Still stuck with Adobe, because only Adobe exports well

Apr 6, 2015

Recently I cancelled my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription: just too expensive for my needs and no scalability for a small business. Also, Adobe is abandoning development of the app I know and need the most (Fireworks). I had a powerful desire to finally break-up with the company. I knew it would be tough.¹ And I knew there was one thing in particular that was going to be particularly hard to replace: export options.

I shopped hard for graphics software from any other developer that offers satisfactory export options … and failed.

All the “Photoshop killers” for Mac are interesting and maturing, but none of them have even half the export features that Adobe has offered for many years in most of their apps (even little Photoshop Elements). Many lack any kind of export preview at all! Let alone one with sensible optimization options.

So, I’m still with Adobe. And it’s starting to feel like I always will be. Sigh.

It’s hard to reconcile the fact that most Adobe apps are offensively janky, and yet have always had many “simple” features no one else offers. Both the love and hate parts of my relationship with Adobe products are well developed. I’ve been professionally dependent on at least one of their products at any time for much of the last twenty-five years. ↩︎