Well. That was a fun a time: we had Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash, DreamWeaver and FireWorks, and we thought we were overtaking the web. We’ve welcomed Macromedia’s acquisition by Adobe, thinking that software we used to work with should become even better. How badly we were mistaken!

Years ago I used to code with Macromedia DreamWeaver. In a “code” mode, if you ask. I used to love that substitution feature (you start typing path to a file, it opens the file-browser). I loved that css & js connection feature (which automatically opened files attached to html in a separate tabs), i loved the product overall. Sure, there was a number of tools on the market, but DreamWeaver was just fine for me.

Then I’ve been out of coding for a while. And what i’ve discovered later? Surprise — i wasn’t able to code using DreamWeaver anymore. While, say, jQuery was opened, it really slowed everything down. It just stated to delay while I was typing. Same thing with a huge css-files. It started to disable shortcuts after 15 minutes of typing. It just crashed couple of times a day. What did we get? Just a numerous “Adobe-support-forum-cryings”. Bug-reports are staying unresolved for ages. I just opened, for the sake of interest, latest compressed jQuery file in the latest DreamWeaver build. Needless to say it still freezes on scrolling.

What actually had happen? What did we miss? Adobe bought Macromedia and all of it’s stuff, day by day doing it more buggy and laggy, adding features which, i’m pretty sure, no one will ever use. The one and only good thing is that they’ve almost buried Flash.

Well, i’ve found an alternative: Sublime Text is great and costs you nothing if you’re ok dealing with confirmation dialogues, notifying you to buy a license. That’s a thing I could deal with (anyway, it’s just $70, i bought it). Moreover, there’s a bunch of plug-ins to simplify my work process: path to file substitution, color picker, autocompletion, whatever. And it’s lightweight and rapidly fast!

Couple of years ago Photoshop team had discovered that designer users have far exceeded photographic users of their software.

What’s next? I used to draw websites and interfaces using Photoshop (sounds weird nowadays, right?). Couple of years ago Photoshop team had discovered that designer users have far exceeded photographic users of their software. What did they manage and what did happen since that? Well, nothing (just to be honest, we are now able to control border-radius of each of rectangle’s corner). Multiple artboards maybe? No, not this time. At least we have “Extract Assets” feature now with svg-support. But built like everything was build by Adobe in the last decade: with tons of buttons and slowing everything down.

And then the glorious Sketch App has come to the market. Well, it’s ubiquitous tool, either you are drawing a website or an iPhone App. It’s just gorgeous. Still I have some complaints, but it’s a great thing, with its multi-artboard documents, copying css-attributes (frankly speaking, Photoshop can do this too, but only if you are going to copy attributes from a shape layer) and multiple image export from a single slice, rapid workflow and tiny file sizes. Bohemian Coding fixes more bugs monthly than Adobe could fix in a couple of years! And it’s just $99 for ages (at least if you won’t decide to upgrade to the next major version)!

It’s all vector from the core and doesn’t work with raster images well, one could say. What if I need to adjust levels or sharpen image a bit? I have an answer — there’s Pixelmator for $30.

I’m pretty sure Photoshop is still an ultimate thing for those who manipulate images for some print ad-campaigns. But what about the rest of us? Why did you kill Fireworks then, Adobe?

Let’s talk about Illustrator. Latest CC (2014) update ruined Bézier curves: control points aren’t snapping to grid anymore. They did for years, but now they do not. What was wrong with them? There always was a quick shortcut toggling “Snap to grid” option in case you wanted to disable snapping for a while. They just didn’t left me an option!

Hopefully there’s a workaround, not very good though: you can install and keep previous version alongside with the newest. Oh, god, I just need a shortcut, not another half-a-gigabyte-application on my laptop!

I’m Adobe user since their Photoshop 4.0. That’s, for a second, roughly about eighteen years. The most significant change was getting rid of that weird type window, allowing you to type just upon the layer. And vector shapes. Oh, and that black UI-theme of course.

Not very much for two decades, actually. I can talk about bugs and controversial features of their software for a pretty long time. Isn’t it just the time to simply say goodbye?

Let’s sum things up. Complete Adobe Creative Cloud would cost you $50/mo. That’s $600 a year. With it’s absolutely dumb support, multiple menu bar icons for their Updater (god knows why), couple of Illustrator versions and tons of bugs. And you won’t save a buck if you only need Ps, Ai, Dw and Id.

Sketch, Pixelmator and Sublime Text together are just about $200. Including their first-class support, continuous updates and bug-fixes. And you only pay once. Personally, I start every new project with that $200 set of tools. Still paying for Creative Cloud though, as I have to support some earlier projects. But I’m pretty sure I won’t ever return to Adobe in a year or so. At least if they won’t start doing things right.