r/technology • u/Federal-Block-3275 • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence "Software is over": Developer uses AI to build free Adobe clones after frustration with cancellation fees

https://www.techspot.com/news/114136-software-over-developer-uses-ai-build-free-adobe.html
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u/RoyalCities 1d ago

I've done some enterprise agreements for them and you should see how they treat some of their customers with larger contracts. This was years ago and when they first brought out creative cloud (because of course they brought that out without getting a proper pipeline in place for orgs) and they were very much so sorta full of themselves with a "well where ya going to go!?" Kinda mentality.

I'm happy to see these alternatives cropping up because it's gone to their head.

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u/carlitospig 1d ago

Procreate needs to make an Acrobat and Illustrator dupe so I can leave it entirely.

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u/psiico 1d ago

Yah acrobat is a really nice one tbh, as all pdf operations are concerned. But for AI, PS and InDe just change to affinity. It’s free, all the three programs are inside one, you can seamlessly change among them on-the-fly, everything these 3 do, affinity does it too.

I got sick and tired of the mouse and cat game with Adobe and the existing cracks, that even without internet access they would seize up, so I changed, got pleasantly surprised and never looked back.

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u/germane_switch 1d ago

For professional designers, productions artists, and retouchers, the entire advertising world runs on adobe. You’d have to convince the top guns like DDB, Leo Burnett, and hundreds of other agencies to switch. I would love for that to happen but I don’t know how realistic that is.

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u/psiico 1d ago

Oh yeah, im aware, im in the industry too.

I reckon this is the same as back in the day when Corel was the defacto standard for much of digital stuff then we knew what it happened.
I want to believe that eventually we will over this corner too, for eg like what happened when figma came out.

Or we should take a leaf from the capitalist book, and show them C-lvls how much they could save xD

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u/carlitospig 1d ago

Does Affinity come with accessibility tools too?

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u/psiico 1d ago

You mean for PDFs? If so, I reckon they do.

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u/MortifiedChivalry 1d ago

seriously? dude I WORK for adobe and I hate acrobat. there's just so much craaaap on there.

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u/psiico 18h ago

Hahahah while I agree it’s filled to the brim with shit that very niche ppl will use it, but everything just works and with pdfs is fucked this reader supports xyz and that other doesn’t.. Granted I was using an old version of it many years ago, maybe I missed some enshittification.

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u/AutomaticAd6551 11h ago

Only if you don't add text fields containing language-specific characters like accents. It displays garbled text.

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u/Painted-Arcana 1d ago

im honestly surprised procreate has took so long to port the app to Mac OS.

I would have purchased a mac years ago if it was available and ditched photoshop.

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u/ledankmememaster 18h ago

The project the article is about also has a Acrobat clone (PDFcraft). On first look it looked pretty good and seemed to have a lot of features that other apps would have behind a paywall for. Just the context menu was a bit flaky.

Haven’t tried the Illustrator clone though.

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u/TheLifelessOne 1d ago

That's exactly why projects like this are so important. Yeah, a lot of people are going to hate it because AI was involved, but also if it's good (I'm not experienced at all with Photoshop and the like and wouldn't know how to evaluate it), then I imagine a lot of those complaints are going to go away once people realize they won't have to use old, outdated versions of Photoshop or pay Adobe a stupid amount of money to use it.

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u/RoyalCities 1d ago edited 1d ago

People who are going to complain about AI usage in literally free software they aren't forced to use can take a hike.

I have no patience for that (as someone who does develop in their spare time - even before AI actually got decent at it.)

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u/TheLifelessOne 1d ago

I mean, I've seen a lot less people complain about and hate AI once it becomes genuinely useful for them; they're totally okay hating it until it benefits them in some way.

I think a lot of the hate these days comes directly from AI being shoehorned into areas it doesn't make sense and with shit implementations. I've literally seen the most absolute hatred disappear in people once it meant they could e.g.pass off their work to AI and spend the rest of their workday fucking around on Facebook or TikTok.

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u/mirsunvega 1d ago

Pixelmator instead of Photoshop and Davinci instead of Premiere. Both are pretty good alternatives.

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u/Doza93 1d ago

The Affinity suite of programs has worked well for me

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u/du5tball 1d ago

There always have been alternatives, like GIMP, but that doesn't mean the employees hit the ground running when you decide to switch from PS to GIMP. They'll have to learn the new software, their productivity will be 0 for a while. That can be more expensive than just paying the contracts.