Bye

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.

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.

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.

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

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.