The Farmstead

So, for several reasons including Adobe's increasing idiocy in re their pricing and distribution model and also the vastly greater ease of getting ahold of them, I'm experimenting with replacing my two biggest Adobe software workhorses with open source alternatives.

So far, this involves one day per app of utter, screaming frustration while mashing buttons and googling documentation and cursing wildly, and a second day where everything starts to make sense and work nicely and I stop wanting to kill the developers with the power of my mind. That's actually a pretty good ratio.

Dreamweaver -> Aptana Studio 3: Aptana is even more powerful than Dreamweaver, in a lot of ways, and incorporates a lot more OS and collaborative development tools like git. Of course, this means it's even more confusing to look at. Once I'd spent the one frustrated and screaming day, though, I found the bits I needed, went and started up my native installation of Apache AGAIN (fuck you so very much, Apple, for turning that off with every OS upgrade and not even giving me a freaking preference pane to turn it on with any more, and did I mention the part about changing the default root folder, seriously, fuck you) and everything worked nicely. Sites, or now Projects, are defined, with ftp upload/download settings in place, I found a black-on-white code color theme (handily named "Dreamweaver" for code immigrants) and the design view, or now Preview, is working smoothly. I like the real-time feedback of the Console pane, too, which gives me command-line reflections of whatever I'm doing when connected to the remote sites. Having the remote site view be its own tab is also really handy.

Photoshop -> Gimp: Now, I actually started out with Gimp many years ago, so I thought this acclimation would go faster. Ahahaha, it is to be laughing. Nope, still one day of utter, screaming frustration and banging on the desk and asking thin air why anyone would ever think that defaulting the Move tool to grab whatever it hovers on instead of the active layer was a good idea. Once I got to day two, though, I found my tools again, remembered where the settings are and to check them the first time, and have decided that I may actually like Gimp's workspace layout better than Photoshop's. Photoshop has resorted to stacking tools on top of each other, and I found that more than a bit annoying. Gimp spreads them out over a lot of different panes, which can be very frustrating at first, but I still like being able to see all my stuff better than having it hidden in a button stack. At any rate, I successfully designed an ebook cover, which involved a lot of layers and text and messing around with growing and shrinking things and tinkering with colors and fonts; it all worked, and I have a cover I'm satisfied with, which seems like a good indicator.

General conclusion: This will work, but you need to be the kind of person who's willing to bang on it and google the forums and, in the final analysis, just click on things until you start getting the hang of it. I strongly recommend starting with a non-vital scratch project, each time, so you don't worry about destroying important work and can try, and erase, and swear at gods and devs as much as necessary.

The only thing I can say about Inkscape is that clicking blindly on stuff until the right thing happens works just as well as it does in Illustrator. I never used Indesign, so someone else will have to review Scribus, but I have a copy on hand at least, should I ever need it. I raise a toast to Adobe putting themselves out of most of their business. *clinks glasses all around*