Adobe today announced the Adobe Creative Suite 2, which includes new versions of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and GoLive.
Adobe Creative Suite 2 announced
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Product Activation? What the hell is Adobe thinking?
I was on the fence with this upgrade, but Activation pushed me to pass on it.
Adobe should know better. Activation stops almost no copying, not even “casual copying” since Activation is easy to get around in general and if you want to find a corporate key, it’s easy to do. Yes, it stops maybe a fraction of one percent of theft, those truly clueless people, but for everyone else, you are either annoyed by it or get around it in less than 5 minutes.
Of all the ideas to copy from our “innovators” in Redmond, this is not it.
As someone who pays a lot of money for Adobe licenses, this is a deal breaker.
It is going to have to take a ton of new features for me to pay to enter the world of Authentication. I simply don’t want the headaches, and CS1 works mighty fine as is.
@retro cat
Did Photoshop CS not have activation?
While product activation does seem like a pain in the ass, it has proven to reduce piracy of windows xp by a small margin. And hopefully you will be able to activate your product anonymously via phone so that privacy is not an issue. Activation may not be the optimal solution, but there are more bootleg copies of photoshop running than legit ones. There has to be a way to verify if software is legit or not because computer piracy is a major problem. You say that you don’t want the headaches? What headaches? You only need to take 5 minutes each time your legit software is installed, which should not be that often. I don’t see why your make such a big deal.
Am I the only one that has not been able to connect to Adobe’s website for over a month now? I can get to anywhere else on the net that I want, but when I try http://www.adobe.com, I’m told in one form or another by any browser I’ve used “Connection refused to http://www.adobe.com” Is there just some sort of news that I missed about their website going down?
The Creative Suite apps had product activation on Windows, but not Mac OS X. CS2 apps will probably be the same.
– chrish
I’m not really a fan of Adobe as a company but do admit that some of their products are pretty intelligent, or so people keep telling me.
My biggest pain is Indesign/Pagemaker. Why oh why can’t someone make something which is a hybrid between MS Word and Indesign/Pagemaker… I love the way to handle layout in Indesign but it’s crippled functionality for writing etc stinks (Yes I know the aim is just formating, not actually writing). Is there any software on the market even remotely close to moving towards what I wanna see???
Anyway, it’s nice to see an update even though reading from the list of news this is a rather small update featurewise.
Does anyone know if the Mac version will require product activation? It isn’t a huge deal, just a minor annoyance..
-Asamoya
While product activation does seem like a pain in the ass, it has proven to reduce piracy of windows xp by a small margin
According to whom? Was it worth it?
Is there any software on the market even remotely close to moving towards what I wanna see???
Apple’s Pages seems to be heading in that direction. Granted, it’s only a 1.0 release and is far from feature rich, it’s headed toward pretty much exactly what your asking for.
The Mac version of CS2 now has activation.
Activation may not be the optimal solution, but there are more bootleg copies of photoshop running than legit ones. There has to be a way to verify if software is legit or not because computer piracy is a major problem.
But what is this really an indicator of? Adobe losing revenue due to piracy? Or perhaps that there are lots of hobbyists, students, and people learning to use Photoshop that can’t (yet) afford it, and so wouldn’t buy it anyway.
For example: I used Photoshop when I was a teenager. Really, I used it for pretty much nothing, just screwing around. But all that screwing around meant that I knew how to use Photoshop, and I eventually became a graphic/web designer. Since then, I’ve had 3 copies of Photoshop purchased by companies for me to use, and I’ve purchased 2 copies myself. That’s 5 copies that wouldn’t have been purchased (or might not have been) if I hadn’t had a free copy to screw around with when I was a kid.
You say that you don’t want the headaches? What headaches? You only need to take 5 minutes each time your legit software is installed, which should not be that often. I don’t see why your make such a big deal.
First of all, this ignores that most corporations use some sort of imaging to roll out their machines (my company rolls out Macs using CCC), so depending on the activation process, it means you have to install the whole system fresh with each machine. That’s a headache. Maybe they’ll make a “corporate version” which will allow you to not-activate or something (like Microsoft does), but that completely negates the purpose of activation, in that pirates just pirate the corporate version.
Second, who are you to that installs of legit software “should not be that often”? What if, for some reason, I do have to uninstall, reinstall, uninstall software quite often? Like if you’re supporting lots of machines, or if you have a test machine that you reinstall all the software on a semi-regular basis?
Third, what if, when I install it, I don’t have ready access to the internet or phone. What if I want to reinstall this software in 5 years– does Adobe pledge to keep their activation servers working? If so, for how long? 5 years? 10? 20?
