You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks
helpx.adobe.com
helpx.adobe.com
Adobe killed the product activation servers for CS2 products in 2013, and for CS3 products in 2017. For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page. This resulted in a bunch of press[0] about it being a /!\ omg completely free Creative Suite /!\, so for CS3's 2017 shutdown[1] they made you register your original serials to your Adobe Account in exchange for an individualized offline serial and the offline installer[2].
I don't know exactly when, but some time around the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 they ended[3] the offline installer program for CS3, removed the ability to generate offline serials in my Adobe Account page or even re-access the offline downloads for my already-generated serials, and have seemingly scrubbed their Knowledge Base of any mention that they ever existed.
I am so thankful I got them while I was able to since aside from needing to tweak the high-DPI handling[4] the CS3 apps work beautifully on my Windows 10 x64 machine. All CS3 applications are only 32-bit, but they're also the final versions with traditional UIs before they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS4, so I'm fine with it :)
[0]: https://nofilmschool.com/2013/01/adobe-releases-creative-sui...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190401002548/https://helpx.ado...
[2]: https://i.imgur.com/ae1SWN5.png (my screenshot!)
[3]: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/locked-photoshop-cs...
Are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized? When I tried googling, some of my replacement serial numbers are found on the web, some aren't. This seems to suggest that they are not individualized -- at least for some product & platform combinations.
My own theory about the motivation of the original giveaway is that they lost the ability to generate new licenses for those old versions, so they made it free. A comment[1] from 3 years ago:
How could they lose the ability to create licenses? I can think of many scenarios: The one server that ran the legacy license code crashed, and they had no backups. Or they lost the database of who had which product and serial number, so there was no way to verify anything when someone needed to reactivite an old product or move their license to a different system. Or there was a new bug or incompatibility in their license generator, perhaps due to a server upgrade, but the source code for the licensing software was lost so there was no way to rebuild it.[1]
Just an assumption because I have two legit OS X CS3 Master Collection serials, got two different replacement offline serials for them, and those serials don't work for the Windows version just like the originals didn't v(._. )v
Completely seriously, isn't Adobe missing out on a significant community of graying designers who would be entirely contented to pay Adobe quintennially for a long term support version with standard menus and hardened fuzzed etc security wash before rtm?
Priced at say 60 percent of the current subscription, and given the opportunity for satisfying this constituency of customers who I am not sure at all would be Adobe customers in the future otherwise, isn't even such a radical branch viable?
I guess maybe this is based on projections about whether (in Adobe’s case) those customers unwilling to pay a subscription are likely to ever buy upgrades, maybe also it’s easier to focus on pleasing a smaller number of more “committed” customers? Not sure really, I’d be interested to read more.
But it’s probably a conscious decision on their part, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll ever see “one off” purchase software from Adobe again.
I do pay for their Photography package (Lightroom, Photoshop and cloud storage) and actually the cloud storage and iOS versions of Lightroom make it worthwhile for me. I occasionally need a vector editor and would probably pay another £5-10/month for Illustrator, but instead I’d have to jump to paying for full CC, so I use Affinity Designer instead!
The Affinity applications get a lot of things right, and do some things better than Adobe already. And obviously the pricing and permanent sale model are much more attractive than Adobe's subscription model.
They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist, and they lack any sort of plug-in ecosystem and all the extensibility and customisation that brings.
But saying that, it's not as if Adobe's applications haven't had bizarre omissions over the years, and they've had much longer to fix them. Hopefully Serif can keep up the momentum and community good will it's built for the Affinity suite and in time they'll close the gaps.
Are there any specific examples that come to mind? I recently heard about Afinity and am planning to give it a try next time I need a Photoshop or Illustrator replacement.
But then again, for a very long time very basic search and replace options were missing in InDesign, so as I said before, it's not as if Adobe's software hasn't had its share of bizarre limitations over the years as well.
[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6002319/Dolbyvsad...
This is the only reasonable way it should be done with old software.
> This resulted in a bunch of press about it being a omg completely free Creative Suite
Just write it in bold - something like "it's not free, you are only eligible if you have purchased a license". Whoever wants to pirate will pirate anyway
> they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS
Flash?? Seriously?
I'll be damned if I can find a reference, but it's definitely a “non-native” UI, probably using Adobe AIR.
Hell, a lot of high-budget video games around the same time used a little thing called Autodesk Scaleform. That's basically Autodesk's reimplementation of Flash Player (Adobe was too short-sighted to pursue this market) which game developers could quite easily license and embed into their games.
The worst part seems to be that they've just killed links and information about this - so you have people presuming they can reinstall their own products only to find they cannot -- and their online searches of adobe-run knowledgebases are just dead ends.
