A request for help

SOTSDO

SOTSDO

Old King Log
Staff member
CE/Moderator
I have been a user of Dreamweaver and Fireworks for about ten or twelve years now. However, there have been recent developments that have me wanting to make a change.

• The first is the abandonment by Adobe of Fireworks completely - no more updates or support following the current version. This has made me (to put it mildly) less than happy.

• The second is the movement of Adobe to the "Cloud" method of handling all of their software. Akin to the "distributive computing" of the days of my youth (where all software resided on the mothership computer, like Google's suite), they now will only "rent" the software to the user, through a variety of schemes, all of which are way too pricey for someone who only occasionally has need to use it.

So, what I am looking for is advice on:

1) A graphics package offering similar features as the now defunct Fireworks, that is not controlled by Adobe. (I.e., not Photoshop or Photoshop elements.

2) A website editor that functions in the same fashion as Dreamweaver - little or no HTML entry, drag and drop placement, that sort of stuff.

I'd like to stay away from as much complexity as possible. Also, all suggestions need to be Macintosh OS X.8 compatible, no PC emulator stuff.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
 
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I feel your pain, and your anger at Adobe's betrayal of their users. For graphics check out Corel Paintshop Pro. Another option other disgruntled PS users recommend highly is Xara Designer Pro. Xara also has many web development programs. You could also try googling 'Adobe alternatives' as I know that recently a number of such lists have been compiled.
 
Ooops. Not sure about Xara either, but it is highly regarded.
 
Crap, I completely forgot about Acrobat, which is a core part of my music library. With that gone, I'd really be up the creek without the proverbial paddle.

Thank you Ben for pointing out this equivalency site to me. I hate to rely on the advice of others when picking software, but the Adobe "void" is truly vast, and it's nice to have someone even semi in the know to do the advanced screening for me.
 
FWIW, it's not like you old version of Dreamweaver will suddenly not work anymore. Hey, I use MX 2004 on a Windows 8 machine. I haven't needed any of the newer features added in the past 9 years. I'd make the same argument about Fireworks. I also had to recently make the argument that there's no compelling reason for most folks to go beyond Office 2003.

Going back to an earlier discussion, it's now 100% legal to buy used software. If you really want the latest and greatest that's not on the cloud, you could just buy a copy of CS 6.

As far as Acrobat is concerned, there are an awful lot of non-Adobe PDF writers/editors out there. It kinda depends on what features you want.

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One of my coworkers is currently dealing with the hassle called "Adobe Creative Cloud." Adobe does their "cloud" considerably different from Microsoft in their Office 365 product. In the latter product, you're actually installing a version of Office 2013 that checks a server every now and then to see if you're licensed. No big deal. Adobe seems to have this big desktop client, each user needs an Adobe account and Adobe really makes it difficult for multi-user environments that might only use two or three of the CC apps for some folks and all for other folks.
 
I've done that in the past, only to be undone by the move to the Intel processor on the newer Macintosh computers. Once that change was made, bingo - no more access to that version of the Adobe stuff. (Canvas, my other graphics editor, was also locked out - two graphics platforms shut down at the same time.)

I'll get by with Dreamweaver for now, but I'll have to make my website revisions on a much quicker timeline now, just in case.

I will miss Fireworks most of all...

As for MS Word, a year or so ago I made the decision to move to the Apple program Pages. Apple finally decided that widows and orphans (not Steve Job's widow (yum) and kids, but lines left hanging at the beginning of pages) were worthy of address in their word processing programs. Since Pages runs across all of the Apple platforms (OS X and iOS), and with their cloud service, it has considerably simplified things in this all Mac household. (I use Numbers, their spreadsheet, for my limited data analysis and freeform database needs as well.)

I have slowly transitioned to Calendar, the joint Mac/iOS calendar program, and want to make the change to their email solution one of these days soon. It's a long-term project.

I do wish that Apple had continued their web programming application, iWeb or something like that. I played around with it when it came out, liked what I saw, but had already invested in a new copy of the Adobe suite at that point. But, Apple shut it down in 2011.
 
SOTSDO said:
I've done that in the past, only to be undone by the move to the Intel processor on the newer Macintosh computers. Once that change was made, bingo - no more access to that version of the Adobe stuff. (Canvas, my other graphics editor, was also locked out - two graphics platforms shut down at the same time.)
Click to expand...
Posting a variation of what I said before: just because Apple comes out with an Intel-based Mac doesn't mean that your G5-based Mac suddenly doesn't work anymore :p.

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A few "for what it's worth" comments:

As soon as virtualization -- i.e. using a piece of software to (say) run Windows programs on a Macintosh -- became much more robust about 5-ish years ago, the Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. whatever argument became moot. This also helped out Windows immensely because Microsoft no longer had to write 20 bazillion lines of sloppy code so you could still run the great screen saver you had in Windows 1.0 on your Windows 7 box. Hey, you wanna run a couple programs in Windows 1.0? Install this free software and there ya go. So, for the past several years you essentially could buy a computer that had an operating system that MOST of your apps run on and use virtualization for the rest. I've got mostly Windows apps, so I've got a PC that runs Windows 8. Simple. Or, because of Moore's Law, you could buy, say, a decent used Mac and a decent used PC that can run the latest and greatest operating systems from wherever and not really spend that much.

In the Mac world, what has happened since the introduction of the iPhone was introduced in 2007 is that the Mac OS is becoming increasingly similar to the iOS. I think I can predict that this trend will continue and, in a couple years, you may very well have "MacOS" for the Macs and "MacOS Lite" for the iDevices. However, it's still gonna be a few years. I've used MacOS 10.9 (one of my co-workers has an Apple developer license) and I've seen the new Mac Pro. They still work a lot differently than the iPad.

I also think that, at some point in the relatively near future, tech companies are going to realize that most of the world does not want to have to upgrade all their software or hardware every couple months because there is some new operating system that's come out. Currently, a major Windows OS upgrade (like 2000 to XP to Vista to 7 to 8) comes out every 2-3 years. A "major" Macintosh OS upgrade (like 10.5 to 10.6 to 10.7 to 10.8) comes out every year. Ubuntu has a major upgrade (like 8 to 9 to ...) every 6 months to a year. I do these kinds of upgrades because I'm a computer tech, so I'm special. Most users? Nope.

I dunno if you've noticed, but with Macintosh OS upgrades, there are fewer models supported -- i.e., fewer models that can run the OS. In a few months, my 2006 24" aluminum Intel Core 2 Duo iMac I have at work will officially be obsolete: it can't run Mac OS 10.9. My 2 year old home PC will still run Windows 8.1 just about as well as it ran Windows 7.

So, looking at the numbers, what does this mean? Well, if you want to keep up-to-date on your operating systems, you have around 5-ish years before your hardware will be incapable of running that newest OS. This still doesn't mean that all your other software becomes obsolete: the newer operating system might support it juuuuust fine. I refer you to my comment about running Macromedia Dreamweaver 2004 MX on my Windows 8 box.

Note that there are different concerns for businesses. If you have a business that's subject to things like HIPPA or PCI compliance, you have to use an operating system that's 100% supported by the manufacturer. As an example, Windows XP (introduced in 2001) will have all support discontinued in April 2014. In general, Microsoft supports an OS for only 5-7 years. Apple? You have to call them. Ubuntu? 5 years.
 
Well that's really going returning to an previously conversation, it's now 100% lawful to buy used application. If you really want technology that's not on the reasoning, you could just buy a duplicate of CS 6.
 
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