In a nut shell, the Bible says that Job, a man of great wealth, prosperity and faith, was tormented by Satan in a test to see if he would rebuke God. This included the killing of family members, wives, children, animals (lots of animals), burning fields, etc. Think worse case scenario and that's what Job put through. Despite his torment and torture, Job still gave thanks to God. Satan lost the bet and had to wear a dress for a week (or something like that) while God turned to Job and made sure his life was blessed ten-fold for the remainder of his years.
It's probably a good thing that Adobe Illus'hate'r CS didn't exist during Bibilical times because I think if Satan had forced Job to use it for just five minutes, that story would have had a different ending.
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
CS2 is even worse. Amazing, eh?
I'm a Freehand man, myself.
AI CS 2 [v12] is a hell of a lot better than AI v9-11.
It seems like the first stable version since v8. I remember v10 just about killed me the number of random crashes it caused.
Definitely a tough application to use, and seems to get worse with each upgrade. Has anyone tried Inkscape (inkscape.org). I have started using it recently, and like it a lot.
Adobe Illustrator has become as bad as MS Word in terms of feature bloat. There used to be a clear distinction between what you used Illustrator for and what you used Photoshop for. Once Illustrator started handling bitmaps things went downhill, though I suppose it had to start handling bitmaps to remain useful for web work.
There's a masochistic part of me that longs for the old, old days of Illustrator, where you had to hit cmd-Y to see the illustration as-is, when one worked in wireframe mode all the time, when people who called themselves designers knew how to draw, and when I used to walk to school barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways.
I keep a duplicate of my Illustrator CS Preferences Folder handy. When it starts crashing a lot, I just replace the folder. Then it hums along okay for a while.
It sounds like I shouldn't be in a hurry to upgrade to CS2.
Are you kidding me? I LOVE CS2. If you'd been using it since the beginning, you know what "difficult" is. Rian knows my pain. Love it. Love it. Love it. Hmmm... guess that doesn't bode well for me in the afterlife, does it?
The upside to Illustrator is that it is not raster like Photoshop. The downside to Illustrator is that it is not like Photoshop. I can make due in Illustrator. Make due, not fly.
I don't have a problem using Illustrator CS2, either. I'd like to know exactly what frustrates you about the programandyour alternative (sorry, can't get into Freehand).
Illustrator has its place, and I personally love using it. Rasterized things scare me: what if you need it at higher resolution? what if merging that layer screws you over later on? And as for distinctions, it's simple: Photoshop is for photos and photo manipulation. Illustrator is for creating artwork — drawing, dealing with shapes and lines and text. Someone also mentioned feature bloat; paths and shapes in Photoshop, anyone?
Illustrator is the only Adobe app completely outsourced to Adobe India. I guess the result is clear.
I don't know why everyone is complaining about CS and CS2. I completely agree with Rian -- it seems like the first truly stable version since 8. CS had its quirks because Adobe rewrote all its programs with a new text-rendering engine, but CS2 has ironed out all those wrinkles as well as added tons of tiny improvements that make my job easier. And the greatest thing about CS2? Smart vector objects when copying Illustrator graphics into Photoshop. Brilliant.
And Greg spoke, and it was good.
I agree, that little program can drive me insane. I used it back in school but ended up buying fireworks and freehand. They just suited me better, despite making people think I'm a pretend designer when I say I use them. 'You use fireworks? Like, for making buttons?'
photoshop cs/cs2 is not that good either.
useless upgrade. except for that one feature.. Transform > Warp
that is cool to have in PS. Not that there are no plugins for that... still...
I upgraded to cs2 on first gen Al. PB with 1.2GB and couldn't use it. (very poor performance). so still using PS7 and Illustrator 10.
Photoshop looks outsourced too.
I imagine that all Adobe apps are duct taped all to hell.
Pretty soon theyre gonna do the same to all macromedia products too.
i would dump anything adobe, if there's a good alternative. i've tried Gimp, inkscape etc. Are good, but not quite there yet.
I wish Click Here came up with alternatives.
Does anyone know of other alternatives?
I find the headaches are much less frequent now that we have upgraded to CS2. But yet the headaches persist.
other than the occasional hang/drop in AI, I rather like my Illustrator/Photoshop CS. Of course, I started in "Splash" and worked my way through Corel Photopaint/Draw/Xara ;)
"...nobody knows, the trouble JB has seen..."
Job 26:2-31:40. Maybe you should review that part.
Freehand rocks. Freehand has had no updates in a few years though.
Illustrator sucks. InDesign was a disappointment. Photoshop is their only redeeming app. What fun fruit flavors are they going to roll over next?
There's one major bug in Illustrator that consistently pisses me off. When you launch the app, and it's finally done launching, it pops up an error saying "unable to complete the requested operation" and then closes. I get it all the time, and it's been on the Adobe Forums for ages. :(
Ta for the link btw. :)
I personally think Illustrator hit rock bottom at Illustrator 10. That was the worst. However, I find Illustrator CS2 to be quite stable. Things done in "preview" mode take forever, but it doesn't crash on me like 10 did.
"InDesign was a disappointment." - Brandon
Compared to Quark? Compared to Quark, InDesign walks on water and changes that water to wine. Quark is my most loathed software company. Their technical support is the scourge of India, their software activation policy would be better if done by carrier pigeon and all of their last three logos sucked.
This may be the only place where carrier pigeons and "your logo sucks" are so casually flung as insults. Gotta love it!
That got a good gut laugh. I couldn't agree more.
*curses illustrator*
Your wording makes it sound like Job was an axe murderer. :)
You know, I said something similar last night.
