I try and use Adobe's products from time to time. Acrobat, Photoshop and others. Personally I think they suck big time to use an expression borrowed from our Special Relations.

I could not find how to crop a scanned image PDF in Acrobat. I really couldn't! My missus who has used it professionally had to search the help in order to find it.

Shortly after opening Photoshop I usually close it and find some other wsy of doing my task.

Acrobat Reader is a bloated dog. End of story.

These programs are designed to be as difficult to use as possible so as to keep their mantle of "professional software" and needing a course to use.

Or is it just me?

Open Office is also a bit dodgy WRT ease of use but at least I didn't pay a fortune and a half to buy it.

The Adobe designers and programmers should be some of the first against the wall come the great user revolution...

Yes, lock in to vendor controled formats does not work well when you want to have standards to work with and choices on how you do things.

> Or is it just me?

Yes ;-)

I'm with Nick, Photoshop is a hard to use pig.

Adobe should figure out how to allow print to PDF in Vista - its only been what, 6 months? Weak.

And god knows, Adobe like to charge. You'd think somewhere in all that overpriced swarm of software they'd have some bit of code that could multiply a dollar price by an exchange rate and come up with something reasonably resembling a Sterling/Euro price (and woe betide the wallet of anybody that might dare to speak a different language)

When you realise what business Sun is really in.

Sun don't really care THAT much what software you run, provided you buy their hardware to run it on; conversely, if you are happy to buy their hardware, the cost of writing and maintaining operating systems so that you will (or can) use it is an overhead, not a profit center.

Solaris is a damned good unix (linux may well catch up someday, but for now....) but like most unixen, the bulk of non-kernel open source sofware will or can be made to run on it - so unlike MS (where Office drives adoption of the OS, and must be defended at all costs) anything that increases sales of the hardware (even at the expense of Solaris takeup) is a Good Thing.

Adobe are not in that happy situation; their ownership of the postscript, pdf and font "standards" are their primary IP, but their main income-generating products are software products (they had a near-monopoly on the mac market for high-end design software, but as mac users and macs themselves move to the Wintel platform, that market lead has been lost).

To give away what few advantages they have left (mostly the code in such products as photoshop, which is still considered the best image package out there by most designers) so it can be bodily lifted and placed in other open source products, and/or just used "as is" for free, would destroy them. Adobe is not Sun, and what would be good business for Sun would doom Adobe.

"The Adobe designers and programmers should be some of the first against the wall come the great user revolution..."

I wouldn't say that Adobe are the worst, even thought I have to work with FrameMaker - which hasn't had a major update in over 5 years (it didn't even have an 'Undo' function until a minor update was released a couple of years ago...).

No, I nominate the designers* and programmers of Lotus-f*cking-Notes to be first for summary justice, come the revolution.

* - Judging by Lotus Notes' UI I'd say was actually designed by the programmers as-well. Oh, and if any of you propeller headed c*nts are reading this, I hope your next shite is a hedgehog. F*ckers.

A significant part of Adobe are in a business where their user base is not growing rapidly. New features and applications are hard to create and sell to the existing user base. Especially with the built in 'you'll need a new box to run this on'. Having bought Macromedia they have destroyed any credible opposition, but even so, they are not in a growing market. Their model therefore has been to add features on an 18 month renewal cycle, looking to sell a bunch of upgrade licenses to existing prepress shops and designers who have to support the latest version just in case. Pretty cynical really.

There are however bits of Adobe that are open minded. Read the licenses for PDF and PostScript and look at some of the labs projects. It's not all black and white.

That said I think the people against the wall immediately before Adobe should be those at SEC who approved the Macromedia buy out.

I find the Adobe Creative Suite incredibly easy to use. It does my fruit in having to add an adjustment layer in GIMP just to tweak the brightness/contrast (you can do it the same way in Photoshop... if you want). When it comes to managing layers and layer groups, applying clean-up effects (shadow/highlight in particular) or even just doing something simple like exporting an image for the web.. Photoshop wins hands down.

Before the Macromedia buy out I tried to use Macromedia Freehand and I'm so glad that's been consigned to the dustbin of history - Illustrator is a LOT more intuitive and far easier to use. Flash could REALLY use the Illustrator drawing tools - it might have them now, I've only got MX2004 :( Try creating some text with an outline in Flash (well the version I've got anyway) and you'll see what I mean.

Quark vs InDesign - all the Mac Pros will be Quark all the way. The advantage of an integrated suite is that I was able to pick InDesign up really quickly since it shares so many features with Illustrator. I still find Quark a horrible cumbersome beast despite using it in college (i.e. being trained how to use it).

Oki, the only real competition to the Adobe Suite is possibly Paintshop Pro - although I've not used it for a while - it used to be only any good for web, it didn't cope with CMYK, but for £75 rather than about £500+ (for Photoshop) you can't complain. Still Animation Shop was quite nice - arguably easier to use and just as effective as Photoshop/ImageReady combo... for web.

The Corel suite itself is good, but for the money, as you're getting close to Adobe prices, you may as well go to Adobe CS.

Now if only Adobe had adopted the Macromedia licensing structures when they bought them out - the old Flash license for instance allows you to have the company install both on your work PC and at home/on a laptop.

CS just costs too much to use most of the people I know that

claim to have it haven't really paid for it becuse they don't have the money I just use the gimp it's getting better but from the looks of things it's not much of a contest.

Interesting that folks feel free to take whacks at companies that promote OSS like Sun while ignoring IP monarchies like Apple and Adobe for keeping their stuff totally proprietary.

To say this is a double standard is obvious, but what's behind it? Even MS is making OSS noises these days. User experience is a sacred cow for some, but these companies are hiding behind that cow.