I was notified in Twitter that my friend Rikard Nilsson was installing Adobe CS 5.5.
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.