=\
I’m not sure why you’d run 10.7 instead of either 10.6 or 10.8 (or 10.9) btw. Lion is buggier than the adjacent releases (which are really solid).
Also I got 8 free updates that other companies would have asked money for. At least 2 big performance updates.
That is the one app that keeps me having a Creative Cloud subscription. In a business setting I find it essential.
(not associated with Foxit in any way shape or form nor a user)
I do like Lightroom, but the catalogue speed with 100k+ photos is glacial on my PC. I tried importing 30 years of photos rather than having multiple catalogues, as tagging consistently across all would be useful ("Hey auntie Sally, look at the photos of you aging!").
1. Impeccable Word to PDF conversion 2. Combining, rearranging pages and documents 3. Editing: add/edit/delete text, images from PDFs 4. Form creation (not something we use now, but plan to) 5. Protect PDFs (as much as you can)
That is the majority of what I can remember using in the last 12 months. I have occasionally used:
6. Compare files 7. Redact - though usually I edit the PDF and delete the text directly 8. OCR 9. Comment. But I HATE the PDF commenting experience, as does everyone in the team when we try and pass comments around.
I've been trying tesseract but find it lacking -- need a better shape/text/picture region recognition (people are working on it these days), and something which puts it back in tagged PDF form. I also want to try whatever Nuance/OmniSoft is selling these days since I used to be a OmniPage customer before.
Maybe it's the path I took in the industry but I had the displeasure of having to automate the installation of Adobe security updates to tens of thousands of Windows boxes a decade ago right through having to (briefly) write software targeting a customer's Adobe Experience Manager product in the last couple of years. There's a long rant bubbling up about AEM, but I'll resist the temptation and just say a suitable 4-letter word, instead.
Their products cost a fortune and for the privilege of forking over your hard-earned money, the company does things like this. I still own a license for one of the older versions of Photoshop post-Activation. I corrected it in a manner that would probably qualify as "cracking it" before ever activating after having run into grief with the product at my day job (at the time). Anymore, if there's a reasonable alternative, that's the kind of stupid I won't spend my money on.
DaVinci Resolve is amazing. I'm becoming better and better with GIMP. CaptureOne is crappier to use but has much better output. Lightroom iOS works fine for freebie Instagram pics.
I HATE this so much that I have an AutoHotkey shortcut that I run after I'm done using any of the CC programs. It kills everything Adobe. I also have a Windows scheduled task that runs every 15 minutes that deletes any autoruns from Adobe in the registry, deletes any Adobe services, etc., because I found that they obnoxiously fully re-added things whenever I would open CC.
You are wrong. Software is generally licensed, not sold. The only person who "owns" Photoshop etc. is Adobe. The rest of us get mere licenses that we are subject to the terms of. Violate the terms, and you're subject to civil and potentially criminal penalties.
I've also been considering what it means if copyright was to assure something for the public good whether there shouldn't be some kind of enforced escrow of the source. Having the copyright expire on the binaries does nothing if no one hid a copy of the source away in their shoebox.
Copyright is supposed to be a bargain with the public domain, and DRM explicitly renounces that bargain. This is a great example to point to... but as usual, nobody cares who has any power to change things, and nobody with any power cares.
You shouldn't get the benefits of both approaches, because they are mutually exclusive. Material that is protected with DRM has effectively been stolen from the future public domain. At the very least, key escrow should be required before copyright protection is granted.
I don't necessarily agree with that premise, but even if we accept it for the sake of argument, I don't think the legal system does effectively protect your IP in many copyright situations, so what happens then?
As an analogy, if you told every store that to prosecute the theft of a bar of chocolate they'd have to employ specialist teams to track down the individuals and then spend a thousand bucks on legal fees to bring a private prosecution, and at the end they might only get back the cost of the chocolate bar and a bit of token compensation, do you really think thieves would be deterred effectively and the store properly protected in its legal rights?
And yet we usually define copyright as a civil matter in most countries, other than sometimes in cases of large-scale commercial infringement, rather than a criminal matter like theft. Stores might or might not employ a dedicated security guard, but if the guard does see a theft, the rest of what happens after the police are called is mostly going to be handled and paid for by the state. It makes a viable deterrent against large numbers of small-scale offences. Such a deterrent doesn't usually exist in the case of copyright infringement.
Legal status and practical enforcement are unrelated issues. You seem to be attempting to conflate them because you just don't like the idea of copyright.
But that's a different issue. In fact it's perfectly consistent to enforce copyright through a combination of DRM and legal challenges.
