Replacements For Adobe Creative Suite 3 Apps? 270
Gilmoure writes "With rumors of Adobe not supporting Creative Suite 3 applications on Mac OS X 10.6, I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? If the apps can work with the native file formats, all the better but if they provide the same functionality, that's still good.
I have several designer friends that are looking forward to the speed boost of OS X 10.6 but don't want to go through the Adobe upgrades so soon after the CS2 to CS3 upgrades. Especially when Adobe's already working on CS5."
To edit, or create (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you using these open source apps to edit, or create new files in the native adobe file formats? Creating typically requires more features than a simple editor.
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Sorry about the late reply; I'm not using them but have some designer friends. One's just willing to check out new apps for new projects while the other was wondering if other apps would be able to open Adobe format files. From reading down below, it looks like there's some compatibility but not enough to totally ditch Adobe stuff without redoing entire projects.
Also, seems the rumors about CS3 not playing nice with 10.6 are overblown and this entire question didn't need to be asked. Ah, well.
Don't bother (Score:4, Informative)
There's a difference between not working and not being officially supported.
Re:Don't bother (Score:4, Insightful)
works, fine.
supported, no.
support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.
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No one supports 10.6 yet, it hasn't been released.
Re:Don't bother (Score:5, Interesting)
There have been dozens of bugs in every version of Photoshop that aren't fixed until the new version comes out - then the come out with NEW bugs.
Re:Don't bother (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed, well maybe it's worse than you state. I found a cross platform bug in InDesign. It would consistently crash on Windows or OS X and made one of their lesser known but advertised features completely useless for a large number of shops. I reported the bug multiple times, in detail and it still persisted through three versions. Heck, it's probably still there, I haven't checked the latest version because I have not bothered to upgrade.
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That could be because Adobe support is required to replicate a bug before they are allowed to even enter it into their bug report system.
I gave them detailed instructions. This was not a hard bug to replicate. It happened every time you tried to use a feature in a specific way. As I said, it was even cross-platform because I tried using the Windows version as a work around. Adobe was, and probably is, just horribly unresponsive about fixes in some of their projects.
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I've been using Photoshop since, oh, version 4. Adobe has never had anything resembling 'support' for any of it's products...
Hell I haven't felt like Adobe supported Photoshop CS3 on 10.5, so I'm sure not expecting anything with 10.6. Even the latest Photoshop on the latest Mac OS seems janky.
Maybe CS5 will have Painty the talking paintbrush. "Hello, it looks like you're trying to add a new adjustment layer..."
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I've been using Photoshop since, oh, version 4. Adobe has never had anything resembling 'support' for any of it's products.
I don't agree with you.
I had to call support for an Acrobat OCR product, and a girl with a beautiful CostaRican accent got to read the same manual page for me, several times.
Of course, I ended up just using another product with a less recognized brand, but that did resemble support. Shitty support, but support nevertheless.
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They don't support an old version on a not-yet-released OS; so that's hardly shocking.
You correctly point out that some people might, even reasonably, want to run officially supported software.
Taking the original posters question at face value, their concern is that they only want to run officially supported software, and they wonder if there is an open source package they hasn't heard of previously for a not yet released OS that will answer this concern? Assuming, for the sake of argument, the poster is s
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And how many OSS apps have "official support" exactly?
Some projects may be backed by the likes of Redhat, who will let you pay for "support" (basically a piece of paper to keep the company's suits happy), but for most OSS out there you're relying on community forums and wikis like everyone else.
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Or the developers themselves which, if they take their software seriously, is the best kind of help you can get.
I've had to use various commercially supported server-side products in the past, most of the time "support" entails being read from a script by some guy in a callcenter what you've already tried, after which you're out of luck. There were a couple of products that did have proper support, but you never know
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support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.
What particular problems have you encountered that having support was able to dig you out of?
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support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.
What particular problems have you encountered that having support was able to dig you out of?
Having someone else to blame.
Re:Don't bother (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps it depends on the professional involved. I've been using Adobe since 1993 and the only time I called up their support was because their DRM had locked me out of running CS2 on a new system (the old system was destroyed in an accident so could not be manually de-authorized). Besides that, I can't think of one reason why I need support from them beyond such unforeseen installation issues. As others have mentioned, if you're using it for business then there's no real necessity to upgrade to 10.6.