I'm constantly switching between Freehand and Illustrator to see if one is more competent than the other. The scary thing is? They're both kind of useless, but necessary. Maybe if you duct taped them together they would create a vortex of mediocre incompetence that would devour just about everything.
Ahhh. That's better.
Personally I don't see the problem with Illustrator, I find it much more user friendly than Freehand although I must agree it's starting to 'bloat'. CS2 has certainly made an improvement from 10.
Indesign is certainly the best of the layout progs - Quark can only watch and wonder where they went so wrong...
Both Freehand and Illustrator have a high learning curve. Personally, I find Illustrator easier to use, but I'd still like to have an Illustrator lite version that only has the 10% of the app I use.
The biggest benefit to CS2? Well, they finally let you underline text natively in Illustrator. It's about time
freehand is for all you old school boys out there. illustrator is for making vector logos and that's pretty much it. i love the program because it interfaces with photoshop and indesign better than freehand. having said all that though, one of the standing jokes at school was, "Illustrator has unexpectedly quit, and so have I." the sheer panic received from not saving for a good 30 minutes and having the program crash was awful.
I've been using Illustrator for way longer than I care to recall (v1.1 on Ultrix? Something like that) and have to say that CS just blows hugely. Feature bloat is one problem. A big problem.
There is an underlying feeling I get, though, that there is very little concern for the users when it comes to features or their implementation.
Think about Illy-8. The last truly stable, solid version. That was a user's application. Everything in it seemed to be thought-out and designed with the user's workflow and thought process in mind. One simply cannot say the same thing for CS. It feels more like something the developers wrote for themselves and not for the users. There's a lack of feel and feedback. A loss of precision. Simple things like snap-to-point feel numb and indirect. I used to start an illustration in Illy-8 and be lost for literally hours simply creating. The app never got in my way. Working for hours in CS is plain work. It seems like it is forever getting in my way.
Besides mashes, what is that you guys do on ILL that cannot be done on flash? Seriously?
I don't recall that FLash allows one to draw vector images. I could be wrong.
But getting back to Illustrator: Anyone have any suggestions for a MacDraw like program that one could use to do good line drawing?? Perhaps somethig along an Illustrator Lite? I have tried Stone Design's products, but still think MacDraw is what i need.
Greg, I can relate. I've never been able to make Illustrator CS work the way I'd like it to. To me it just doesn't feel natural, instead just the opposite really.
Have you had any luck with any alternative programs? Fireworks, etc?
CS was a terrible release and what was worse, there was not one single update during it's entire release. Then came CS2, which I am happy to say is much, much more stable. I hope CS3 carries on, I am a bit worried because Adobe now has to recompile for the new OSX on Intel architecture.
"I don't recall that Flash allows one to draw vector images. I could be wrong. "
Dude, that's just the core of the program. Vector animation.
O___o
Jim Clements is right - Illustrator 8 was the ultimate. I'm using CS2 now - and it's perfectly stable, but it does get in the way. Don't like the tool palettes, and it generally does just get in your way.
But there's nothing else out there up to the standard under OS X, and going back to Classic is pretty much impossible now.
"Freehand rocks."
Correction. It *did* rock. Now it's pretty much dead. Thanks MacroAdobeMegaCorpInc!
In fact, Adobe products rocked too. Circa version 7. Once apps get into the double-digit releases, they've seen better days.
Adobe applications on Windows are awful. I have had an Adobe application (ImageReady, Photoshop, Illustrator) crash on this Dell Optiplex GX620 (2GB RAM) I have to use at my full-time job, 28 times since February 28th, 2006. Yes I keep track; I take a screenshot of the crashed application's error message each and every time there is a crash. I wanted undisputable evidence that Macs, are indeed, better (more stable) than Windows-based PCs, especially for design.
I have been tracking every Windows application that crashes, everyday, since November of 2005. Since November 29th, an application has crashed 105 times on this Dell running Windows. Of the 105 crashes, 56 of them have been Illustrator, ImageReady, or Photoshop. Here is a quick breakdown of my Adobe crashes thus far:
27 Photoshop
13 ImageReady
16 Illustrator
In all fairness to Photoshop, I do use it more frequently than the others.
I do not think that it is Adobe that is the problem; I think it is the fact that Windows is outdated, and awful at memory management. Why do I say this? My reason is simple, I run the same exact applications on my Mac (Dual G5 2.7 w/2GB RAM) and I have NEVER had an Adobe application crash, EVER, for as long as I can remember. I am currently running 10.4.4. on my Mac at home.
If I wasn't broke, I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the complaints above are coming from Windows users. I plan on posting a “Windoesn’t Gallery” of shame on my Web site, but I am way too busy with client work (at home on my Mac) to post the gallery right now. People argue that PCs are faster than Macs; even if that was true, any speed advantage (if any?) is lost entirely to the amount of time spent restarting applications that crash so often on Windows-based PCs.
Oh come on Photoshop is even more bloated, but it's market is professionals, and so people want all the freakin features. What's freehand like?
I can't wait for Adobe to merge Illustraitor and Freehand into one new product. Maybe they'll call it "Adobe Frustrater".
(footnote: I stole that pun from somewhere)
crashes 3 or 4 times a day - on windows. almost crashes another 10 times.
I've been using the Mac version since 1.0. Like Star Trek movies, the even numbered versions are mostly better. Version 8 was the best balance of features and performance. CS2 is the best of the post-8 versions. I have been using it since it was available and it has only crashed a few times that I can recall. I was trying to open a corrupt file or something.
It would be great if version 8 ran natively in OS X. But there are a couple of features of CS2 that I like a lot: Object styles and OpenType support. I also like being able to place Photoshop files directly.