Legally copyright is the default. Nothing is in the public domain unless it's explicitly handed over to the public domain.
So software items with DRM can't be "stolen from the future public domain" because the DRM is part of the product or item. And it's up to the rights holder to decide whether or not they want to free it. This is a deliberate choice on their part. (It's a little more complex with other content because the content is assumed to have an existence independent of its realisation or distribution model. Not so much with software.)
None of this justifies Adobe's actions, and a class action against Adobe would also be reasonable. (Realistically not likely to succeed - but hardly baseless.)
But it would be an argument about real/assumed/implied breach of contract with buyers/license users, and not over copyright terms or DRM.
This is sort of like living in a world where burgling old homes is perfectly legal, but lockpicks are also illegal, and so people who always locked their homes have basically opted out of the intent of the law.
That still leaves all the other questions about the duration of copyright protections, what fair use or the equivalent concepts should mean in an era of technological protections, and whether it's healthy for society to encourage perpetual rental models for creative work rather than permanent rights to access any given material, but these are separate (and potentially complicated) debates to be had.
The only legal basis for copyright existing in the US is to provide incentives for creators to enrich the public domain. Any other basis is unconstitutional.
With DRM, creators are failing to live up to their end of the bargain.
Because copyright is temporary, it is a legal protection allows one to exploit a their work. But when the protection expires works should be accessible for the public good.
If the public cannot access a work after copyright expires (because of DRM) then then the company will never contribute to the community-good in return for the protection they receive.
Those US Founding Fathers were all about laws that ensured progress of Science and useful Arts[0]. Or some such.
[0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec...
Oh come on. Surely a company with the resources of Adobe can figure out a way to keep an activation server running. In fact I'll bet you could find one competent sysadmin to keep it running indefinitely. I hate when companies spew out obvious utter B.S. like this.
When producing digital goods you never want to be in a position where honest people who want to pay you money will get a better customer experience by going through thepiratebay.
What would be the break down?
Legacy software, security and the constant upgrades, a manager, HR, customer support. Training your all your call centres to know about it and who to re-direct issues to.
The real cost is the people who don't go and subscribe to Adobe CC because they still have a totally functional release of CS3. Once their old machines die, they'll be forced to become a renter.
Or they'll look into alternatives, for which there are many available avenues.
* security and the constant upgrades - unsupported, $0
* a manager - unsupported, $0
* HR - unsupported, $0
* customer support - unsupported, $0
* Training your all your call centres to know about it and who to re-direct issues to - unsupported, $0
all non-issues. Adobe is intentionally breaking the software.
Those arguments are like saying an Apple ][ shouldn't be able to run "The Print Shop" anymore because someone might haul their IIe and an ImageWriter into the Genius Bar.
People know it's unsupported but they still want to use it for whatever reason.
It has zilch to do with the reasons you listed. Adobe is making being a legitimate customer needlessly difficult by hustling their customers to pay for the software again. They will learn the same lesson the RIAA and the MPAA did.
Instead of reasonable digital streaming solutions groups like the MPAA made things like the DIVX format which were disposable discs that expired. The commercial DVDs had long unskippable copyright warnings and unskippable ads, an inability to play the content on linux or other open source players, etc.
Then there was the DeCSS fiasco; there was a master encryption key that they called their private IP and used legislation called the DMCA to enforce it. 2600 magazine, a monthly alternative culture computing magazine, published the key and were sued by universal studios, paramount pictures, metro-goldwyn-mayer, tristar pictures, columbia pictures, time warner entertainment company, disney enterprises, and twentieth century fox, for printing a number (https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/04/2600_withdraws_suprem...)
These organizations eventually learned the lessons and won, so you are correct. but it was years of bogus outlandish lawsuits (suing old ladies for millions, sometimes because neighbors used their unprotected WiFi - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_group_efforts_against_...), technology fiascoes and incredulous legislation that made them the laughing stock of the world before they got their act together.
There was a time in the mid 2000s when ignoring copyright was the sensible and reasonable moral action given the outrageous "sue everybody without regrets" strategy of the RIAA.
Lessons
1. Offer products to your customers in ways they want to consume them.
2. Don't criminalize your customers for your lack of doing #1
How much would you tell your manager?
Someone hacks your server and gets into Adobe with ransomware because it's not managed properly, next week you'd be complaining about how stupid Adobe is.
Are you storing client names on this server?
Can it be DDOSed?
It will have to pass audits.
A company that can be trusted to deliver that patch will have a more valuable product because customers know they will not lose access to it.
I also doubt that piracy of older versions would affect sales. The pricing means it is pretty much only accessible to enthusiasts and professionals, who would be inclined to use more recent versions anyhow.
