Adobe Creative Cloud Is Back 74
As reported by TheNextWeb, the extended outage of the authentication mechanism of Adobe's Creative Cloud service has been resolved. From the story: 'According to a series of tweets: 'Adobe ID issue is resolved. We are bringing services back online. We will share more details once we confirm everything is working.' Adobe said further, 'We have restored Adobe login services and all services are now online. We will be sharing a complete update on the outage soon.' and 'We know we let you down. We apologize and are working to ensure it doesn't happen again."' A good time to revisit this prediction from last year about how going to an all-cloud, all-subscription model might hurt customers.
...and there was much rejoicing. (Score:1)
yay
Only Creative Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what happens when they no longer sell their products and you have no choice but to have the Creative Cloud. Should the entire design industry shut down when Adobe has an issue?
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This is going to open the doors to other company's to take the top spot from Adobe.
Offer a similar product, charge 1/4 what they charged for the full CS 6 suite, and don't link it to any cloud authentication. Just a simple serial # system.
Will people pirate it? Sure, there will always be pirating, no way around it. But I bet you enough people will pay for a legitimate copy that you will still turn a huge profit.
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The problem is, Adobe has bought up so much of the industry that they have a huge warchest of patents.
They also aren't terribly nice about sharing information to competitors --- look at how poorly FreeHand handled .pdfs for one example --- the devs complained that Adobe was _not_ forthcoming about aspects of the format which were needed to improve it.
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Have fun monetizing your project w/o being able to bill U.S. clients.
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No, you are responsible for your own cloud. Every designer has to have a diesel-driven cloud generator in the basement and fire it on every time there is a cloud outage. Its just like with energy in developing countries. Welcome to the third world, designers!
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Fail. Gimp just doesn't cut it. It's very good, but it's not Photoshop. And Photoshop is the 900 lb gorilla in Adobeland.
Now that Apple blew its own dick off by ruining Final Cut Pro, Adobe is in the cat-bird seat. Unfortunately a cloud based Premiere and AfterEffects is bullshit. So sad...
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> Fail. Gimp just doesn't cut it.
Fine. Continue enjoying your outtages. This is exactly what you get for brand fixated mentality. Gimp is but one example. It's the tip of the iceberg. The fanboys always should down anything that isn't Brand X. It doesn't matter what the license is.
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No, it's more like Photoshop CS2 was given away (accidentally?) by Adobe some time ago, the downloads and regkeys might even still be up for all I know. They made them available publicly. Even photoshop CS2 beats the living shit out of the gimp for actual usability. Granted, there's no context-aware fill in photoshop that old, so that will send me back to the gimp to use the resynthesizer. I sure wish someone would port the resynthesizer to [ye olde] Photoshop.
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More seriously, pointing people to much less capable software is not going to help them do their jobs. If Adobe moving to a subscription model actually causes ongoing hardship, it'll open the way for a real competitor.
Re: Only Creative Cloud? (Score:2)
Gimp is only comparable to Photoshop if you don't know the extent of Photoshop's capabilities or wouldn't push it to its limits if you did. Gimp is closer in capability to Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator.
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I don't think that many people who use photoshop require the entirety of it's functionality.
It's like microsoft word vs openoffice, there are some fairly commonly required features that are catered for that handle the overwhelming majority of the population, but each person has their own little outlier function that only word handles.
gimp is becoming viable for more types of work by the day, it may not ever do everything photoshop does, but it doesn't have to. All it has to do is enough to "get the job done
Re: Gimp vs Photoshop: no comparison (Score:3)
You're arguing my position. If your needs are relatively simple, you can use Gimp, Elements, or Pixelmator roughly interchangeably. If you need to do anything tricky, you'll probably run into a wall with all three.
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Should the entire design industry shut down when Adobe has an issue?
Sure, that's a predictable consequence of any monoculture - the agile will survive. Or does somebody actually expect Adobe to be around in 100 years?
Re:Only Creative Cloud? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I'm a film guy, not a photog, so my options are: Avid (industry standard), or switch to a mac and use FCP, not to mention work with prosumer software such as Vegas. Editing is editing and there's not a whole lot of differences between the suites that don't have workarounds, etc. I particularly enjoy the Premiere->After Effects workflow, and while Audition is no ProTools, it's good enough for my purposes. The most exciting thing for me lately is reading that Speedgrade CC 7.1 has a better roundtrip workflow, but I haven't tested that out yet.