Re:Don't bother (Score:5, Insightful)
works, fine.
supported, no.
support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.
In that case, you can buy CS4.
Solutions:
1. Stay with 10.5 and CS3
2. Move to 10.6, use CS3 (which presumably works just fine, but if it doesn't, it's not Adobe's problem)
3. Move to 10.6 and CS4
It seems to me this is a non-issue, other than it's good to be aware of it so you can make the right choice for you. For most people (pros and amateurs alike), option 2 is probably the best.
If you're a Pro and you really want to use 10.6 and really want the peace of mind official support, then you can fork out for CS4.
On the other hand, moving from Photoshop (Illustrator, etc.) to some Open Source program is going to be, for most pros, worse than any of the three options listed.
I don't mean to say that the GIMP or Inkscape or whatever are bad, just that the switchover is going to be more jarring than any of those three options.
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support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.
Support comes at $120 an hour, and their support people are clueless. I guess this means you've never used Adobe in your career.
Re:Don't bother (Score:4, Insightful)
support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.
First of all... when have you EVER gotten support from Adobe?
Secondly, if getting official 'Adobe support' is critical to you then a topic titled "Alternatives to Adobe Creative Suite 3" probably isn't going to be very useful.
DigiKam, Ufraw-GiMP (Score:2)
I use these all the time for photo processing. These are very effective programs giving many kinds of control over photo images.
Respectively: (Score:5, Informative)
*I haven't actually used Scribus myself.
Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively. There are many alternatives to Nvu, it's just the one I've used. However, I usually just write the HTML myself, for which Kate is very useful and user-friendly, supporting syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and so on (at the same time, if necessary).
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Re:Respectively: (Score:5, Informative)
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Interesting post. I've never noticed all of the clicking because I use focus follows mouse.
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Too bad it seems relly alpha-quality.
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I figured it would use something like http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] - that seems like a much better resource.
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Yeah, I find the GIMP so unusable on OS X i paid for Pixelmator, which is pretty damn good. Its not as feature-complete as GIMP but for 95% of my tasks its pretty good.
Actually, I paid for Pixel32 as well, but that turned out badly, as the developer (Pavel Kanzelberger) is a total dick.
Would be interested in donating to an effort to improve the GIMPs UI, its pretty clear the core developers aren't interested.
Re:Respectively: (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly, GIMP needs a complete fork. There are sooo many different partial enhancements, revisions, face-lifts and the like, and none of them actually work all that well/universally. Something like, say, inkscape, which works identically on all platforms (natively, without any hosery) or OpenOffice.org would be pretty damn useful for bitmapped graphics. We've got gimpshop, gimp.app, GimpPhoto, and surely a handful of others I'm not immediately familiar with.
Most of the major functionality is "there" in GIMP, as I understand things. I understand there is (or was until very recently) some problems with it's "professional" color rendering precision or some such thing, and a handful of other things. I'm surprised there hasn't been a concerted effort to fork things to something "new" and more universally accessible instead of the arcane, cumbersome menus.
Personally, I'd love to see a "Photoshop Pro" type UI, or for that matter: I'd be quite happy to have a working Paint.NET or similar.
Re:Respectively: (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it has so many forks, it needs another. The truth is that it doesn't need a fork, it needs a full workthrough with a new pixel format and workflow abstraction. At least the latter GEGL was supposed to be since 2000 or something now and support for other color spaces than RGB like CMYK, Pantone etc. that is used for printed material is still vastly lacking. If your target is the web alone then GIMP is just fine, but then so is many tools for that job...
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He's a professional and shouldn't be playing with Windows if he ever wants to do something highly productive.
I work with Photoshop on 500MB images. I wouldn't switch to Windows for 10-15% - I'll lose more than that time elsewhere.
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mac supports PAE in 32bit versions so the 3.4gb limit is a windows only limitation!
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and PC changes what? If eg cs3 does not work in windows 7 for example, he has the same problem. If you are a professional designer, you are very much locked in to Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign, etc. There are no alternatives.
And the biggest Problem is the versions, We have have all possible version of everything here at work, from old school os9 photoshop, to cs, cs2, cs3, cs4.
And why does he need to upgrade to snow leopard if he doubts cs3 will be supported there? And as written above, what support? And
Re:Respectively: (Score:4, Informative)
Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively.