Adobe is business, and it's all about revenue. "Dead" products don't make any money, so there's no business case in keeping them around.
The difference between Adobe and Procreate is night and day. It's so clear that Procreate folks use their app themselves and take pleasure in it. I've switched all my work to Procreate, Affinity, and Final Cut.
In addition, it just does so much that changing it would be a very costly task likely to break a lot of things and end up removing features that some tiny niche still uses.
I didn't even really use Photoshop in a professional capacity, but it's probably worse in that situation. In the past, if you wanted to do something "cool looking" on the web, you'd describe to Google something you saw and invariably land on some Photoshop tutorial. It doesn't translate to other things easily. So to switch to something like GIMP, you have to not only learn the interface, but learn how to translate all of the useful help "in the wild" from Photoshop to GIMP.
I remember when I sat down to try to learn paths and such in Photoshop, thinking, "Is this really the best they could come up with?" But, yeah, it was ... when they came up with it and everyone learned how to use it. A switch would eliminate the moat that the product has.
And that's what's been chipped away at, in general. I haven't had any need of Photoshop for web dev work in a long time. My image processing needs rarely go beyond the command-line, these days, because many other things we relied on PS for are described in css or are vectors rather than image files.
Old-timers have muscle memory, but it's hard for newcomers to hunt for things because it's not logically organized. The steep learning curve is there for newcomers, but since it's what everyone uses they learn it.
Throw enough other hurdles like subscriptions and people will start to switch. It will be hard to dig themselves back out because changing their UI alienates old-timers.
https://maurycyliebner.github.io/ https://twitter.com/enve2d
If I can't run it on a desktop computer, big fat meh.
"I've switched all my work to Procreate, Affinity, and Final Cut."
This is where Apple Silicon and the convergence of macOS and iPadOS sounds useful. Still not convinced it makes up for the losses though.
That's not really who they're catering to anymore, though. Not primarily, anyway. If you pay attention to the way Adobe communicates in recent years, it's all about the "democratization" of design tools. They want their new tech to look like magic to regular consumers. It doesn't need good UI. It doesn't need to help professionals work more efficiently. It just needs to help Joe Everyman use content-aware fill to remove the unwanted thing from his next Instagram upload. If they can do something in that vein once a month and keep the subscription rolling, then they're golden.
Their record-breaking profits for the last few years in a row tell me 'yes'.
The story as I remember it went like this: X had a practical monopoly on professional image editing and printing, everything else was for amateurs. (Was that Quark? not sure). Then X did something that pissed off a lot of their users, and within a few months everyone had pivoted to the newcomer, Adobe.
The moral here is that if you've got a monopoly or at least a comfortable majority in an area of software, you shouldn't just be worried about someone else making a better product - switching is effort and people don't like that - you should be very worried about doing something that annoys your existing customers enough that staying but adapting to the new UI / pricing model / etc. is perceived to be as much effort as switching.
(Whoever authorised the new UI for firefox on Android might want to think about this too.)
What I can find is Strategy Letter III, saying that in this situation the best thing for a challenger to do is make sure their product is "backwards" compatible: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/03/strategy-letter-ii... Example: How Excel (that Joel was working on at the time) grabbed the market from Lotus 1-2-3.
When people like @prox below say things such as "I switched to Affinity completely, and I also slowly see some people in the industry change.", I'm starting to think that Adobe might be ready for its Lotus 1-2-3 moment. Not letting people install their old Adobe software they've paid for is the best incentive to try out something new that I could think of.
A lot of people were pissed off about Adobe stopping perpetual licenses, but that didn't hurt their bottom line. In fact, they increased revenue because a subscription is a low upfront cost.
Most of the people complaining about this are non-customers whose strong-held beliefs on how to license software have been offended. These people don't matter to Adobe's business.
The cost of CS6 Master Collection was around $2,500 or so; whereas a CC All Apps subscription is $53/mo. The thing is, though, that Adobe frequently updated their software to newer versions that had significant backwards compatibility problems. That $2,500 would only get you about a year or two of "the latest version", upon which you'd have to spend another $900 for an upgrade.
So Adobe went from a pricing model of effectively $2,500 + $450-900/yr, to one of $53/mo. Your first "year" of Adobe CSwhatever cost you $208/mo, followed by upgrades which were effectively $37-75/mo depending on how quickly Adobe released their software. Creative Cloud was and still is a bargain if you need Adobe's software.
