Systeme D

17 May 2007

Creative Suite 2 is a joke

Evidently now that Adobe is seizing the Mac page layout crown from Quark, they've decided this gives them carte blanche to act like Quark, too.

CS2 is excruciating. Illustrator runs at a half decent speed, but crashes every time you select 'Divide Objects Below'. Given that I use that on every map I draw, I've had to go back to CS1 for exactly that reason.

Photoshop is so appallingly slow I hesitate to use the word 'runs', because 'arthritically wheezes' is what it actually does. When it does anything, that is. And I've given up on InDesign since it took two hours to print a handful of copies of our news pages.

There may be occasional bugfixes available for some of these, but the Adobe Updater (which always starts by requiring installation of an updater to update itself... you can't make this sort of stuff up) refuses to locate Photoshop to perform any updates on it. Hint - it's the application called 'Adobe Photoshop CS2' in the Applications folder.

Some of these may be fixed in CS3. Maybe it's all down to my temerity (or rather, our company's temerity) in purchasing the currently-shipping version of Creative Suite for use on a currently-shipping (Intel) Mac. Maybe this isn't what you're meant to do. Maybe Adobe really do think that it's decent behaviour to charge £600 for a full version of CS2, and then £492.32 - and that really is outrageous - for the upgrade required to make it run at a reasonable speed.

But behaviour like this is exactly what made people look for an alternative to Quark in the first place. Adobe are simply setting themselves up for a similar fall. Next time I buy an illustration program, it's not going to be one of theirs.

Comments

Have you tried using Inkscape? (inkscape.org)

What did you think of it?

Jamie

P.s. It looks like there was a native Mac OS port in the works, but for now you have to run it under X11. Progress seems a little slow. See inkscape.org/archive.php?lang=en&year=2006

Posted by Robert (Jamie) Munro on 17.5.07 15:27

Have you tried using Inkscape? (inkscape.org)

What did you think of it?

Jamie

P.s. It looks like there was a native Mac OS port in the works, but for now you have to run it under X11. Progress seems a little slow.

Posted by Robert (Jamie) Munro on 17.5.07 15:28

Do you have an Intel Mac? I think CS3 is the first native Intel version.

Inkscape is very nice. That's what I run.

Posted by Matt Lee on 19.5.07 14:09

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