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?
Not such a bad idea. I use Lightroom, Photoshop, and Premiere. I don’t use Auditon, as i use a competitor. Switching programs suck. If I need to edit audio in Premiere, ther eis a sucky builtin tool to do that – if I want to do heavy lifting, I export-edit-import. I should be able to just change my perspective and switch into ‘audition’ mode and work on the same objects.
This seems like a parallel between Vectors in Photoshop and Illustrator.
Sounds like Apple’s cancelled OpenDoc technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
I’m an After Effects ninja. I learned to shoot 35mm chromes and 4×5 and I know the value of having the skills to doing everything in the camera so I loathe Photoshop with a deep and totally unreasonable passion. I learned to draw in Aldus Freehand so I despise Illustrator. And FLASH? Puh-leeze. It’s alien. And I use Apple’s Final Cut because Premiere was a joke when we converted from Media 100. And even though I’ve been using After Effects since it was CoSA, there are vast areas I have never explored such as scripting and advanced motion tracking.
Adobe products, just like stuff from Apple and Microsoft, are tolerated by most users. The applications are hopelessly cluttered with junk advanced users will never need. Very few of us have the time or even the desire to be masters of more than a few. Know anyone who uses more than 4% of the raw power in Word? Even my company’s Photoshop wonks use only 13-35% of Photoshop’s capabilities.
Did you see what Apple has done to iTunes recently? Sheesh, all I need is an app to ingest my CDs and load my iPod.
david boise ID
That’s just what Microsoft’s Expression does!
yup, you’re right–worst idea ever. i can *maybe* see the feasibility of applications that function similarly (photoshop & illustrator), but flash? are you kidding? flash->book doesn’t make sense.
it’s coming, not from apple, but soon it will happen
these suites become more and more bloated and worthless.
plus the pseudo ui integration is a joke, duplicating a layer in two adobe apps is totally different. I mean .. holding alt just before dropping , that’s the first time i saw this kind DnD scheme ever, even after playing with 99% of cg apps in the history of cg ¬_¬. Even the 3dsmax un-interaction design team didn’t think of that one, and they are master when it comes to slow you down.
and what about the amazing transparency abilities of illustrator, that pdf do absolutely not want to hear about, so they invented the “transparency flattener” ( ‘d be better called ‘cruft expander’ ), which is like a taking all the vector concept and using it backwards; each time I use I think of html-table layout design. It’s like bitmapping gazillion of color-frozen vector elements .. it’s total non-sens. And it’s not even continuous ..
well, enough hate for today. I have to say, photoshop is one wonderfull thing ( even if the timeline and 3d thing is like a fifth leg ) but AE.. Ai ..
Everybody start using shake or houdini , or anything with a mathematical way of doing things so you don’t have to have a shrink in your office each time you want to print a f***ng dropshadowed logo ><
Mhh please forgive all my typos and my absolutely horrible english (anger doesn’t help here for sure), and btw I meant Adobe , not Apple.
Bye
I have a co-worker that uses Corel Draw and it kinda is like Illustrator and InDesign with a little bit of Photoshop (very little PS) all combined. I haven’t made the switch but I’ve been thinking about it more and more with each crappy release Adobe has had. Corel ain’t perfect but sometimes it seems to have vast superior capabilities compared to Adobe Illustrator or InDesign.
Trust that you’re not alone. I can’t stand the Adobe app fragmentation, the entir thing reeks “marketing”. While ALL in one might be a bit much, eliminating the plethora of redundancy and marrying paradigmatic features into something around a few applications would be wonderful for workflow and overall user experience.
This makes sense. The “Suite” concept gives people the impression that they are purchasing a collection of applications and can upgrade individual programs. Question is: Will I be able to upgrade Photoshop from my Suite??? Someday?
take it from a programmers perspective, keeping all of these programs seperate is a really good thing, in the least it keeps the complexity of these apps down to a managable level.
This one program would have to have *every* single small detail implemented in it, so that’s everything from the packaging in indesign to the level controls in photoshop. And then how to differentiate how bits work, learning this one app would take weeks to even get started.
I’ve seen people drawing large graphics in indesign, its doable because the pen tool is there, just like in photoshop but that’s all, there’s nothing thats useful for getting the right colours or vector shape manipulation or showing edges.
I doubt it would ever happen, but the only way I could see it working is a sort of wrapper application that figures what you’re after and presents the user interface from seperate apps, even that is not an easy option, the amount of old UI conventions (apple + k for prefs?!?) and how the key commands would change depending on what you’ve got selected, and which ‘application’ you’ve got selected.