Sure, you could have just stuck with CS2 or 3, and amortized your software cost over multiple years. However, by doing that, you wouldn't be able to practically collaborate with anyone else in the industry. The moment someone you work with updates from CS3 to CS4, all their files are going to start throwing weird errors and not working when you load them up in your older version. And remember: Adobe Creative Suite was THE standard in a lot of industries, it wasn't like you could just insist everyone remembered to click the save-as-old-version option (if that was even available). Not upgrading was a business disadvantage.
Adobe's big break was the Apple LaserWriter printer supporting postscript (the page description language).
The new ui on android isn't bad. I actually like it. But I can see how changing from the original normal can make people angry.
The limited selection of addons is also frustrating.
Roughly $0.30 an hour vs whatever wage is being paid to click the buttons.
It's not cheap, but it's not something businesses are going to balk at either. They are showing healthy growth in revenue:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/financials?p=ADBE
So apparently lots of their users are not concerned about their change to the pricing model and increased cost of use?
I was using Lightroom to manage my catalogue of photos. I'd open up Photoshop and Lightroom maybe a dozen times a year. It was nice to have them available but they were effectively costing me $20 each use. When Adobe products were an upfront payment I could choose to buy a product and keep it through multiple release cycles, which would reduce my cost.
Adobe have switched their revenue driver from improving the product and introducing new must-have features to making churn painful. In fact when I tried to cancel my ~4 year old subscription they decided charged me a penalty fee because it wasn't done immediately before my account's anniversary. Their incentives are now strongly misaligned with building a good customer experience.
Will never go back to Adobe's ransomware/subscriptions again. Just a happy amateur and in periods it could pass weeks/months between starting up the software.
Although, I do miss photoshop a bit but Gimp does the job "good enough" for me.
I bought Lightroom 3 times (1/3/5?) and used it a bunch, but not professionally. I've got tons of old images in it, from that era, I open it a couple of times a year to find stuff. I've moved on, I don't do DSLR/RAW images anymore.
This version doesn't run on Catalina, and the only upgrade that would keep the develop settings is O(10)/mo. So I'm looking for something that can do the cataloging, and something that can do the processing should I ever do that again.
I have 0 hope that anything will take the develop settings in lightroom and use/improve them, but that would be perfect. (I've got one image in particular that's just at the edge of acceptable quality on LR3 that got dramatically better on LR5)
For someone like me that has occasion to use something like Photoshop or Illustrator 3-6 hours per year, the $100-$200 per hour is quite pricey.
The €50 a month is sizable. If you're working with it full time and the client requires it, well fine, otherwise it's €50 to save.
Step out of your high pay bubble. That's a ton of money for the majority of the population. It's fine for corporate professional use but completely inaccessible to most people.
If you donate anything near what you would have paid for Adobe, then these projects will be awash in resources.
We all too often look at open source software and think of it as a clone of an 'equivalent'. Journalists and others lead us to believe that the likes of the GIMP team are striving to create a clone of Photoshop, or that the Inkscape team are striving to create a version of Illustrator or that the OpenOffice team are playing catchup with Microsoft Office.
If you are a developer with basic image manipulation needs and some specific needs such as being able to save files to a specific colour depth in a specific format, then GIMP is what you want. Admittedly you are not going to be able to do the things a designer does in Photoshop but that is not the point.
Same with OpenOffice Calc, it is a spreadsheet program but not a clone of Excel. It has a different demographic of users, some of whom would consider Excel to be the wrong tool as it magically autocorrects and thinks it knows best, with an interface that obfuscates important (to the programmer) details file save options.
Inkscape - the alleged open source clone of Illustrator is not that at all. It is an editor for SVG files and is a better tool than Illustrator for that specific task of creating optimised SVG files. You can do some design with it too, but it has technical applications and a user base that prefer it because it caters to their needs.
Some people that are used to the market leading software come with preconceptions about what free and open source software is about and how the user interfaces should be improved. Meanwhile, long time users of the open source software, can be mightily relieved that their chosen software is different to what the majority thinks is better.
In the meantime, the team from ZeMarmot have been making concrete changes in features and UI, with a funding level, that I certainly couldn't live off.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if they were funded to the level of just one developers salary.
In the meantime, the team from ZeMarmot have been making concrete changes in features and UI, with a funding level, that I certainly couldn't live off.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if they were funded to the level of just one developers salary.
Here's whats left before GIMP 3 can be released https://www.patreon.com/posts/40087754
Getting the Gtk 3 version out should be a boost, there is way less between Gtk3 and the upcoming 4 too so the way ahead is good.
How do you know I actually donated? Well Krita emailed me a donation # but I'm not sure if that's persionally identifying or not, but if you really care email me and I'll share that with you, or screenshots of my paypal statement bill or something.