Be careful with this. While inkscape does a better job than gimp, both can't import the files fully. Gimp only has VERY basic interpretation of photoshop files. It will import layers, raster layer masks, layer effects, and some layer styles. Beyond that you're SOL. If you use any vector based maps, hue/curves/contrast/etc layers, smart objects, perspective, etc, then gimp will interpret the file incorrectly. .ai files, but you'll have to do without any gradient meshes and some other advanced styling.
.svg files I prefer it over Illustrator.
Inkscape is a bit better with
Gimp needs a lot of work still. It's great for quick fixes, but for larger scale projects/companies it just isn't worth it. Inkscape is fantastic though. It has some VERY nice vector capabilities. I've used it extensively for icon work, and I have to say that for making straight
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Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus*, Nvu.
*I haven't actually used Scribus myself.
Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively. There are many alternatives to Nvu, it's just the one I've used. However, I usually just write the HTML myself, for which Kate is very useful and user-friendly, supporting syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and so on (at the same time, if necessary).
I use both Photoshop (under Windows) and GIMP (under Fedora). I use each program for a different reason, and under different circumstances. But this is clear: Photoshop is a serious tool, while GIMP is a not-so-serious tool. Anything that requires more than a cursory manipulation is best done with Photoshop, along with absolutely anything that requires color manipulation, 16 bit depth, or CMYK, no matter how simple.
In other words, while they have overlapping utility, GIMP is not a replacement for Photosh
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Anything that requires more than a cursory manipulation is best done with Photoshop, along with absolutely anything that requires color manipulation, 16 bit depth, or CMYK, no matter how simple.
I'm not into illustration, but as far as photography goes, you can do a very decent colour management with Cinepaint. Krita is unbearably slow, and Gimp... well, it's no use shooting at ambulances.
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It's not a question of eye, it's a question of maths. As long as digital photography will create colours by interpolation between RGBG values of a matrix, you'll need empty 'holes' to re-create colours and avoid sampling artefacts. Applying filters (sharpening, border sharpening, USM etc.) also needs room to do their magic, otherwise you're accumulating errors that ultimately show as noise. When your postprocessing is done, then you can downgrade to 8 bits / channel without too much loss for printing or display.
Believe it or else, there's a real difference between a 8 bits and a 16 bits workflow; you'd need to try for yourself to be convinced, but for a pro, it's the difference between work or joblessness.
Re:Respectively: (Score:4, Informative)
Inkscape can have a LOT of issues aith AI and even many EPS files. We have a lot of people who need to view artwork from customers where I work and I tried like hell to get rid of Illustrator...but we had a majority of files that wouldn't work with it.
Other than that, it's a great vector art program.
And if I was doing something wrong witrh Inkscape, please tell me, I would love to give Adobe the boot.
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Nvu is old and unsupported.
Coda might be a better option, although it's commercial and not open source, it really is a very good editor.
(I'm probably going to get chided for this on Slashdot, and it doesn't really answer the question, but I actually like Visual Studio's HTML editor best, if you have access to a Windows machine you can run Visual Web Developer Express for free. Or buy Expression Web, it's pretty affordable.)
Last I tried Inkscape on Mac, it was an X11 app and didn't run natively, and it had e
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(I'm probably going to get chided for this on Slashdot, and it doesn't really answer the question, but I actually like Visual Studio's HTML editor best, if you have access to a Windows machine you can run Visual Web Developer Express for free. Or buy Expression Web, it's pretty affordable.)
On a side note, SharePoint Designer -- the middle child of that program -- is free with validation of windows. Think FrontPage done right.
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Which is why he should use its fork, Kompozer [kompozer.net].
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Note that if you need to open old PS files or deal with new ones from other people, Gimp does not support all of the features of the .ps format. Notably, it's lacking support for some (all?) layer effects, like drop shadow. They'll just disappear when you open the .ps in The GIMP.
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*I haven't actually used Scribus myself.
Last I checked, Scribus still had a god-awful "no, we won't let you put in bold text. you need to manually change your font to Courier Bold" policy.
Which is a shame, 'cause I was almost excited when the windows native came out.
