So why does ImageReady suck so much ass?

Kosmo

Web graphics tool my ass! Imageready has got to be the most useless tool I have ever met in my long journeys, and it's Adobe's only option for web graphics tool (yes yes, aside of the crown king Fireworks now). Can you imagine, you can't even create a simple border rectangle, you have to create two rectagles and place them atop of each other, the top rectagle being 1px smaller from each side. Has anyone ever actually used IR? Or is it just a fad? Why does it exist? I could do better job by hand thatn with that peace of shit. Sorry if there are some IR fanatics here, but if you are, you are a moron. There, I guess that was rant worth 400€ that I had to shell to get Fireworks 8 just because Adobe is incapable of producing a simple web graphics package.

Bergamot

1. It's made by Adobe
2. It isn't Photoshop or Indesign

QED

Bergamot

I should probably qualify that.

Indesign and Photoshop aren't all that great either; they're just the best app in their class by a long shot. I'm a Photoshop nut, but If someone made a clone that was actually well-designed, I'd switch over in about 10 seconds.

Imageready was used for two things, mainly: slicing images and making animated GIFs. Nobody does either of those things anymore, so yeah it is basically useless. It's a relic from the first web bubble; that it's even around is proof of just how slowly things work over at Adobe. I mean, shit, even Microsoft has finally retired Frontpage.

adrian.

ha, my friend who does pixel graphics, makes £££ off using imageready. he just called, he wants a fight... :)

DigitaLink

I just use The GIMP. It's not photoshop, but does about everything I need it to.

Bergamot

I've gone over to GIMP a few times over the years, mostly out of an "ARRRRGH @#%$& Photoshop" epiphany and a desire not to spend $300 every few years.

I always come back. Photoshop is badly designed; the GIMP is the absence of design. Anything good it has, it borrowed from Photoshop. If I wanted a free version of Photoshop, and didn't use it much, the GIMP would be perfect. As it is, I want something better than Photoshop, and wouldn't mind paying for it, and the GIMP doesn't deliver. Neither do Gimpshop or Paintshop.

I'd love for Adobe to hire some awesome interaction designers and do an Office 12-style "extreme makeover" on all their major apps. Given Adobe's slow response time, their general disdain for customer opinion, and their paranoia of pissing off their existing customer base*, I really don't see it as an option.

*I have no idea how they manage to combine those last two, but somehow they do...

lech

In all my days, I've only used IR once, after that I realized what a mistake that was so I pretty much forgot about even using it. Most if not all the options you need to output even the most compressed jpeg/png/gif are always available from within PS anyway and IR just seems to make things look worse and bloat the filesize. If anything should happen, they should just pull it or integrate it's key features (whatever ones that may be) into PS and leave it as that. I do recall that the reason the applications were split, was because back in the day, hardly any consumer machines could run both at the same time so it made sense a decade ago to have them split. Personally, if I need crunchy filesizes, I'll use something else.

papoo

Microsoft retired Frontpage, but they are working on a WYSIWYG that looks suspiciously like a replica of Dreamweaver in so many ways.

Bergamot

Microsoft retired Frontpage, but they are working on a WYSIWYG that looks suspiciously like a replica of Dreamweaver in so many ways.

True, but at least they avoid the trap of piling minor features onto a decade-old web design program, which is what happened to IR.

I don't claim to be an expert in their "expression" line of products (I briefly skimmed the site about a month ago), but it looks like they're attempting to fight Adobe head-on, which should be fun to watch. Nobody would be happier than me to see some real competition in the creative app space.

lech

Microsoft didn't necessarily "retire" frontpage, they simply move it from one line to another. If you look closely, it's now being offered up in it's own little visual studio package. So in that case, it's just gone under the knife to become something else.

Bergamot

Microsoft didn't necessarily "retire" frontpage, they simply move it from one line to another. If you look closely, it's now being offered up in it's own little visual studio package. So in that case, it's just gone under the knife to become something else.

I was, and still am, unclear whether that new visual studio thing is just rebranded frontpage (which would be weird, since frontpage was absolutely useless for writing ASP.NET pages) or something new.

EDIT: This guy claims that it's the latter:

"The short answer is that once we ship SharePoint Designer and Expression Web Designer, we will eventually discontinue FrontPage."

NOTE: I have no idea what a "SharePoint" is, or why I'd want to design one, but the Expression Web Designer certainly seems to be heading in the right direction, at least to the extent that a WYSIWYG editor possibly can.

