solo designers I know use Affinity, and I've heard of one (albeit small) team that has swapped to Affinity for their whole team.
  
  Affinity was just bought by Canva so idk how it might evolve over time, or if v3 will make compromises I don't agree with. But I got v1 during Covid, loved it, converted to v2 as soon as it was available, still love it. Using all of them on the same file in the same window feels amazing.
  
  Another downside is that designers rarely make asset packs for Affinity. But I'm pretty sure Affinity is able to import brush pack formats from one of the other big names, just not sure which (likely Adboe's .abr)
  
  I don't like painting in Photo though, but that might be because I'm so used to Krita, which is designed for illustration in the first place. (They're great, I might donate to them again actually)

Gimp sucks. Krita is way better.

They have different purposes.
- Krita is more focused on painting but it has most of the same features as gimp.

Some brilliant people invented photoshop

So the real question is whether Photoshop might ever have become successful, if Adobe hadn't bought it.

It sure is.

I feel like I should have switched to GIMP a decade ago.

The best time to switch was 10 years ago. The second best time to switch is right now.

Big GIMP fan. That being said, Adobe needs to start promoting some of their actually good stuff, like their investment in the open C2PA spec for proving content authenticity, vs constant AI crap that is the exact opposite.

Ok, so I've tried gimp in the past, but had a hard time with it. Honestly, my Photoshop skills are mostly self taught (and not all that impressive), but that's the interface I know. How similar to Photoshop can one make the interface in gimp these days? Because that's probably my biggest hurdle.

Gimp is a little steeper learning curve but if you already know photoshop it’s not that bad.

The tricky thing is knowing what to do when you get stuck. Luckily they wrote a manual that assumes you’re only reading the manual because you got stuck and you’re so frustrated you’re actually reading the manual.

Gimp3 just launched and it’s really nice.

And free.