October 9, 2004
Calender driven updates suck Comments Off
Adobe Creative Suite 2.0 slated for early 2005 release. Right now, I don’t care about new features – Photoshop CS has all I think I could possibly need (though hey – maybe they’ll give me something so grand I’ll decide I can’t live without out it. Who knows?) What I am concerned about? Backwards compatibility.
90% of all the user supplied art I handle at work is vector line art, and NONE of my vendors can take anything higher than Illustrator version 9. The printing industry is famous, BTW, for the slowness of it’s upgrade cycles. A huge portion of my job, therefore, is to be a bridge between upgrade happy business users who think that newer software is always better, and printers who don’t understand why they should upgrade anything that still functions. (I’ve seen old-school vendors who grumble about the linotype machines going away.)
This is not a problem with Photoshop, regardless of the relative cluelessnesss of the end user. There’s a nifty option called “maximize compatibility” that makes it real simple to make sure anyone can open your .psd. (and most of the time, a bitmapped file is sent to me as a .tif anyway – which I can open *anywhere*.)
Illustrator though? Is *horrid*. If you save an .eps or .ai file straight from Illustrator CS, there is /no option/ for backwards compatibility. You have to export your file as a “legacy eps”. This command is not only counter intuitive, it’s frelling well hidden from the average user! It’s so damm hidden I’ve had to post a tutorial for my poor users, and even then half of them couldn’t get it right.
I was loosing so much time walking users though the export procedure for Illustrator CS (30 minute calls with hysterically frustrated users wherein I provide free training and tech support do not make me a happy camper) that we’ve finally upgraded from version 10 just this week. Not ’cause I need any of the new features, but because now we can take Illustrator CS files directly. Without the time sucking hysteria.
Of course, the only users who had a problem with my directions? Were the ones who shouldn’t be allowed near a graphics app in the first place. (Putting sales guys in charge of art files is usually a bad idea. I really prefer it when our customers let me deal with their graphics people directly.)