Oh also totally overlooked (can't edit now) Inkscape, which I personally know I've used in the last year, same amount:
https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/
For those who don't have money to spare, donating time or speaking well of these programs and increasing their adoption are just fine as contributions (at least I think so, maybe others might disagree).
[EDIT] - If you don't have money but you have time and expertise to contribute a translation/pull request/etc that's actually worth even more than the money you could give and it would pay off repeatedly, forever. I've actually done the bare minimum by giving money since I know contributing a code fix or feature implementation/etc would be way more valuable.
I wasn't happy with GIMP's interface since way back but this one fulfills pretty much my every need, and I gather would for most other users too (excluding heavy professional users). Give this one also a spin
Get it out of the closet and ah, the battery is depleted. Who expects it to hold charge after... 8 years? I don't have a cable either. I have lightning though, even usb-c. But nope, it's the old 30 pin charger. Order it online.
Still works! Except, I haven't successfully managed to download a single app. It hangs forever. Same thing for itunes.
I use my iPad3 (2012) for Netflix and light browsing and it works great. The battery even holds plenty of charge.
The App Store and Apple Music work fine.
The YouTube app stopped working because the app demands an update that Google didn’t make available for that generation of iPad. Watching YT via Safari still works.
My only complaint is that adblockers don’t work because that generation of iPad doesn’t have a 64bit CPU.
It uses AAA cells so battery is never a problem. I really wish we could go back to standard replaceable batteries for phones and laptops :(
Amazing what we can do if we don't artificially hobble our own engineering prowess.
Replaceable? Yes. Standard? Big, big huge no.
The biggest hassle was setting up sync with the desktop, because that requires their app and drivers. But even that was ultimately a solvable problem on Win10.
But the old Palm apps install and work just fine, if you can find them. A more annoying problem is that a lot of them were shareware, and authors have long since moved on. But even with what's free, it's a handy little device; I can't think of many other AAA-powered gadgets that are capable of compiling C apps for themselves!
As far as battery life goes, I'll just quote one Amazon review from 2001:
> Another negative feature with this specific model is the poor battery life. The m125 requires 2 AAA batteries (included), however they only last aprox. 2.5 weeks under normal use (compared to the 1-2 months of the m105 and most other PDA's).
Sigh.
I’d switch but I am very busy with work and can’t justify the time to learn new software right now while I still know all the features of Fireworks as I’ve used it since Macromedia introduced it.
I wish upon wish that Adobe had just made it possible to obtain a license key for it that worked offline.
Really upset at Adobe right now about this but also can’t imagine switching since everyone in the industry uses their file types.
I won’t invest my time in learning more of their products after this though.
I started out using Fireworks in 2003(?) when I bought Macromedia Studio, and find it's still faster for me to use than Photoshop for a handful of tasks. And the way its layers work has always been more intuitive than Photoshop to me.
So this sucks, as it's the one app I wouldn't want to let go of until I can find something to replace it. I suspect Sketch would, but I'm a Windows user.
Obviously, nowadays web development is more complex than just throwing together some HTML, CSS and some PHP inserts. But the workflow these programs had was really thought out and pleasant.
Also, I highly suggest this video tutorial of building a modern website with truly modern techniques using Dreamweaver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R64vGpluA3s
You know... just in case!
See https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=firecall in an incognito browser window.
You have the potential to make a couple of our more creative members extremely happy :)
The problem with piracy is that it still ends up with more people knowing the proprietary software, and thus helps it keep the position cemented.
Anything to pull from PS's dominance is good though!
Most of what I do I use Krita or more obscure tools for.
On top of that, this tool still sits along side other single purpose tools for scaling and rotating, which are the first results if you search "how to rotate in GIMP", so why should I even expect this tool to exist?
This is not intuitive UX which is "trivially different" to PS, this is a mess which can only be learned through laborious trial and error, or reading the documentation like a book.
[0]:https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-tool-unified-transform.ht...
That depends on which version you use. IIRC the version in the Ubuntu/*buntu repo's have a patch to bring the UI closer to PS, at least in appearance.
There are also some functions which you have to do differently in GIMP vs PS.
I found it to be a treadmill - the prices went up until Adobe decided that you could no longer purchase anything outright and now had to rent it. Newer versions looked prettier, but the performance and stability dropped.
I’d reckon that the vast majority of people using CC would be happy with an older version and just as productive. CC6 and later are resource hogs that are constantly calling home. Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.
> Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.
He’s not a designer, his a pirate. If you do a professional work, you pay for tools you use. Simple as that. If you want to say, that they are pricy then use some free alternative (they existed, and are great), or cheaper pro software like from Serif.