Anyway, "creative cloud" is to "cloud" as "javascript" is to "java". Unless you're using Adobe's cloud storage program. But why the fuck would you do that? I generated over 250gb in footage (non-raw) for a 6 minute short recently.. How long would that take to upload to cloud storage and how long would it take to pull it back down? No thanks, I've got local storage and I like it that way.. maybe if we ever get ubiquitous fiber connections and $10/month/terabyte cloud storage options I might consider using it for archival, but yeah, no thanks... I did not even know Adobe's shit was down until I read about it here. That's how much it affected me.
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Anyway, "creative cloud" is to "cloud" as "javascript" is to "java". Unless you're using Adobe's cloud storage program. But why the fuck would you do that?
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Doesn't it have sharing? If so, it would be an effective way to deliver samples to clients, or for collaborative work on images (though as you point out later, not video.)
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I decided to look into it a little bit more.
https://forums.adobe.com/messa... [adobe.com]
Apparently the creative cloud is offline applications that while they use online functions they do work offline for 30 days of non conductivity.
Still stupid.
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If I had a deadline and was unable to access my stuff, is adobe going to pay for it? I doubt it
Where is the link? (Score:1)
Is it http://thenextweb.com/creativity/2014/05/15/adobe-creative-cloud-worldwide/ [thenextweb.com]?
And just like the McRib (Score:2)
it only happens when pork prices are lowest.
Creative Suite Six will be Adobe's XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously.
The major advances in tools in Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver et cetera have flattened. I love the perspective drawing tools in Illustrator and some of the improved tools in Photoshop but really the major changes in CS have been in workflow, lifecycle and preflighting.
That latter stuff is great but largely a) is for technically advanced production users can talk to other technically advanced production users and b) locks you in to Adobe.
That stuff serves no other function for anyone else. People have figured that out and so to keep revenues up, Adobe switched to the cloud model. That's it. There's absolutely no benefit for most users to switch to the cloud model given that most companies skip two or three versions of Creative Suite. My prediction is that CS 6 will be around for a long, long time.
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Re:Creative Suite Six will be Adobe's XP (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a lot of misunderstanding about the "cloudiness" of CC. The recent outage didn't take all the subscribers down, at least as long as they are using local storage for their work. The software runs locally. It would actually be a step forward if, say, they came up with some killer algorithms that require super-computer power to run and gave subscribers access to those cycles in the cloud. But currently, the cloud is mainly used for license validation (periodically) and software updates.
Adobe is leaving money on the table by not accommodating the customers who used to go for every other or every third update. I expect that within a couple of years they will realize this and come up with some sort of hybrid subscription/perpetual license scheme.
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There is a lot of misunderstanding about the "cloudiness" of CC. The recent outage didn't take all the subscribers down, at least as long as they are using local storage for their work.
A lot of people have reported problems with using their locally installed applications at all, or with features like the Typekit integration even if the software would start. It seems to be a much wider problem than just the on-line storage and activation for new licences.
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What's becoming of this site? (Score:5, Informative)
While I agree in principle that "cloud"-based services are overrated for reasons we are all aware, the issue with Creative Cloud was a minor one.
I use Adobe software every day and I noticed the error just because I tried make a change in the subscription plan.
The apps run locally and the license is checked every 90 days. Yes, some people could not activate their licenses or they couldn't download an application. This is a DRM issue, like Microsoft's or EA licensing servers being down. This could have happened regardless of Creative Cloud.
The only cloud services are their Typekit and Edgefont font distribution and Behance portfolios.
So let's make this clear: Creative Cloud is a fancy way of saying "rented software". Compared to the traditional model, it may cost more or less, depending on the upgrading habits (personally I used to always upgrade and use the newest version, other users upgrade to every other version)
However... (Score:3)
Some sites such as the daily mail missed publication because of the outage, so it obviously wasn't minor to everyone.
This could have happened regardless of Creative Cloud.
