Anyone using Adobe’s Creative Cloud? What are your thoughts? Using/Used Dreamweaver CS6? Share what you think…
I am considering upgrading and wanted some feedback from users.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of having to stay an Adobe member, log in and pay monthly to keep using their applications, but maybe that’s just me. I’m not familiar with the whole range of services offered by the cloud, but I’ not sure I really care. You don’t really need many tools to engage in web design, and there are free versions of every tool you need, so I’m wondering why I even use Ps and the like … but I do. I’ve moved away from Dw, though. There are lots of nice code editors around, some much simpler than Dw, which I’m quite enjoying right now.
Thanks for sharing Ralph. What are a few of the alternative tools that you are using, if you don’t mind sharing?
I’ve gone through quite a few code editors of late, such as Sublime Text 2, TextMate and Coda2, but have settled on Coda for now. The last two are just for Mac, though. For FTP I like to use Transmit. It works really well and is very sleek (again for Mac, though).
I do use Illustrator and Photoshop a lot, but there are decent alternatives to these, such as InkScape and Gimp.
I don’t use many other tools on a regular basis.
As ralph said, there are loads of alternatives; I’d stick with Adobe for the creative products like Illustrator, Photoshop etc. (my personal opinion, there are others; I prefer commercial products on the whole).
But to answer your question specifically; about Creative Cloud.
Adobe’s full suite is expensive, and is highly pirated (I think CC is a measure to combat this).
Anyway, Creative Cloud gives a lower cost of entry to their products. So if you want to use Adobe’s products but can’t afford the full license fee’s, you can pay a monthly license fee to use their products. You can license one product, several or all of them through Creative Cloud, so you can elect for the products you will use or the whole suite.
Which makes them more accessible to those who are starting out; which is a good thing. That said, it would be more expensive long term to use Creative Cloud so I’d probably recommend buying the products outright as soon as you can justify it.
One other thing, I don’t think you are locked in I’m sure I saw rolling (month by month) and annual contracts on their site when they launched it.