I prefer it this way (Score:4, Interesting)
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GIMP - really cool can even open fully some PST files on it but I don't think it is 100% compatible with PST (Im not a photoshop user so cant say for sure)
Inkscape - Spectacular each version ins getting better then the last, can open most AI files but not all that compatible, has a lousy time with EPS though. Each version is adding some new exciting design feature, just check the website. Really like it, use it a lot in Linux!
Scribus - Use this for producing our agency newsletter, if you used PageMaker/I
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None of those apps are valid replacements for their counterparts.
GIMP has the worst UI known to man. Inkscape produces some of the shittiest SVG files I've ever see, its the IE of SVG, NVU is a joke, might as well use Thunderbirds message compose window and export the source. I've not used Scribus, but considering what you're touting as replacements for the other options I'm going to safely assume that its absolute shit as well. Have you ever used an app that didn't suck ass?
You can not possibly be a pro
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I love Inkscape though; what is it about the SVG files it produces that makes them so shitty?
I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
If such applications existed, Adobe wouldn't still be in business.
Forgive my ignorance, but what does the operating system version have to do with anything? Why wouldn't Adobe CS3 (which isn't all that terribley old) not run on a new release of OSX? Is Apple really that retarded?
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No, but Adobe is. They have a long history of doing stupid things, then waiting until the actual consumer release to "discover" that their product has a problem and not fixing it until the next major release thereby preventing their users from upgrading OS.
In this case CS3 may actually work, they just aren't going to promise it so people will pay to upgrade and Adobe doesn't have to do any support on CS3.
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I should add, my copy of Illustrator for Mac is 5 years old and works like a champ. So, depending what you do with CS you may not even care.
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Since I have Windows apps from 1995 that run just fine on 64 bit Windows 7, I guess I just don't get the concept of a new OS version that breaks existing apps.
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Since I have Windows apps from 1995 that run just fine on 64 bit Windows 7
Uh huh. But they aren't supported.
I guess I just don't get the concept of a new OS version that breaks existing apps.
Outlook 2002 (from Office XP) is broken on Vista. (Vista removes an insecure security API that Outlook uses to store passwords, so Outlook 2002 in Vista requires you re-enter all your passwords each time you start the program.) There are other hiccups too. That's a pretty high profile break though. Windows users -genera
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"Can you *guarantee* that the app you writing now will run smoothly on a new OS after 5 years?"
Surely not. But if I, as a VAR, am testing the new OS releases when still alpha, beta and "for limited distribution only", you can bet I'll be able to anticipate if my programs will run or not on them prior to their public launch.
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Linux isn't a replacement for Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think it is, well that tells me you don't know a whole lot about what people do with their computers. There are many reasons why it isn't, a major one would be that not all the apps people need have Linux versions. Supposing Linux was a true replacement for Windows, in that you could take any person using Windows and get them on Linux doing the same thing, no problems, well you wouldn't see so much Windows out there any more. Hard to compete with free.
So while I'm sure you can find apps that are in roughly the same market as the Adobe ones, they aren't replacements. GIMP is an image editor and thus in the same general area is Photoshop and Illustrator, but it isn't a replacement for them. It is not as capable, not as easy to use, not as well documented, and not as integrated with other prepress products. So while GIMP may work if you need an image editor, it will not work if you need Photoshop.
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That works both ways. After using a Mac at home, Linux at work and on my netbook, and even an iTouch, Windows has the most constricted, barely-functional desktop around. Most of the software I want to use works poorly, if it all, and you have to buy or download sketchy utilities to do the most trivial things.
I've tried using Windows before, but it's just so lacking in software and basic usability when compared to KDE or OS X (or even the iTouch) that I've never been able to stick with it very long.
It depends on what you're replacing (Score:2)
Enh... In the interest of completeness, I'd like to point out the needing Windows, and *thinking* you need Windows, are two separate things. If your requirement is for the OS to be called "Microsoft Windows", then there is literally no alternative. If what you need is a set of resources, and the only solution you're aware of runs on Windows, then you still only have one choice. At least, until you educate yourself further on what choices are available.
As you so succinctly pointed out, GIMP doesn't fi
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatives to expensive commercial apps exist but it requires relearning and retooling. This is not something that individuals or companies are interested in. And when it comes to data sharing and data interchange, these proprietary apps' file formats are defacto standards.