Of course I don't think people would be very excited about any such DRM scheme. In the professional environment, software vendors take particular care to enable privately hosted license management servers *precisely* because of this risk. EA is a steaming pile in general, so that's not setting the bar high. MS has KMS servers for enterprises to deploy and even failing that, their activatio
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Isn't the Daily Fail missing publication a huge win for anyone who cares about honesty? Are you asserting that it wasn't minor for right-wing liars, and we should somehow be upset that the absurd propaganda didn't get out to the rubes on-time?
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I think it being the Daily Mail is secondary to the issue that it could have been *any* client of the cloud based offerings to be afflicted You can be completely dismissive of the Daily Mail but still appreciate that the problem could have hit a more valuable publication. Daily Mail I just new about because a story about their woes popped up in my reader.
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and the corollary point, if adobe isn't going to pay those fees (which they aren't) then can people in fact afford to depend on adobe software? for anyone who has close deadlines, the answer will become no, if it isn't already
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Squeezing Oranges rather than Growing More Oranges (Score:2)
That is what happens when a company realizes they don't know what to do to get new creative apps out to a larger base of customers.\
Sad but true. Definite limitation of the Adobe Board of Directors.
The Cloud! The Cloud! (Score:2)
I can only hope the mad rush to get everything to the cloud continues so as more and more of these incidents occur people will see the folly of letting someone else manage their data.
Further, if someone is able to get into a cloud service, it's not just your information that is compromised, it is the thousands of other people as well. Imagine a company having its internal documents about an upcoming product being made available to its competitors.*
* To those who might cheer this scenario, image if it's your
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Dear Adobe. (Score:2, Funny)
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HI! I'm Joe Beats.
Say, what chance does a deceased returning war veteran have for that good payin' job, more sugar, and that free Mule we've all been dreaming of?
No Problem Here (Score:2, Insightful)
The $20 / month price is for the first year of the student-teacher pricing. Second year goes to $29.95. It's a better deal than purchasing the software at the outlandish prices. Adobe is not making software for the casual user. It's all professional stuff and I'm quite happy with my subscription. I don't store my files in their cloud, I keep them locally and on a backup elsewhere that costs me very little.
As for the outage, the software is loaded onto your machine and continues to function for 30 days even
Adobe better take a look at their SLA (Score:4, Insightful)
If one of our sites was down for as long as Adobe's was, heads would roll.
What took so long to restore? Crappy process for restoring server images or recovering a database?
Or, as others have speculated, was there a security breach and they couldn't bring it back up until all the evidence was gathered and the vulnerability was closed.
Oh wait, this is Adobe we are talking about. Their code doesn't have vulnerabilities.
This is why I don't upgrade (Score:3)
I wanted to upgrade.
I had the cash in hand.
But Adobe destroying file compatibility (can't write CS4 files), forcing the subscription model, cloud and 30 to 90 day reauthorizations on me make it not something I'll do.
So I just keep using CS4.
It works.
Adobe loses money they would have gotten as upgrades by tens of thousands of users like me.
If another program comes out that I can afford that will read and write all the Adobe formats I need (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat) then I would switch to it in a heart beat.
Old way, New way (Score:2)
Old way.
1. Buy Photoshop CC, create thousands of editable images using CS6 proprietary features and saved in CS6 proprietary format. Cool.
2. Loved CC, but Acme Studios has finally released a superior product that will improve my images and workflow. It's incompatible with PS CC, but that's ok.
3. Buy Acme Studios to edit my new images; continue to use CS6 in parallel to edit my old images.
New way
1. Buy Photoshop CC, create thousands of editable images using CC only proprietary features and saved in CC
Re: Butthurt (Score:1)
Sorry, your premise is questionable.
http://www.cultofmac.com/232682/photoshop-and-whole-creative-cloud-already-cracked-and-pirated/
Oh well (Score:2)
The sad thing is that now that everything's back up, it'll be business as usual.
I grudgingly subscribed to Adobe Creative cloud when I found that buying Illustrator would have cost me $750 for a legal copy, or $30/month and also include the rest of the CC package. I already own a legal copy of Photoshop CS5, which is good enough for me, so I haven't downloaded that, but I've had two projects that required video editing (so I downloaded Premier) and extracting difficult text from a PDF (so I downloaded Acrob