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Comment by nikatwork | Hacker News Reader

Adobe has never cared about developers. I'm not sure whether from greed or incompetence. One of my first gigs was as a Director developer (eww Lingo) - I managed to jump off that ship right before it sunk from neglect.

It's frustrating, Adobe make really useful products that hover on the edge of greatness - Director, Flash, Coldfusion, Air - then somehow seem to lose interest right before they break through. I mean, if Adobe had of lifted even one finger to work with Apple, then Flash might have had a bright future in front of it. As it stands, Adobe stood stupidly chewing their cud in usual fashion until El Jobsy gave up.

In some ways, I regret every one of the many hours I have put into learning Adobe dev platforms; on the brightside, their BS pushed me straight into the arms of OSS.

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>Adobe has never cared about developers.

True. Another problem is, they now seem to not care about users either, with the possible exception of large design studios.

The CC subscriptions are fucking over customers who used to skip a version or two (now they have to constantly pay up or they lose their CC programs), and they also fuck people that don't need all of CC but a few choice programs (you either fit with their pre-defined bundles or you're screwed if you need access to only a few programs: after 2 programs, it gets cheaper to buy the whole suite, even if you don't need it).

I'd appreciate a full_suite_price/number_of_components base pricing for a single program (with a slightly larger weight for star programs like Photoshop and Premierre), instead of the current "need 3-4 programs? Sorry, you have to rent the whole thing").

Plus the non-US Creative Cloud pricing is a joke. The formula seems to be: take the US price, add any local taxes (legit) and hike it another 30-40% just because.

>It's frustrating, Adobe make really useful products that hover on the edge of greatness - Director, Flash, Coldfusion

Hmm, all of those were made my Macromedia (Cold Fusion by Allaire and then Macromedia).

> Hmm, all of those were made [by] Macromedia

True, although they maintained a lot of momentum after the acquisition. But maybe that's the answer - perhaps Adobe slowly starved the dev platform teams to death whilst rolling in all the filthy lucre from the design products.

What sucks is that for media creation apps, Adobe still has untouchable quality. Nothing even comes close (sorry Gimp, RIP Freehand), except maaaybe Final Cut or Vegas for simple editing.

Have you looked at Blank Ink?

It's still in early-early-early-beta but it's the first product I looked at and thought "woah, there's something that is actually interesting in the design space".

[1]: http://www.bleank.com/BlackInk-a115.html

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77GlldH06kY

Damn, that looks amazing, nice find.

I've seen other awesome specialist "arty" apps like this, but nothing for general use. Photoshop has incredible breadth and depth, I've been using it for 15 years and I still stumble across hidden corners.

Corel Draw is the only app I've ever seen seriously compete, and it wasn't really in the same league - I could be wrong, I never spent a long time with it. Gimp really is a toy by comparison. (Sorry Gimp.)

I wouldn't put Premiere in the untouchable league. Sure, Photoshop, Illustrator, and (perhaps to a lesser degree) InDesign are industry staples, but AFAIK, Final Cut Pro 7 is still the king of professional video editing software.

A veteran! Ah yes, i have been thinking that for a while now after reading those posts. Adobe didn't CREATE that stuff. they simple acquired it.

PS: Been playing around with Flash since Flash 4! (was a wee little kid back then). Pretty much learning programming from actionScript. So it really does break my heart to see that Adobe is letting it die

Funny how Adobe used to be one of the major promotors and implementors of SVG (remember the Adobe SVG plug-in?) because it was their answer to Flash, and then immediately after they bought Macromedia, SVG instantly became the red-headed bastard stepchild living out back in the dog house. And now Adobe's all like "oh yeah, SVG, that's part of HTML5, and we totally support that!"

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