The F/OSS community has been making progress on this though. SVG format is becoming more commonplace and if GiMP were to come up with a similar "open standard format" that would be awesome. (Yes, I know GiMP format *is* technically and open format, but it is not a standard in any larger body of standards for information transmission or interchange such as ISO or W3C.)
Furthermore, there are PATENT roadblocks standing in the way of competition to Adobe Creative Suite. One of the most significant patents are those surrounding CMYK implementation. So the patent system, often cited as the motivation for creativity and innovation, is a big part of why Adobe doesn't have much competition at the moment. Once the patents expire or software patents are outlawed or otherwise brought into more reasonable terms, we will see a lot more competition.
Your ignorance is forgiven, but what you are seeing is largely the effect of vendor lock-in, and not evidence of any superiority of quality.
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Some really old and depreciated API calls could get dropped in the transition between OS versions. When depreciated these calls will log error messages in the various log files.
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Forgive my ignorance, but what does the operating system version have to do with anything?
You're forgiven.
OS X 10.6 is a major shift away from the Carbon (C++) framework to Cocoa (Objective-C) framework. In previous versions OS X supported both frameworks, but with the migration to "complete" 64 bit (the default is still 32, but that's another story) the choice was made to stop supporting both frameworks and Carbon lost. Adobe made a major shift between CS3 and CS4 too by dropping support for PPC and focusing only on Intel + cocoa. That's why the OS version matters.
But then, you could have f
It runs just fine (Score:2)
Why wouldn't Adobe CS3 (which isn't all that terribley old) not run on a new release of OSX? Is Apple really that retarded?
No, Apple is not "retarded" - it runs just fine (i've been using CS3 under the SL betas).
Adobe is simply saying they will not test nor issue updates for the platform, if there are issues - because CS4 has been out for some time and I believe has a substantially migrated code base. Basically, it's not worth the pain to maintain.
Note that Adobe said the same thing for CS3 on Vista. Did
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In the Mac world, a lot of things can change in between operating system versions. Numbers like 10.5 and 10.6 don't describe patch levels or minor versions for the same operating system; rather they identify completely distinct operating systems with different SDKs and features.
If you're experienced with Windows, think of this as an equivalent question: Does my software which runs on XP continue to run on Vista?
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Not Supported? or Doesn't Work? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd read about them not supporting CS3 in 10.6 as well, but I believe they just didn't test against it.. has anyone come out and said it flat out won't work? I guess I'd wait a bit and see if there are actually any problems before giving up ones workflow to try new apps that may or may not work in 10.6.
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[Update: No one said anything about CS3 being "not supported" on Snow Leopard. The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation.]
And also things like:
I'd frankly be shocked if people at Adobe & Apple really hadn't tested CS3 on 10.6. I *think* it's just some corporate conservatism at work here, and Adobe doesn't want to over-promise anything.
So all in all: No Big Deal
Re:Not Supported? or Doesn't Work? (Score:4, Informative)
I have 10.6 (build 10A421a) and Adobe Creative Suite 3 installed on this MacBook Pro. It works just fine.
Much ado about nothing.
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has anyone come out and said it flat out won't work?
No, and you're right. All Adobe said is they're not going to test CS3 in 10.6. This doesn't mean it won't work, it just means they're not bothering to test whether it does or not. Nobody is really going to know until Friday, but people with dev builds say it runs with some minor bugs. Really though, CS3 is buggy enough I doubt it'll be much of a deterrent.
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Technically, Adobe Photoshop CS4 64-bit is only supported on 64-bit Windows Vista, but I've been using it on 64-bit XP for over a month without any problems. Adobe's online documentation only states that "Although 64-bit Photoshop CS4 was not thoroughly tested under Windows XP64, and therefore is not supported, it should run." The OpenGL features (mostly minor GUI improvements like smooth zooming) are disabled by default, but you can still enable them in the options. There's also a registry script included
Nice FUD on the front page editors (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets put it this way. Your OS does not make you productive, the applications do. If you rely on certain applications then you should not be an early adopter of an OS, you should wait to see if people have problems. With that being said, what have you heard about CS3 not working in 10.6, personally I have been using it for awhile and I have not seen many incompatibilities, just a couple of issues with parts of CS4 that I don't use.