Felipe

Gimpshop has the price and licence of Gimp but the interface of Photoshop. Well, not so bad.

Bergamot

Yeah, but the money I spent on Photoshop is a sunk cost; I can use this copy of Photoshop CS for as long as I want and not pay Adobe another dime.

Kosmo

Since I produce alot of graphics my tools have to be varied, but there isn't a single tool that I can do the whole pipeline in. I use Photoshop, Painter, SketchBook and Fireworks, and that is just the 2D pipeline. When you add 3D you have to add two more programs. I love each program in what they do, they do their own thing very well, but IR just doesn't do anything, not well nor othervice. And especially now when Adobe acquired a company that does web developer tools a million times better than them, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't jut either sink IR completely, or just replace it with Fireworks. My last web design for my own site I did with Illustrator, because it has the very basic vector graphics tools that a web graphics package needs, pure and simple.

Bergamot

Yeah, I tend to be in the "paper and pencil" school of web design, with the small caveat that I'm faster in Photoshop than I am with a pencil and paper, so I use that.

Yes, theoretically IR should have been killed about five years ago. Realistically, it's free with Photoshop, the start menu icon and wasted hard disk space can be reclaimed pretty quickly, and the only negative factor it has on me is taking up space in the Photoshop toolbar and menu.

At the same time, there's an IR team at Adobe that has to go to work every day and code an app that nobody cares about; better to keep them busy with some stupid little project than to fire them and need them back later. There's a manager in charge of that team, who would be faced with either a demotion or layoff if it gets cut, and is busy pulling strings to keep it alive. The people in charge at the top have no more idea what ImageReady is supposed to do than we do, but they know it's something web-related and "hey that internet thing is pretty big".

So, I mean, I *do* know why it's still around; I just don't like the implications.

lech

Yes, theoretically IR should have been killed about five years ago. Realistically, it's free with Photoshop, the start menu icon and wasted hard disk space can be reclaimed pretty quickly, and the only negative factor it has on me is taking up space in the Photoshop toolbar and menu.

Well, unless you're really sapped for disk space, that extra 10-50mb shouldn't make that much of a difference. Yeah it's worthless, that's a given, but with 60+gb free in most cases it hardly makes much of a difference. But I still agree that in any future versions, they should just do away with it if they haven't already. In either case, I haven't had the need to upgrade beyond ps6 still :P

giginger

Bergamot: SharePoint is Microsofts intranet page software type thing. That's the best way I can describe it. I suppose it's a CMS of sorts.
At least that's my understanding.

Kosmo

In my understanding, there is no separate IR team, it's all a big happy Photoshop team that is part of the Creative suite team that has it's managers that handle all (no separate manager for IR). I attended the Finnish launch of CS2, I talked with Adobe staffers and they mentioned that CS2 is ment to be a pipeline, and as is, IR has very little or no part at all in the general pipeline. It just hangs around for the sake of hanging around.

leason

I'm also a huge photoshop fan. The last time I used IR though was to create an animated gif (the hover image for big links on http://www.eestables.com). I did it because you can't use flash files for background images in CSS files and I wanted something a bit more fun than a static image. Plus it was a fun experiement. If you can get the hang of popping back and forth between PS and IR (the layers can get weird) then its the easiest way to create animated gifs. -Lee

DigitaLink

I'm kind of fond of the way GIMP does animation ... just put the duration and transition info right in the layer palette and whammo ... While I agree with most that GIMP's interface well ... sucks ... I've learned to live with it, and have learned all the keyboard shortcuts for my most used tools. Makes it easier to forgive the GUI when you don't use all of it all the time. I've seen people marvel at how quick I can do a touchup and edit on a photo while barely taking my hands from the keyboard. At the same time, I've NEVER been a fan of the layout of Photoshop either. Used to love Paint Shop Pro. Of course, my other motives for GIMP are that it's cross-platform. I support all cross-platform (preferably open source) apps I can. That way I can use the same tools at home in linux as I do at work in Windows. Only holdout now is my web editor. I'm generally using Dreamweaver at work and always use Quanta+ at home. If I could just get Quanta to run in Windows ...

ADM

I love Photoshop, I think it's well done except for the output to web algorithm they use. Sucky. I've tried Gimp but the interface and way things are done are just not what I'm looking for. Haven't tried Gimpshop though, might give it a shot.