Your right, this may be the worst idea ever. I can’t imagine how big and unruly such an application would be. Besides, each “graphics” program does different things. InDesign, for instance, is not a graphics program at all, but instead a layout program. It has its roots in Aldus PageMaker, which Adobe did not create but has done a fairly good job integrating.
I agree with you that they have more work to do to get the programs to all work the same. But you’ll have to admit that with each upgrade the programs get closer to looking like and working like one another.
I like to gripe about Adobe, too. But for those of us who spend our days with our heads buried in Adobe apps should keep one thing in mind–we should be thanking our higher powers that our livelihoods are not left up to the whims and sloppy programming at Microsoft.
Bill Harrel
Sounds nice if the right apps were combined, such as Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign/Acrobat and After Effects/Flash/Premiere/OnLocation/SoundBooth/Encore. In a busy production environment where people are very likely using many Adobe apps on the same project, moving things from one app to the next only because the workflow demands it, this would be a really useful approach.
But of course it’s not so useful when you start looking at the average joe who uses just Dreamweaver or just Photoshop. You will always have people who only need or want the functionality of one of these apps and will complain bitterly about having to pay for stuff they don’t/won’t use. People who only want Photoshop will bitch endlessly that all this page layout and vector (what the hell is that?) stuff is rolled in – clearly it was just a way for them to charge more… and on it goes.
It probably could work, however, as a higher-level app (like Bridge), for Adobe to offer in its bundles. Some kind of app that pulls in and unifies all of the applications in the bundle (Web Premium for example) into one interface on the fly, yet they are still technically separate programs that can be sold and used individually.
There’s already an “All-In-One” app out there. It’s called CorelDraw – ask them how it’s doing.
I can see a possible way for Adobe to integrate Illustrator’s tools into InDesign and Photoshop, then just get rid of Illustrator completely. But that’s about the extent of any “merging” I would want to see.
There’s already an Adobe app that does 2/3 of what you want: It’s called Fireworks. Bitmap and Vector, in one application.
If you want to combine the functionality of these programs, you are on crack. Really.
I personally prefer, and teach others, to use the right app for the right project. I don’t want some “smart” program to figure out what I’m doing and crap it all up (like Micro$oft).
And those of you that think CorelDRAW is the answer… I’ve used Illustrator, CorelDRAW and FreeHand over the years. A lot. DRAW is like a combination of Illy and InDesign, but it’s over-bloated and slow. Every other version (usually the even-numbered ones) was very unstable and crash-happy. In earlier versions, it wouldn’t produce printable postscript code. Crash the RIP frequently. It took a lot of hoop-jumping to get it to work.
Corel bundles a separate app called “PhotoPaint” that is a Photoshop clone, so you don’t get an “all in one” panacea from Corel.
I’m with you FreeHand users. I think of the big three vector apps, it was king. I’m surprised Adobe hasn’t sold it… When Adobe purchased Aldus (to get PageMaker), Aldus’ agreement with Altsys (the original creator of FreeHand) said that whoever held the license couldn’t have a competing product in their fold. Apparently, Adobe lawyers (or perhaps Macromedia?) didn’t make that mistake twice.
And Corel founder Michael Cowpland actually started this whole “gotta upgrade every year” concept. Thanks for that, Mike.
On the plus side, they also started the graphics suite concept, bundling DRAW, PhotoPaint, a bunch of fonts and clipart and font managers in one program. Only they didn’t charge two grand.
A long time ago, some companies like IBM and Apple had a project called OpenDoc. What it was all about, was to create a compound document system where a document could consist of many different media types, and the proper tools to manipulate each of them was about to appear seamlessly when needed. In this way, you don’t open application Yadayada to edit an .yada file; you open the document and do your work. Unfortunately this project died. Fragments of it made the way to DSOM and OS/2, which also died. So that was the end of the story. And now we are still stuck with monolithic applications doing one particular task and nothing to help us get the job really done. Because the job often involves working with many media types; like creating a web site (Dreamweaver) with Flash content (Flash) using images (Photoshop) and illustrations (Illustrator), some copy-writer work (Word) and tabular data (Excel), and a back-end database tier (Visual Studio).
Mhh please forgive all my typos and my absolutely horrible english (anger doesn’t help here for sure), and btw I meant Adobe , not Apple.
Bye