Adobe CS or something else?
I was notified in Twitter that my friend Rikard Nilsson was installing Adobe CS 5.5.
![Rikard tweets](/img/rikard_adobe.png)
My response to that was of course “Why?” and he then stated he was doing it just because he has always done it.
I have myself as well just followed the stream, because I thought I needed CS as well (or whatever it was named before it was CS). But one time I asked myself what I was doing. Is it worth the money or should one do something else?
I have, to be fair, never used the advanced features in the Adobe series. I have never had any need for specific fancy Photoshop plugins for example. What I have used during the years are simple Photoshop editing and then more and more Illustrator work.
And for that I today use two other tools: Graphics Converter and OmniGraffle. They are not for free. Graphics Converter is €34.95 and OmniGraffle is $99.99. But much cheaper than the CS package.
Yes, I do have the older CS package installed, and yes, I do open some files in Illustrator still when I really need to edit some more advanced illustrator things. But I think that is fine. I do not need the newest shiny version, and the old license I have is still ok to use.
I think my message to Rikard and others are, yes, you might need the CS package, but do not just ignore for example these two great software packages. I can live without CS, but I can not live without these two.