Extortion, pure and simple

Once upon a time, I started to get interested in graphics and design to support work that I was doing to produce material for the Traveller RPG. I started on the slippery slope with a scanner and a copy of Adobe Photoshop. I’ve a feeling it was version 4 or some-such. I also picked up Adobe Illustrator, which was used very heavily in producing graphics for the starship designs in the BITS book Power Projection. Over the years, I upgraded these, and I added a full copy of Adobe Acrobat to support PDF preparation, and for a while used Adobe Go-Live for web design (until it was killed off).

Adobe used to have a reasonably open upgrade policy; so long as you were within three versions or so of the current software release, you qualified for the upgrade price. As I was a more occasional user, I tended to upgrade every 3 years or so, which used to cost ~£400-£600 depending on what I updated and how long it had been since the last upgrade which tended to influence Adobe’s costs.

Eventually, I jumped to the Creative Studio to get access to Adobe InDesign as well, diving in at CS2. I played around with dropping Photoshop for first of all Acorn (really nice and I do use it) and then Pixelmator (never really had the time to play with this), but stuck with it - especially after I got some great actions for building planets. I could never find a replacement for Illustrator that I liked, and had ended up with CS because neither Swift Publisher or iCalamus had been robust enough for layout.

Jumped to CS4 because changes to OS X needed it, and then found myself upgrading  within eighteen months to CS5.5 because Adobe said that when CS6 was released CS4 would not be eligible to upgrade. A month after I did, they reversed the decision, and also added an option to buy CS5.5 and get CS6 in a few months time. Frankly, I was not impressed and felt that I’d been played as a fool.

Adobe then moved to the subscription system with Creative Cloud but I’ve never jumped. A single application costs £17 per month (so £200 per year) and the full  CC package costs around £500 per year. As a comparator, the entire Microsoft Office Suite (which I use a lot more - and I guess has a lot more users) is around £70 for the year. I can’t justify these costs, not for casual use. I’m not a business.

When OS X 10.11 El Capitan came out, parts of Illustrator broke (the eye-dropper tool produces regular crashes) with CS5.5. Now, I could upgrade to CS6 (but that’ll be somewhere in the £300-£500 range (based on previous checks) but there’s no guarantee that it will survive the next OS X update.

Instead, I picked up Serif’s Affinity Designer, a newly built from the ground drawing and design program which is seriously aiming to be an ‘Illustrator-killer’. It’s faster and more stable, and probably has 90% or more of the functions I could ever want. It’s also £40 with free updates through the Mac App Store. They’ve also released Affinity Photo, which is a Photoshop replacement. Both will read PS and AI files, and output PSD, EPS, PDF and all the rest. They also use the same file format. The price? £40.

What I’m most excited about is Affinity Publisher, as Serif have a good reputation for their DTP package. This is due next year. They’ve said the first release won’t generate Creative Studio compatible files, but it is on the route map. The price is also planned as £40.

I think that slowly, Adobe are going to lose me as a customer. It was only £500 every 2-3 years, but it’ll be zero, because they decided to price people like me out from their software. As it stands, I only need InDesign and Acrobat (and I can replace the latter easily).

18 November 2015

The Robocop Reboot

While I was preparing the badges for Furnace X  tonight, I watched the reboot of Robocop. I enjoyed it, but I think that it lost itself somewhere between trying to be a serious story about the use of robot weaponry, a story of relationship changes forced by Alex Murphy having a near full-body prosthetic fitted, and a crime action thriller. It was really disappointing that the female characters were reduced to ciphers; more could have been made of them. The technology, look and feel was excellent though. Recommended, somewhat reluctantly.

15 October 2015 

Initial Thoughts on iOS 9

I don’t do the public betas of iOS or OS X, as I prefer the guarantee of a better level of stability (although, it has to be said that Photos and iTunes under Yosemite are really good at causing a kernel panic through the NVIDIA graphics chip and taking my iMac out). As a result, I’ve been watching news and comments articles on iOS 9 with interest.

