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Consuming the Adobe Creative Cloud

I  have been using Adobe products for over 20 years.  For many years, I was on the yearly upgrade cycle and, even as a previous purchaser, the upgrade fees for the Adobe creative suites easily cost over $600-800 USD per year.  That was quite a hit for a young author and designer fresh out of graduate school, but if you wanted to play with the big boys, you needed big boy toys, and Adobe is, and has always been, the web and authoring standard.

Over the last few years, with the churn in the business from a purchase model to a renting model at Adobe, I’ve patiently waited on the sidelines with my hardbox copy of the Adobe CS4 still in everyday use — about three generations behind the leading curve — and CS4 has served me well.  The new Adobe “upgrades” have seemed incremental and confused, and I was happy to keep skating along with Photoshop and Dreamweaver CS4 until two things happened.

First, I purchased a new MacBook Air that had plenty of room to install a ton of new software and, second, Adobe announced the end of boxed editions and were going rogue and “online subscription only” from here on out using a monthly and yearly for-pay model.  Two days ago, I signed up for the new “Adobe Creative Cloud” and I am totally thrilled with the decision.

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Jumping on the Apple TV Bandwagon

Yes, I’m late to the Apple TV bandwagon.  I thought I’d wait out my wanderlust temptation to try the “black box” edition of Apple TV and leap on the concept when it was more fully realized as an embedded meme in an actual Apple TV that included the actual TV, but like losing patience for the phantom iPhone 5S to appear, I decided to give in to my purchase envy and shell out the $99.00USD for the shiny cube.

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The Review: Paying for Google Play Music All Access

I have not been been much of a fan of Google’s play into music — but today, I think I might just change my mind with my new “Google Play Music All Access” subscription.  The new service is an odd dog, to be sure, but it seems to be worth both its bark and its bite so far.

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The New Yorker for iPad Review

I finally bit the bone and bought a year subscription to The New Yorker on my iPad 2.  I resisted the purchase for so long because the weekly magazine is pricey and because getting magazines to work on an iOS device was an expensive hit-or-miss adventure that usually entailed hours of fiddling and re-starting and re-installing just to get a new issue to load.

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Bye Bye Pandora and iTunes: The Spotify Review

I signed up for Spotify on Friday, and after only a few days of use, I’m ready to forsake my years with Pandora and iTunes.  Spotify covers those music services with ease and then beats them in the belly of the very beast in which they long to live: Customizability and Variety. With the $10.00USD a month Premium version of Spotify, I can stream high bit rate music and download 3,333 songs each to three separate portable devices like an iPad or an iPhone for non-streaming, offline, listening.  The Spotify library has more than 15,000,000 songs and using Spotify makes me feel as I did when I was using Rhapsody before I had to give up that music service in my move to Mac computers.

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When the New York Times Tells You Sunday Means Saturday and Sunday

If there’s anything I love in the world of print journalism, it’s the Sunday New York Times. There are so many sections exploding with glorious information waiting to be devoured, from the Magazine to the special fashion inserts. This is precisely why, when I saw a New York Times sale booth a few weeks ago with lovely tote bags being offered for subscribers that I felt that I had to bite. I knew exactly what I wanted — the Sunday New York Times.

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Why I Love Indiespensable

As a general rule, I enjoy the feeling of being included in something special — whether that something is a club or a membership of some sort. Moreover, I like the notion that I could possibly be a member of something more exclusive for any reason — whether it is because I have opted into early or through my own efforts. This is why, for example, I keep paying the annual Pearl Jam Ten Club membership fee — being a member since September of 2002 gives me access to significantly better tickets than someone who may have joined this year.

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