The installed base issue is giant for anyone. It certainly seems to have tons to do with why so many smart folks at MS end up spinning their wheels on creating anything genuinely new. What's that number people throw around? Something like 26 flavors of Windows devices to support? Eee-yuck. That's a lot of masters to please.
Re Adobe and re Pshop in particular I seem to recall a few years back -- and well after the years I would have counted myself as even "competent" at PShop -- people freaked over changes to a bunch of key commands and menu nav (do I remember that right?).
I way get that. So much. It's (again w/ the kitchen metaphor) like having some joker come in and mess up your pantry and hide your knives and whatnot.
It's just that for me, as an increasingly casual user of these apps (as well as a 1-man show who has total freedom to choose/buy/change/try/dump whenever it suits me), it just feels like things are devolving at a quickening pace. Just at a gut level. These apps are no fun to use. Bloat. That's the word I keep coming back to.
FW and DW feel like Java apps at this point. SO far off the mark on performance, UX, and general polish, that I kinda can't believe Pros still pay retail for them. I guess it's just a line item in the Excel. No idea.
I owe a lot to Adobe and their apps and have for MANY years now. And like I say I love the folks I know there. It just feels like the company has lost any interest or ability in making the sorts of things that OS X power users love shelling out dough for. Great software that you want to tell everybody you love, y'know?
"people freaked over changes to a bunch of key commands and menu nav"
Very much so. And then there's another set of people who freak because of some default key shortcuts (which can, of course, all be changed from the defaults to whatever the hell makes you shiny) which have been in Photoshop since version 2 or so do something that's not the OS X standard. But it would cause more freakouts to change them so...
I've never used/been a fireworks guy, but I don't believe many of the pros are using DW anymore much at all.
"making the sorts of things that OS X power users love shelling out dough for."
See, the thing about that, and in more general terms... I love "native"-feeling OS X apps as much as the next person, or probably more, for most values of "next person". And I'd certainly love for Photoshop to be more native. A couple problems with that, though... the obvious one of the vastly greater effort to do multiple platform stuff with entirely different native guis on each; then there's also the fact that native controls are just inadequate for what power users want out of photoshop. Just as a minor example, the ubiquitous scrubbing on the labels of textboxes to change values; certainly not something you can do with native controls.
In short, I'm not really sure what Adobe could be doing better. (Well, other then making their shit not crash horribly all over the room, though Photoshop is still extremely stable in my experience. I have nothing good to say about Flash or Acrobat in any way, and in fact most of the macromedia imports are generally shit.) Inevitably somebody will challenge their market dominance, and if they don't smarten up and fix PS beforehand, well, changing everything then in a desperate effort to retain their market will only make matters worse for them. Better for users everywhere, one hopes.
The installed base issue is giant for anyone. It certainly seems to have tons to do with why so many smart folks at MS end up spinning their wheels on creating anything genuinely new. What's that number people throw around? Something like 26 flavors of Windows devices to support? Eee-yuck. That's a lot of masters to please.
Re Adobe and re Pshop in particular I seem to recall a few years back -- and well after the years I would have counted myself as even "competent" at PShop -- people freaked over changes to a bunch of key commands and menu nav (do I remember that right?).
I way get that. So much. It's (again w/ the kitchen metaphor) like having some joker come in and mess up your pantry and hide your knives and whatnot.
It's just that for me, as an increasingly casual user of these apps (as well as a 1-man show who has total freedom to choose/buy/change/try/dump whenever it suits me), it just feels like things are devolving at a quickening pace. Just at a gut level. These apps are no fun to use. Bloat. That's the word I keep coming back to.
FW and DW feel like Java apps at this point. SO far off the mark on performance, UX, and general polish, that I kinda can't believe Pros still pay retail for them. I guess it's just a line item in the Excel. No idea.
I owe a lot to Adobe and their apps and have for MANY years now. And like I say I love the folks I know there. It just feels like the company has lost any interest or ability in making the sorts of things that OS X power users love shelling out dough for. Great software that you want to tell everybody you love, y'know?