Goodbye, Adobe

I finally caved and upgraded to MacOS Catalina today. This means that my old, old, old copy of the Adobe CS4 Production Premium Suite no longer works. I had prepared for this over a year ago by purchasing Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Designer, which seemed like the best options given my requirements. I also ended up buying a license of Sketch a few months later because I needed it for a client’s app, and then Acorn when it was 50% off earlier this year.

None of them are the same. I don’t mind losing Photoshop so much, because Acorn in particular does seem like a great replacement for my typical workflow, and I can always figure out how to do the more powerful stuff in Pixelmator if it ever comes to that. But I’m going to miss Illustrator so much. Affinity Designer and Sketch both make me kind of furious in different ways, and I very, very much hate that there’s no way to just open, edit, and save an SVG in Designer—it’s always an “Export” function.

But also I realized that this will be the first time in twenty years that I won’t have Adobe apps running on my machine. They’ve been a huge part of my professional and amateur life. They just killed me with this $21/month pricing. I don’t need Illustrator that much. But I’m going to miss it something terrible. Hopefully being pushed into the arms of Affinity will help me embrace their UI paradigms and eventually become comfortable. But it still sucks to say goodbye to an old friend like Illustrator.