Adobe licensing and upgrade paths still suck
I upgraded to Leopard at home, which is awesome, because it’s a really great OS. Well, so was Tiger, and to be honest there aren’t a lot of really significant improvements, but lots of little ones that are nice. Definitely the new Finder is a lot more useful (I’ve stopped using PathFinder, sorry guys) and the speed of Spotlight is much improved (making Google Desktop Search a lot less critical). But, some software isn’t compatible, as to be expected. The worst bit is that you can no longer install the older Adobe apps.
You see, I own a copy of the ‘Adobe Design Collection’, which is basically what they called Creative Suite 1 before officially rebranding it that way. I use it occasionally (Illustrator mostly, but sometimes PhotoShop too.) I’m pretty happy with the older versions of the apps in it, but after upgrading to Leopard (and getting a new Intel Mac), it wouldn’t install and I decided to flip for an upgrade to the latest version, CS3, for $400. Pretty steep given my usage pattern, but heck, it’s pretty good software and I would like to be able to use it when I want to.
Some background: the Adobe Design Collection has all the exact same software as CS1 (PhotoShop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2, and Acrobat Pro 5). It cost me $900 when I bought it. Since it has the exact same software as CS1, I thought the upgrade path would be the same. However, there is apparently two big differences between the ADC and CS1: 1. I have serial numbers for each individual product, instead of just one for the suite as a whole and 2. that means I can’t upgrade as if I had CS1, even though I own licenses for all the same versions of the apps. This really sucks, and I didn’t know that, and I didn’t figure it out until I got to the step in the installer (near the very end, 40 minutes in, after it’s actually installed) that my serial number(s) wouldn’t work. Grrr. I called Adobe sales and it went something like this: Read more »