Adobe Dreams (and What I Replaced Adobe Software With)

I’ve managed to move entirely away from using Adobe software but this recent video from Adobe looks incredibly enticing. It’s basically a great big bunch of ideas for things that could be possible in the future. They’ve focused on Microsoft technology (hence the XBox) but the continuous move towards using tablets for content creation is awesome and I’m looking forward to seeing some of these things turn into reality (and get released on Apple products :)).

Replacing Adobe

For those interested I have made the following the following to replace:

• Photoshop – I use a combination of Acorn and Pixelmator. I tend to go for Acorn more often, but Pixelmator has some nice filters that I like to use occasionally.
• Dreamweaver – I don’t use a wysiwyg web design tool, but I do still do web design, and my text editors of choice are Netbeans and Brackets (with a side order of Codekit).
• Fireworks – I’m a big fan of Sketch and use it most days now. It works great for both interface design and icon design.
• Illustrator – I don’t do much illustration these days but when I do I generally use Sketch for that as well.
• Premiere – this might seem like a strange one but I like to use Screenflow for my basic video editing needs. It’s constantly being improved and is now quite a powerful app – and shouldn’t be limited to screencasts IMO.
• After Effects – when Screenflow isn’t powerful enough then I use Apple Motion. It’s awesome, especially seeing as it’s so cheap.

A lot of these apps have fewer features than the related Adobe app, but for what I need they are perfect. They’re simple and they do what I need.