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."
Re:To edit, or create (Score:0, Interesting)
If he's using them at all, it is because he piratebayed them. The entire question is thinly veiled OSS astroturf based on today's tech headlines, the "designer friends" don't actually exist.
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:Respectively: (Score:3, Interesting)
I figured it would use something like http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] - that seems like a much better resource.
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.
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:Respectively: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 cs3 works (see here: http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ [wikidot.com]).
And if he thinks he can replace any of the Adobe tools with some open source thing, good luck and happy failure. Gimp will not replace Photoshop at all, not even close. Especially on OS X it is not only a mess, but dog slow. I don't use Inkscape a lot, so I can't say how it holds up to Illustrator, neither can I say anything about Scribus because I have not even tried it.
But when you need to deliver a document to be printed on a offset printer and you tool does not support CMYK and the connected tools for it, you are pretty much very much ultimate screwed.
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.
I prefer it this way (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Respectively: (Score:3, Interesting)
I love Inkscape though; what is it about the SVG files it produces that makes them so shitty?
Keep an eye on developments here... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't get it (Score:1, Interesting)
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.)
The GIMP format is not suitable for interchange as it more or less directly reflects GIMPs internal datastructure.
OpenRaster is a multi-layer format made for this task, and if you care about this I suggest you see what you can do to help its adoption.
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).
Re:Respectively: (Score:1, Interesting)
I actually bought Creative Suite 2 for InDesign, but for complex book design (even involving free positioning/stacking of drawn objects) I ended up using LaTeX & XeTeX ... Why? The Creative Suite demanded online authetitication each time the system config seemed to have changed, leaving me with a disfunctional system when I had no internet access ... I actually used Scribus for some posterwork earlier on, it really is a great piece of software, but the team will need to work on some papercuts and overall performance before one would use it for bigger business tasks ... creating a lively scribus community would boost development and acceptance, too (look at success stories like drupal.org ...)
An amazing tool for vector graphics (Score:1, Interesting)
GhostScript is not really GUI, but despite that it is a really amazing and easy to use creative tool.
Ghostscript is available in OS X by default (part of CUPS), but I'm not sure if interactive graphics mode is available (unless you are really good at visualisation and always know exactly how your picture should look before you create it, you need that). Basically you get one window where your document is displayed and one console window with a command line interface were you write PostScript commands. It's easier to use and faster then Illustrator/IncScape for most everyday tasks.
Once you created your image, GhostScript exports to PDF, SVG, PNG, JPG and a lot of other file formats.
There is also a lot of other useful tools for PostScript manipulation and as it is a text-based format it is easy to create your own (PostScript btw is an excellent all purpose programming language).
IncScape can import and export PostScript. The PostScript code IncScape export is as human unfriendly as SVG, but can still be useful if you don't have to touch it's inner workings.
PostScript don't support semi-transparency. You can fake it, but it is hard. If you really need transparence when you create your vector graphics I recommend IncScape or Xara Xtreme (really good tool, but semi-open and only free of cost in Linux and it's native file format is not usable with any other tools).
IncScapes GUI is rather good (on par with Illustrator) but very artistically limiting (as Illustrator). You can create your own plugins if you miss some feauture and there is some means of automating repetive tasks, but those things is really complicated and limiting compared to PostScript.
The inconsistency among SVG tools (like IncScape) is huge and they usually don't create compatible SVG files. But if you stick with one GUI tool and export to some other format for final distribution, then an SVG based tool can fit your needs. SVG is text based, but hand coding SVG is something you don't want to do if you value your sanity. SVG is extremely human unfriendly, long-winded and hard to read, creating anything usually means a lot of repetive, time consuming, creativity killing, absurdly complicated work. There are XML-editors (one exist within IncScape) that take away some of the pain with hand coding SVG, but you don't want to do it if you have any other alternative.
Re:Been there (Score:2, Interesting)
I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? Short answer: You can't.
It all depends on the stuff you do. I earn money using Inkscape and Gimp on Debian and have no problems at all. Still, I wouldn't blindly advise anyone to do the same (which is sometimes hard, because I am one of those open source zealots ;)). I suppose the poster should have told us the type of work he does to get a more precise answer.
Adobe did test ACS3 on Snow Leopard (Score:3, Interesting)