I finally got to try it today, as – surprisingly – I was able to download the installers on all on our iOS devices from about 90 minutes after the update went live. This is fantastic compared to previous launches when the servers have been so busy that it has taken me the best part of 24 hours to get the download.

Installation was smooth on our iPad 2, iPad mini, iPhone 5s and iPhone 6. The old iPad 1 is long past updates but fine for movies and some internet.

First impressions - the new system font, San Francisco, feels more rounded than Helvetica Nueue, but I like the style. In honesty, three hours in it feels the norm. The introduction of a ‘Back to App’ option when you drop to another app is great. The introduction of Ad Blockers seems great, but unfortunately can’t be used on the iPads as they aren’t 64 bit CPUs which the architecture is built around. The backlight adjustments for ambient light seem more aggressive. I’m not certain in the new app switcher screen, but I’m glad it lost the contacts material. It feels quicker, but this could be psychological.

Be interesting to see how this develops.

16 September 2015

Interstellar (potential spoilers)

I watched Christopher Nolan’s epic hard science fiction movie Interstellar over the weekend while Jill was ill and I wasn’t. Visually, it was awesome, but the story left me feeling underwhelmed.

Now, I’m not sure if I’m the right kind of person to be judging this as I probably understand more about the scientific jargon that they use in the film than Joe Average, but it was nothing about the science that was an issue. I think that it fell into the 2001 A Space Odyssey trap of loving itself just a little too much. Some of the key events seemed very semaphored and obvious, especially who was signalling to humanity, and the revelations of Dr. Mann’s world. Some of the backstory elements; for example, the chasing of the drone and the weird compass effects on the combine harvesters weren’t that well developed and seemed to be bolted onto the plot for exposition. I’m also not convinced about the entry into the black hole, but I’ll take John O’s recommendation and read Kip Thorne’s tie-in science book first before I have a final judgement on that.

One element I did like was the way that it used an analogy with the issues seen in the present-day USA with creationists rewriting text books to remove evolution, to a plot thread with the US government officially having the Apollo programme officially a successful propaganda exercise and that the moon landings never happened. The smugness of the young teacher spouting this off made me want to shout at the screen. I think you could make a really interesting film using this as a concept. The ideal vehicle for it would be the novel by Niven, Pournelle  & Flynn: Fallen Angels.

I enjoyed the film, and will happily watch it again, but I think it reached high, and fell short of the stars.

9 April 2015

Blast from the Past #ZX81

Blast from the past

 #ZX81 #fullerkeyboard #coding

Farewell, Sir Terry, 66 years is too short

It's strange how some things hit you. I've known that we will lose Sir Terry Pratchett prematurely since 2007, but wasn't expecting to hear the announcement today when I was driving home.

His books have always been a staple of my life since I started secondary school in 1983, when The Colour of Magic was first published. I can remember reading the adventures of Rincewind the Wizard with glee, and eagerly devouring the next book when it came out. A family tradition was born; every Christmas, my mother and father would always buy me the paperback of the latest Terry Pratchett, along with the annual Tolkien Calendar and probably a Satsuma and a Terry's Chocolate Orange.

At University, his books were my escape from examinations, and I tended to rip through the whole series (back when it was considerably shorter in the early nineties) as light relief and a touch of procrastination. His humour slowly shifted and became more subtle rather than slapstick, but I still found my sides splitting with laughter at unexpected moments.

Now I've children, my rate of reading has massively slowed, and I'm overdue a complete re-read of his books by several years. But the Christmas tradition continued, with a new book each year. Except now he's gone, and a little bit of my childhood with him.

Farewell, Sir Terry. You'll always be remembered through your books and the joy they have brought. But tonight, I will feel sad and raise a drink to you, as you pass into memory with a tall darkly hooded figure with a scythe, a horse, a strange twinkle of starlight in his eye sockets, and A LIKING FOR CAPITAL LETTERS.

12 March 2015

Happy New Year!

Just a quick post to wish you all a happy, prosperous and healthy New Year from the Mooney household, now we’re calming down from a complicated Christmas and New Year Period.

(You may still see a few posts appear in 2014, as I recover material from the archive that I never actually posted!).