Oh man, I think I may be about to grit my teeth and give in to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I went and looked and they have now quietly added some features I actually want. Curved corners, very much like what one of Astute Graphics’ plugins does, except better-integrated; the return of sliders for transparency (when they rebuilt the interface for CS6, or was it 5? they turned a bunch of sliders into dropdowns with 10%/20%/30%/etc), bitmaps in art brushes, and most importantly some new fillips to the pencil tool that lets you hold down a key to make some or all of your lines into straight ones.
The pencil tool is like 95% of my Illustrator use. This could be important.
Running the math.
Single app: $20/mo, $240/year.
Full Creative Suite: $50/mo. $600/year. OR if you’re an existing customer you can get the first year for $30/mo – $360/year.
My usage of the Creative Suite is basically Illustrator all day every day, plus InDesign and Premiere a few times a year for putting together books and Kickstarter videos and whatnot. Let’s say I need one of them like four months out of the year – if I subscribe to one app or another for a month or two and cancel it after, that’s $80/year.
So Illustrator plus ad-hoc usage of other apps is around $320. I could see it easily being $360, what with forgetting to cancel subscriptions, having book production run long, etc. That is about what I paid for a new release of Illustrator every year and a half. I’m still giving Adobe more money than I used to, but I’m also able to use the other apps without the immense hassle of abusing trial versions and/or the SAY YOHO route.
The existing user price works for me for a year. But unless I suddenly start making a LOT more money off my stuff, I’ll be going down to the single app plus ad-hoc rentals of other apps once that’s over.
Either way, I’m going to mull this over a few more days. I’m in the very last stages of getting Rita 2 to press, I really do not want to get lost down the rabbit hole of upgrading anything right now.
edit. Okay fuck it I sent off the very last tweaks to Rita 2, I did it. Now I get to have the JOY of migrating my settings. ALWAYS FUN. I just tried doing some by cloning over files, and now Illustrator CC is crashing on launch even after removing stuff I added to its settings. WHEE. So I get to wrangle installing it AGAIN. And it’s been stuck at 90% for like five minutes now…
As always, piracy has the better user experience.
I’m not sure. Hunting down an installer and a keygen/crack every time I want to upgrade – or install a particular tool for the length of a project, and toss it afterwards – is getting to be more and more of a pain in the ass.