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Posted on June 1st, 2009 by Tom Arah
Adobe rips off / the wraps on Catalyst
Two announcements from Adobe today.
First the bad news…
… and an average 10% hike in the price of CS4 suites and apps blamed on “currency fluctuations.”
It is true that the pound has fallen against the dollar since CS4 was launched as I pointed out in a previous post. However it has been rising steadily since and is now at a 7-month high.
More to the point the original UK price included a whopping 30% mark-up over the dollar pricing so to say that this rise seems unfair is an understatement. Especially as the main reason for the mark-up in the first place (as given to our very own Jon Honeyball) was precisely to avoid such fluctuations.
However I can’t see Adobe changing its mind so, if you know you’re going to be buying in the near future, it makes sense to do it before the price hike takes effect on July 1st.
On to brighter news and the announcement of the beta availability of Adobe Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder), Adobe Flash Catalyst and the open source Flex 4 framework, all now available from the Adobe Labs site.
The main interest here is the brand-new app, Flash Catalyst, previously codenamed “Thermo”.
Adobe is constantly pushing the benefits of Flash as a RIA platform but while the technology has long been there to produce the results, the authoring apps just didn’t do the platform justice. To turn that around Adobe first had to provide an IDE that would work for developers hence Flex Builder, but that effectively cut the designer out of the loop.
Which is where Flash Catalyst comes in. Catalyst is designed to act as a bridge letting designers produce the interface visually (starting with Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks) and then pass on the resulting Flex markup to the developer.
Sound familiar? Yes, it’s not just Microsoft that is playing catch-up with Adobe; Adobe is having to play catch up with Microsoft too. It’s another example of Flash/Flex/MXML and Expression/Silverlight/XAML shamelessly copying each other.
Tags: adobe, digital design, Flash, flash catalyst, silverlight
Posted in: Real World Computing, Software
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6 Responses to “ Adobe rips off / the wraps on Catalyst ”
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June 2nd, 2009 at 7:33 am
No wonder people download via torrents when Adobe tries to rip off Britain, well Adobe people are ripping you off how do you like that.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:26 am
Having just shelled out on the execrable Fireworks CS4 for Windows, I have to say that there’s a good chance we won’t be buying another Adobe product for as long as we can avoid it.
Lots of things are broken in their software, it’s buggy, often slow, and extremely expensive. All I can say is that this must be a good time to be a rival. We have the MS Expression suite, and while it does do some things well, it’s still not quite there… but another version along and I feel it could be an excellent, and much cheaper, alternative.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:32 am
Exchange rates are just an excuse. If that was truly the reason why would Adobe prevent UK customers from downloading from the USA website and paying in dollars? If you are a UK customer you have to go to the UK website and pay in pounds.
The fact is they are charging higher prices in the UK because they can. They add insult to injury by lying about the reason for it.
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:22 am
Couldn’t agree more with Mr Adobe. I don’t blame a single person for downloading Adobe Software via Torrents just because they can. Granted, if you can’t afford it, you shouldn’t use it, but it’s so clearly obvious that this country is being ripped off right, left and centre! Power to the people.
Personally, I wouldn’t use their software… I won’t even use the free reader software out of principle. They can cram it up their adobes.
June 4th, 2009 at 9:42 am
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June 15th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I got lucky in 2007, I was in New York for a week and picked up a copy of Adobe CS3 Web Premium whilst I was there, saving a not inconsiderable amount of money in the process.
I’m not planning on upgrading to CS4 any time soon – the upgrade cost just doesn’t justify it for me. And can someone explain to me why it should cost *more* to be able to download it direct from Adobe, as opposed to purchasing a DVD-ROM of it?
That said, I’m not going to go torrent CS4 – CS3 works just fine for me right now. Maybe by the time CS5 rolls around they’ll have something that I actually want to upgrade to, and will have gotten a clue about upgrade pricing.
What really saddens me? I was invited to take an online survey in late 2007 by Adobe, where they are getting feedback on possible upgrade pricing for CS4 – at the time, that gave me hope that they might be listening to customers. But as it turned out, it looks like they took that feedback and promptly binned it…