Sure, you probably won’t need the software anymore by then, or you’ll have a newer version, but I don’t think that’s the point. Adobe is setting up a system whereby you’re reliant on their servers in order to install/run the program that you paid good money for. I’m not a big opponent of copy-protection, as long as it doesn’t cause any problems or inconvenience for paying customers. I won’t pay for a product I have to activate/register for.
Does anyone know if GoDead.. sorry.. GoLive Mac version supports Unicode encoding yet ?
Acrobat Pro 7.0 seems to not support Unicode in bookmark-text (bookmarks in PDF’s produced with Acrobat 7.0 Pro from for example headlines, manually)
The persons who complain about activation are ones pirating software day and night. Phil is right 5 mins can’t kill ya!
Use any older photoshop-version you’re getting along with fine and be happy… faster, lighter and cheaper.
If you REALLY NEED some of the new functions buy it, but think before upgrading.
rock over london, rock on chicago, adobe – what a difference
I know many people who refused to buy the latest version of Quark because of activation – nothing to do with the idea BEHIND activation, they’re all for reducing piracy, what they are against are the number of problems WITH the activation process; people being denied activation because of serial number problems, activation problems over the internet, on the road with their laptop and something happens.
There are a number of scenarios where by software CAN become unactivated, resulting in a mirrade of problems exploding for the end user.
Adobe had the edge for NOT having activation in their products, now customers are going going to ask “should I have just stayed with Quark to begin with?”
Oh, and I’m with Larry on piracy – the people who are going to use their products for work are always going to pay, just as those who aren’t going to pay are always going to refuse to pay, regardless of whether there is activation or not.
Perhaps you have a host file blocking adobe’s site.
InDesign and Photoshop is great but Illustrator is getting long in the tooth and needs Adobe to get off their ass and rewrite the app from scratch. Tie it in better with InDesign and Photoshop and preferably allow for it to run on Linux either through WINE or natively (my Pipe Dream) I hate Windows but I have to use it at work as Macs here (decent workstation spec) are way overpriced.
Is Quark still looking towards Mono for their next gen of Express?
It seems that Adobe is being very fair on activation.
Since I do use software until I see a real need to upgrade, I often will continue using software until it is very old. If it still works and does what I want it to, I’m very happy with it.
Although as of late using Photoshop 5 in classic no longer appeally, so I decide it was time to upgrade and I was a bit worried with this new product activation in the Mac version of the adobe suit. Since I feared that if I bought it now, that Adobe may disallow product activation once the product has hit a certain age and I could be still wanting to use it on newer hardware. Well it appears my fears have been put aside by:
http://www.adobe.com/activation/faq.html
“Adobe is fully committed to honoring the terms of its product license agreements. In the event that a product is discontinued, Adobe will enable automatic approval of all activation requests for that product or provide a means to remove activation outright. In either case, the customer will not experience any change in software capabilities.”
and “Adobe’s product license agreements typically grant the user of an Adobe product the right to use it in perpetuity. Adobe plans to honor these agreements. In the unlikely event of the company’s shutting down, we will enable automatic approval of all activation requests or provide other technical means allowing users to continue using our products.“
My biggest pain is Indesign/Pagemaker. Why oh why can’t someone make something which is a hybrid between MS Word and Indesign/Pagemaker… I love the way to handle layout in Indesign but it’s crippled functionality for writing etc stinks (Yes I know the aim is just formating, not actually writing). Is there any software on the market even remotely close to moving towards what I wanna see???
Well maybe it is to early to say because it is still on version 1, but I have seen this tends to be the direction “Pages” Apple product is taking.
For small and fast compositions you can make pagemaker-alike designs to type letters, memos, etc.
It is still not as powerful as Word or Indesign, but I think it is a good start.
I know many people who refused to buy the latest version of Quark because of activation – nothing to do with the idea BEHIND activation, they’re all for reducing piracy, what they are against are the number of problems WITH the activation process; people being denied activation because of serial number problems, activation problems over the internet, on the road with their laptop and something happens.
Or like in my company, we’re working on switching from Quark to InDesign, in part (though not in total) because of their crappy licensing server (not quite the same issue, but a related problem). Quark keeps crashing, forcing the user to “force quit”, and when they do, the Quark server doesn’t release the license.
I don’t like the idea of piracy and I don’t like the idea of “activation” (I don’t think those ideas are in conflict). But if you MUST force strange licensing on your users, at least make sure it works right.