You can knock 30% off the price of Lightroom 2 (upgrade or full unit) when purchasing it together with Photoshop CS4 (upgrade or full, standalone or in a Suite). You can also save 50% on popular plug-ins when buying them together with Photoshop. Check out the special offer page for full details. [Via]
For those of us that bought the upgrade to LR2 before the release of PS CS4, how about a retro upgrade deal for CS4?
Hi John. I’m writing with some commentary about the overall poor quality of code that Adobe seems to be shipping as of late. It’s a general trend that I’ve noticed across the Adobe product line, most recently on Photoshop Elements for the Macintosh. I recommended it today for the head of our company, who just converted to OSX, and I was amazed to learn that the Mac version 6 of Elements is a 1.27GB download (versus the 454MB Windows version 7).To put my opinion succinctly, that’s nuts! I’m a leftover NeXTStep/OpenStep programmer and Adobe fan from way back. At one time Adobe turned out tight, clever code, but that time seems to be tragically long past. There has never been a time in all of Apple’s various incarnations when Windows code in general was smaller than Mac code, given the historical much higher code reuse and library functionality on the Mac side. That has never been more true than with OSX. Why, then, is Adobe’s PSE code so large? I have to speculate that Adobe is basically writing a Windows emulation layer to increase their code commonality between platforms. As someone who has developed for both, I can say with certainty that’s a huge mistake. It causes three problems: monstrous size, bad platform interface support and many extra man-hours spent on code development and maintenance. Adobe apps on Macintosh never follow the platform standards anyway; they’re poorly behaved and don’t live up to the high standards set by the user interface. But what’s worse is that the number of man-hours you people are using to create an inferior product is totally unnecessary. A native product would be smaller, far faster to develop (have ya TRIED Interface Builder???) and cheaper for Adobe to ship and support. I would think that Scott Byers would know, given his historical involvement with OpenStep. I’m not exaggerating when I say that a small OSX development team of 2-3 people could probably run circles around a Windows team of ten times that. In fact, over the years I’ve run into several companies that have determined that for themselves. John, I’d be ashamed to ship the kind of code that you’re putting your name on. It’s bloated, slow (try using Reader versus Preview for another example), and the user interface is substandard. Even Microsoft doesn’t ship code that’s so poor; Office Mac is a decent product that follows the UI standards and isn’t nearly as large. It makes me sad to say that Adobe ships more bloated code than Microsoft. Please, John, take a step back and do some evaluation of Adobe’s current development practices. Thanks! – Dave Klingler
I agree William, before purchasing LR 2 I tried to find out if there were going to be any special offers / bundles but got no response at all so I had to just purchased it.
Now I am about to upgrade my Design Premium CS3 to CS4 and the only discounts I can find are for people with CS2 Suites and people who purchase PS CS4 and LR 2 together.
Add to that the fact that I live in Australia and cannot even download from the US store (as far as I can tell) and purchase at the much cheaper US prices. In this modern day when I can purchase all sorts of things from the US online why does Adobe force me to purchase in Australian dollars when no physical product is involoved? What difference does it make if I download a product to Australia or the USA?
As a faithfull user and purchaser of Adobe software for my Photographic business I do feel that Adobe could make my life alot easier and better rewarded by providing more consistent discounts based on loyalty to Adobe. For example, why reward CS2 Suite owners who compltely skipped purchasing CS3 suites but not similarly reward CS3 owners who spend more money with Adobe? Equally why make it impossible for LR 2 early adopters to get a discount and reward those that held off buying until PS CS4 was announced? Also why is there no disount for purchasers of LR 2 and Creative Suites that include PS CS4?
If Adobe really wants to encourage a loyal client base then why not reward the people that continually spend money with them and make the upgrade process as simple as possible rather than a time conusming and frustrating excercise?
Just noticed that you mention the LR discount is available to people buying suites so ignore that comment, but that still doesn’t help those that purchased LR 2 when it was released.
I also wanted to point out that while I have a few gripes related to upgrading my Adobe products I am still very happy with what I get from them and how the products are being continuously improved 🙂
Dave, we users of Adobe products on Windows are just as annoyed at the effects of Mac compatibility as you are of Windows compatibility. We too would like Adobe apps to follow OS UI standards. In this case, Windows UI standards: a modern file chooser, task dialogs, a standard window frame that’s forward-compatible (e.g. Aero Snaps in Windows 7, and multimon utilities today that hook into the title bar).
Then, too, there’s the money Adobe is spending to port from Carbon to Cocoa — that’s money that isn’t being spent to make the Windows product better. Look, Microsoft didn’t put up this roadblock — Apple did — so why are we Windows users paying for it?
Microsoft is an interesting example, because they treat Mac Office as a completely separate product line from Win Office. Different development team, different marketing team, they even report to a different division in the organizational tree (E&D rather than MBD). Read their blog sometime — they basically take the philosophy that they won’t port any code from Win Office until they’re convinced that it’ll be better than writing it from scratch.
Ultimately, it’s a difference in philosophy. Adobe believes that people buy computers to run Adobe software, not to run Adobe software on OS X or on Windows. And they’re probably right.