Oh and the speed boost is not all that drastic. The OS feels snappier, but applications in general feel like they run out of memory after awhile. 10.5 felt like it had better memory management. This goes for Adobe, Office, and all my games (Prey, Sim City, Homeworld 2, etc).
On a side note can they fix the damned text entry fields in Slashdot my mouse only works on like half of it,
Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors (Score:4, Funny)
Which is why everyone uses Windows. Thanks for clarifying that.
Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors (Score:5, Insightful)
yup.. shouldn't this be "I'm an Apple fanboi who is going to install the latest operating system update come what may, even if the software I use for a living doesn't work, because Steve Jobs says I should. I don't want to pay to update these other apps, so could the community recommend a whole bunch of open source apps that aren't up to the job, even after installing/trying the 20 or so on recommendations from the community. At no point will i address the fact that trying/learning all the holes in this new software will have a time penalty, which is a cost in itself. And I can't be bothered to weigh that up against the cost of a CS4 upgrade license. I also fail to acknowledge that if there was a FOSS program even nearly as good as photoshop, I would have damn well heard about it by now from a million blogs going 'ZOMG! THROW YOUR PHOTOSHOP AWAY' "
apart from that, its pretty accurate.
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As you have obviously not used the other major OS's I am taking your comment with several grains of salt. I find that it depends on what you are used to. If you know the keyboard shortcuts for most applications then you could see massively increased productivity, but I don't see any advantage to using OS X over XP when using the same apps, and I do use the same apps on both. I find that the limiting factor is the application, if it is designed with increased work flow in mind then it will have various short
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but I also have a windows box so that cancels out my shiny shiny
Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors (Score:4, Informative)
Your OS most certainly DOES make you more productive.
Many applications use the OS for file management and browsing. Finding that photo from a previous project that you need is the task of the OS.
Also most people run more than one app simultaneously unless you're using a turnkey system like Flame. It's the OS's job to manage the various applications you have open and enable the user to exchange data easily.
An application in a bad OS is like a sports car without any wheels. It might have an impressive feature list but interfacing with other applications and data is a big component of many applications-- a component which many applications rely on the OS to make fast and effortless.
Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors (Score:4, Funny)
Well, we have photoshop...
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Macs have always had games, now they are just starting to get games people actually want to play.
Broaden the question, please (Score:2)
I think more people would benefit from this discussion if responses also included other commercial and non-GNU/Free applications that are alternatives to Adobe's Creative Suite. If the responder feels it's important, he/she could still mention the license used and the remuneration expected, if any.
Nothing to see here, move along. (Score:4, Informative)
I am posting from a MacBook Pro running the latest seed of 10.6, and I have Creative Suite 3 installed and running on it.
"We don't support it" â "It doesn't work, ever." My guess, is that they don't support it now as 10.6 is still a beta until Friday.
Re:Nothing to see here, move along. (Score:4, Informative)
Like it matters. CS4 still doesn't work on case sensitive file systems, and getting anything that could be considered 'support' from Adobe is slightly easier than walking too the sun.
Try these (Score:4, Informative)
Firstly if you're looking for opensource app replacements you can always try www.osalt.com [osalt.com].
Personally I'd try:
Photoshop: GIMP [gimp.org] or GIMPShop [gimpshop.com] or Krita [koffice.org]
Illustrator: Inkscape [inkscape.org] or XaraXtreme [xaraxtreme.org]
InDesign: scribus [scribus.net]
Dreamweaver: KompoZer [kompozer.net] or Aptana [aptana.com] or seamonkey [seamonkey-project.org] or Amaya [w3.org] or href="http://net2.com/nvu/">NVU
I also found this website which might help: www.thefreesuite.com [thefreesuite.com]
Here are the relevant OSalt links:
photoshop [osalt.com]
illustrator [osalt.com]
indesign [osalt.com]
dreamweaver [osalt.com]
Anyone bought CS3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Photoshop should not be in the boot track of my local disk.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I have 4 copies of CS3. SafeCast has never caused me a problem, whatever it does doesn't seem to bother Windows and seems to work fine with our disk imaging tools so while you are write that it shouldn't do it, the fact that it does in and of itself isn't really an issue.
Finally, SafeCast doesn't 'override operating system security and safeguards' by writing directly to the boot track, Windows DOES NOT PROTECT that area of the disk, which has been brought up on slashdot before.