After getting screwed royally, I shut down all my accounts with them and switched to Serif's Affinity Photo and Designer which are the equivalents of Photoshop and Illustrator which are two of the most used software packages for me.
They had a 50% off sale going on during the pandemic and I think honestly it was worth every single penny and more and it has already paid for itself from a new client project.
Fuck Adobe. We should all be boycotting them for the way they treat their customers.
https://www.cnet.com/news/adobe-releases-creative-suite-2-fo...
However it looks like this download is not available anymore.
(Adobe is certainly trying to make it hard to find, which I'm not surprised about.)
The warez scene nowadays have pre-patched *.iso versions of the whole Creative Suite (last years version I believe). No need for a keygen, messing with your hosts file or manually replacing files after install.
Not that I trust those, I didn't run them on my PC, just tried it out in a VM. If they went through all the effort of creating that version, then I don't really trust it to not contain a cryptominer of botnet client.
I always wonder if a situation like this is legal. If I purchased a product and want to keep using it, what right does the seller have to prevent me from doing so x years later?
Can I sue them for not selling me the product they said they were selling me?
You did purchase the software after all, and unless you are illegally distributing it I see it as a perfectly fine thing to do whatever you want within your own private residence.
Err, umm, no. You purchased a license to use the software.
If you have the disks, you bought a copy of it, just like you bought a copy of a book, not a license to read it's pages.
Ofcourse it has to be tested in court, unlikely Adobe will even sue if they knew. I don't think they care one way or another. And the customer using cs2 still is unlikely to sue as it's not going to be a large enterprise.
This is just laziness from Adobe , older servers take effort to maintain. They could be using keys that have expired to be signing the auth request for example.
You own a CPU. Because you own that CPU, you get to play gatekeeper and decide which parts of that bytearray go to your CPU and which ones don't. That's not for Adobe to decide.
The bytearray they send you is just a suggestion of what to run on your CPU. They provided you a suggestion in return for a payment.
You don't have to run all of that suggestion. You can selectively run parts of it.
I guess you can use them as frisbees.
That said, my moral interpretation of closed-source software is that I can do whatever the hell I want with it as long as I'm not distributing it to others without permission. Anything that enters my private residence, whether it be a CD I may have bought, or a very long byte array that got transmitted into my internal LAN in return for a payment, is fair game for me to do anything I want with, as long as it doesn't reach anyone outside.
Also, did CS6 stop working? The only stories I see are CS2 and CS3.
[1] https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/licenses-terms...
That actually doesn't matter if the terms are unreasonable.
Courts commonly understand that one-sided unreasonable licenses are unenforceable when litigated.
Here’s [1] the CS3 license. It states a 90 day warranty, which is certainly legally a standard warranty. Section 14.8.1 states Adobe can disable the activation server.
So yep, looks like this was covered in the license. I doubt a court is going to rule Adobe must provide a server indefinitely.
[1] https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/photoshopcs3.html
I felt the same way about the whole Sonos recyling thing too...
But regardless of that, your damages would be limited to what you spent on the license. So definitely not worth your time.
But it could be a class action suit, and if you're the class representative you can get larger compensation.
Class action perhaps? Or small claims at the other end?
What is the value of the years it takes to become proficient with such software? Remember, that investment was made on the back of the idea that the software would continue to be usable.
Isn’t it a moot point anyway because nobody ever “buys” software, they just obtain a license to use it. Ownership is such a convoluted concept in tech, particularly in software.
Then despite probably "authenticating" itself to the xbone, won't actually run unless the disk is in the drive.
(don't get me started on how bad the UI is, I really haven't any idea why gamers love those little machines so much, they are mostly just trash).
Well, depends on the country. In Germany that's not a thing because contract law doesn't allow it. Either you buy software or you rent it.
The devil is in the details.
Pixelmator is a lovely replacement for Photoshop, too.
This is what happens when companies don't support their own products.
The Affinity Spotlight website showcases what people are using the apps for and the type of content they are creating:
https://affinityspotlight.com/
I have all the Affinity apps and don't miss Adobe one bit, but the Affinity apps are a bit clunkly in their UI (but far less clunky than Adobe's apps).
After Effects (AE) is the only Adobe app that has no real rival. A new motion and animation app called Cavalry recently launched but it's far too early to see if it can rival AE. It also uses an online subscription model (https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/).
>>Sir, you are no longer allowed to use your car
>But I paid for it! It's my car!
>>Our aging servers had to be retired
>Can't you just turn off the checking so it won't cost you anything and I can keep using my car?
>>No sir, without the checking people would start pirating the car
> But you don't even sell this car anymore! So much so you don't even want to keep the servers online!
