Several people have heard me mention on Twitter that I’ve been looking for new development and design software to get away from Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop. Why would I want to replace these? Because they suck.

I’ve replaced Dreamweaver with Coda, but I’ve yet to find a replacement for Photoshop. So far, I’ve tried Pixelmator and although the interface was really nice, it was buggy and I would get the spinning beach ball every time I’d turn off a layer.

Why am I not going to buy any more Adobe products? Adobe reminds me of health insurance companies. They are super huge and know that everyone needs them, so they don’t have to care about us. They can charge us how ever much money they want and can give us all the crappy service they want, because they know there’s really no alternative to them.

An arm and a leg

One of the biggest turn offs to Adobe, is that they come out with a new Creative Suite every year to year and a half. This isn’t a bad thing in itself – technologies change rapidly and so should software. But the kicker is – they want you to pay…and I’m not talking $10’s of dollars. A new Creative Suite is $2500! The upgrade is $900 but only works if you have the last version – which means you’d have to buy every version. Also, it seems to get more expensive by the year.

Now, you might be saying, “Then don’t buy the new version every time and use the old one.” For the most part, this works fine. Until you have an important project created in CS4 that won’t open in your CS3 programs. Hmm. So Adobe purposefully makes their files not open in older versions? All of my other software is cross-compatible, so I know this is possible.

They don’t care about you

If my clients upgraded their WordPress site and my theme for it broke when it wasn’t supposed to – I’d have to fix it. If I told my clients I’d get around to it in a year or so – I’d be out of business. Yet this is what Adobe did to us.

For several months – almost a full year – Photoshop and Fireworks was useless for anyone using Snow Leopard. Useless because you could open a file (75% of the time) but only save it 5% of the time before it crashed. They just recently fixed this problem.

Ever since I bough Dreamweaver CS3, even before Snow Leoapard, I’ve had nothing but weird JS problems that wouldn’t allow me to do anything without 5 warning windows popping up. I searched around the internet and found this was a common problem – that Adobe never bothered to fix, instead I’m hacking my $2500 software’s core to get it to stop. Why should I have to do that with such expensive software?

Also, I’ve heard from several people (but haven’t experienced it myself yet – thankfully) that their customer service fails. Long wait times, unhelpful agents and rude answers to questions. How do they get away with this?

Bloated and buggy…what exactly are we paying for?

If I pay for a million dollar house, I expect it to look, contain and act different than a $50,000 house. Adobe Creative Suite is the million dollar house of design and development software. Yet their software is buggy and overly bloated – which makes it run like crap, especially if you have more than one program open at once.

Alternatives?

Whenever you think of design and development software, you most always think of Adobe Creative Suite. But there are alternatives. I reviewed Coda last week, which is a great alternative to Dreamweaver and contains similar functions, but has yet to crash or slow down on me. I’ve found lots of great Dreamweaver-replacements thanks to readers here and on Twitter.

Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve only looked at one other Photoshop alternative, Pixelmator, and it didn’t run well on my Snow Leopard MacBook. I’m going to look at Gimp as soon as I have a few free minutes and see if that works better. Other than that, I’m not sure of any similar Photoshop programs out there.

I don’t mean to whine but…

I feel like Adobe is missing out on a lot of buyers and I hope they see that soon and correct their mistakes. I don’t mind paying for software. But it should work, work well and crash less. It shouldn’t cost $2500 every year or so. It shouldn’t break 3 months after you purchase it. I’m a developer, so I know bugs and crashes happen – but there should be a high level of support, response and fixes on a product that expensive.

Your .02

How has your Adobe experience been? Any better or worse? Do you enjoy their products?

Amber Weinberg

Amber is a freelance front-end developer specializing in semantic and accessible custom WordPress themes. She works with agencies and other freelancers to bring their designs to life using custom ACF flexible layout builds - making them more performant and less buggy while allowing the client easy customization without breaking the design system.