You can sit around and w
Re: (Score:2)
yeah, their 'copy protection' is sure worth a lot.
uhuh.
don't ask me know I know.
What's wrong with CS4 (Score:2)
CS4 should work. Adobe just won't be releasing patches for CS3 to update compatibility issues with the new OS. Until CS5 is out though (which probably isn't for AT LEAST 8 or 9 months considering Adobe's past release schedule) it'll only be 32-bit but, really, would you care?
Adobe alternatives on the DVD production side (Score:2)
I have a related, but slightly off-topic question - does anyone know of any decent FOSS alternative for the video production side of the Adobe suite? I'd dearly love to throw my XP partition away, but I can't find anything Free that'll match the combination of Premiere Pro (for video editing) and Encore (for DVD Authoring). In particular, none of the big hitters on the Linux video-editing front seem to offer support for multi-camera editing.
Meh, I suppose I could always save up for a Mac Pro and a copy of
Dreamweaver (Score:2)
Suggestions are welcome.
Been there (Score:5, Insightful)
Short answer: You can't. I might get modded down by open source zealots, but the truth is the sooner you forget about the whole idea the better. Using CS3 on an unsupported OS, or indeed switching to a supported OS, not to mention using the latest version (CS4, hello!?), are all infinitely less trouble than trying to do "professional" work with currently available open source tools that could replace it.
The price is only right... (Score:3, Insightful)
The price is right only if your time is free. The price of the entire adobe suite is less than a few days of billable work.
Good luck if you are a professional... (Score:4, Informative)
And go beyond the web. The problems with good CMYK implementation has been talked about quite a bit but what I rarely have seen mentioned is Pantoneï. Corporate art departments live on pantone colors and swatch books for anything printed, painted or applied. If the program doesn't have Pantone it's too limited to be a professional app in the print arena. Pantone charges for it's technology, therefore is unlikely to be in Open Source apps.
Now if someone would come up with an open source alternative with printed swatch books...
CS3 works... (Score:2)
From what I hear, and my own experience, CS3 works.
There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater - Upgrade to 10.6 and keep using CS3.
Problem solved.
If you're unsure about running in a non-officially supported configuration, don't sweat it.
If you have a bit of a look on Google [google.com] you will actually find that Adobe doesn't support using any of the Creative Suite apps when working off a network volume... Which covers something like >90% of the use of Creative Suite in the real world.
If Adobe don't s
Flash flash flash flash (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm making progress using http://www.actiontad.coms/ [actiontad.coms] samples and FlashDevelop, but its very slow process. For example, I can add a picture, but when I try to resize it, it disappears without any errors to indicate why. Then after doing some development, I find out Crysis needs AS2 and not AS3, which is quite a bit different than AS3. Finding documentation and code samples ("pure code" samples) is even harder for AS2 than AS3 it seems.
Anyways, anyone know some GOOD AS2 documentation or GUI tools? It needs to support AS2 (and only AS2 apparently).
Adobe did test ACS3 on Snow Leopard (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Dreamweaver: I prefer Coda. No WYSIWYG editor, but I've stopped using Dreamweaver completely.
Completely agree. I couldn't live without Coda now.
Photoshop: Acorn. If you're a power photoshop user, it won't suffice... depends on what you're doing. There's also pixelimator
Pixelmator is very good for what it costs, which is something like 5% of the sticker price of Photoshop. But like Acorn it won't satisfy you if you need all Photoshop's functionality.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah I use Acorn pretty much daily, and although it does a good 90% of what I used to do in Photoshop, the 10% forces me to keep CS1 installed (I refuse to update for feature I don't need)
Still no decent Illustrator replacement though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If CS4 actually worked, it might be worth it. As long as CS4 won't even install [thinkingdigitally.com] on my machine, not supporting Snow Leopard in CS3 just means my money will go towards supporting one of their competitors like Pixelmator. Adobe, I'll install when the new version of the app is worth installing, which means A. 64-bit, and B. case-sensitive-safe.
Re: (Score:2)
I would say it's the latter: Adobe doesn't want to prematurely guarantee that CS3 will work on Snow Leopard. Furthermore, I'd say Adobe would prefer that customers think they'll need to upgrade to CS4.
What about Leopard is broken beyond repair exactly?