I’m a photoshop guy. To say I have an intimate relationship with Photoshop is like saying John Gruber likes Macs. My obsessiveness about Photoshop verges on unhealthy. For the past nine years, few days (okay, weekdays) have gone by where I haven’t worked in it, let alone spent hours working with it. I use photoshop, I teach photoshop, I criticize photoshop.
So to be made to use another program for months on end feels odd to me. When I have to edit a photo or some other task that absolutely requires it’s bitmappy embrace, I feel a calming relief. Suffice to say for the last 4 months or so, 90% of my workday has been spent in Illustrator, and lately inDesign. Being so familiar with one member of the Adobe family but few of the others isn’t as rare a trait as I’m lead to believe. I think most people have that “upside down T” level of knowledge when it comes to software – expertise in one or two things, vague familiarity with others. This was my experience, super pirate ninja with Photoshop, familiar enough with Dreamweaver (ick), kinda okay at animating in Flash, and I’ve flirted with some of the others at one time or another (I rocked pretty hard at Premiere about 5 versions back).
Nowadays I’m no expert at Illustrator and certainly not inDesign, but I’ve got my footing. I can move pretty fast in Illustrator and really do realize it’s benefits – and it’s shortcomings. I’ll save my full experience with Ai for another time, but I want to talk about The Worst Idea Ever, which really isn’t so bad, but I’m sure there’s reasons it’s not so good.
Why does Adobe have 14,000 different applications? Yes, Flash and inDesign are about as different as graphic programs can get, but, what about Photoshop and Illustrator? Erik and I were talking about how yes, in CS4, Adobe created a unified interface, and despite all the moaning (here’s looking at you, DA submitters, love ya lots), it’s probably for the better. But functionally, there’s things that inDesign can do (Paragraph Styles) that Illustrator and Photoshop can’t, and that doesn’t make sense to me. Should you be able to use Actionscript 3.0 in Acrobat? Probably not, but there’s alot of missing overlap.
So here it is. The Worst Idea Ever. Combine ‘em all. All of them. The obvious ones – Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash. The less obvious ones – Air, Contribute, onLocation (I don’t even know what that is). Let’s put aside financial disincentives, what are the technical limitations at this point. I make Illustrator chug and I’m not even drawing anything, what would a 100gb hybrid app do to my wee little quad processor mac? What I want is to open a .adobe file in my Adobe.app, click a “Mode” dropdown, select Photoshop, and get my photoshop windows. Edit all my layers with bitmappy precision. Then, when I need to edit something in vector, I don’t use the pathetic excuse for vector tools in Photoshop mode, I switch to Illustrator mode, and all my bitmappy layers suddenly work as Illustrator objects. Would this be extremely difficult technically? You betcha. But let’s keep going.
I switch to Flash mode and I get a timeline to edit everything. I’m not switching apps here – everything is a single file, and I get to edit that file 14,000 different ways – then export it for any end purpose. I take my .adobe file which I’ve just made into a complex Actionscript 3.0 site, switch to inDesign mode, and make a book out of it. Why not?
I’m not the first one to think of this. I don’t think of ideas first, I’m not that bright. I’m sure every junior engineer inside Adobe has thought of this. And for the record, as much contact as I’ve had with individuals who work for Adobe, I have no idea what they’re thinking about the future. But why not is all I’m asking dear Dear Adobe readers, all two of you. Why the hell not?