>>I'm sure you'll love the new model we are selling
> I don't need a new car! I already have one, fuck off! I'm just gonna use a crack
>> Sir it's illegal to run unauthorized software on your car
So in the future, a crappy old car will need to be left running 24 hours a day, in an augmented reality garage that fools the car into thinking it is on a long journey.
I would like to write a science fiction story from the point of view of a sentient car in that situation. But I have to write my code instead.
(scroll to the bottom of the post for it)
Cars only have replacement parts available for N years.
...and for some models, N is closer to half a century than half a decade.
Talking about software that no longer works, I tried network recovery on a 2016 Mac. 2016 Mac is programmed to download only Mojave. And Mojave can't be installed on a Mac that had Catalina at some point in the past (even after a complete disk wipe). It took me a whole day to find another Mac, download offline installer, buy a new USB stick (because the installer was a bit over 8G) and get it reinstalled.
I have Creative Cloud now, and have had for years, but still, that little bit of my history is now just memories. I still have my CS6 environment, so they'd better not kill those activation servers anytime soon!
For a company to have such a grip on their means of living seems a bit harsh. I have great respect for the software, but not a high regard for the way it is sold. I can only hope that cheaper alternatives come along someday, but again, I think Adobe has quite a stranglehold on the industry because their software is the standard.
I have been pretty happy with it, but I would be happy with Photoshop 7.
What alternatives exist for ‘After Effects’, though?
Is Autodesk Combustion still around? That was another competitor of theirs back in the day.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/fus...
Followed by learning Krita.
If it's worth that much, buy a new piece of software. Adobe isn't responsible for your 13 years of failure to make backups.
1) Customers "agree" to binding arbitration
2) Adobe reserves the right to terminate your ability to install the software at any time
If the above are not true, however, this seems like a nice target for an entrepreneurial class action lawyer.
Of course, what we really need are some vastly better digital consumer protection laws.
To be clear though, arbitration where the employer chooses and pays (pays off really) the firm in question seems the definition of a conflict of interest and a one-sided contract that should be thrown out.
Just did it couple days ago for a sim for my LTE hotspot.
I guess on the plus side, my returns tend to go smoothly as the boxes tend to look unopened.
On the contrary, I remember reading EULAs that clearly stated that if the user didn't agree with the EULA they could return it to the store where it was purchased for a full refund - regardless of the condition of the box. I think that was in Microsoft's terms mostly?
Cry me a river - Adobe can't afford to keep an old server running?
At least be honest about the motivation.
But I could be wrong.
But it's a problem for researchers, who generally want to publish their findings (or at least was the last time I was really paying attention to the law in the early to mid 00s).
> Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works
> Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
A typical crack is likely just a few bytes to change. Maybe in multiple places.
They should call it rent instead of purchase.
There are free, opensource alternatives that are 95% the same as greedobe.
Use them.
If its a physical good, it is expected that it degrades over time, so you can't take, say, your washing machine back after that period of time and demand your money back.
Further, the law doesn't dictate that updates are required, or anything like that, so if CS3 doesn't work on Windows 10, thats not Adobe's fault. However, if you can show that it no longer works on a system it used to work on, then the product is not fit for purpose.
The quoted sentence is what people are bothered by. The program is still lying around on a disk, but cannot be used legally.
How is this relevant? Gmail has always been a remotely hosted service. This is about Photoshop CS, not CC.
And I do not expect old software to do cloud updates/document sync. I expect it to keep working as is.
I also can't stand the endless "Needs connectivity" and "Set up syncing now" in modern software.
Gmail has always been a hosted service - not software that runs entirely on your own machine. Apples and oranges.
> Imagine creating software today with perpetual licenses but no updates or sync across devices. You would laugh it off your machine.
You mean like any number of extremely popular software packages like IntelliJ that offer perpetual licenses?
Adobe cannot unilaterally change the rules of a sale they completed in the past. It’s Darth Vader’s “pray i don't alter it further” behaviour - a character built to be the representation of evil.
Imagine requiring set product lifespans in this day and age, you’d get laughed right out of the data centre.
Updates come via paying the fairly high price to start with, you know, supporting the damned product you paid for.
Document sync is something that is provided via a bunch of other services if you need it - icloud/onedrive/dropbox/etc
But sure, come up with more laughable excuses to justify shitty company practices.
Feature updates just come in new versions, which you pay for.
Monthly payments can still work, many other companies use that model, and after a period of time, you're frozen at the last version you paid for (after a year for example) if you stop paying.
But yeah, screw them now - I used to have a usable paid version, but no longer - there are better alternatives now.