A Ramble About Adobe CC
The other day, on a whim, I decided to try out Adobe Creative Cloud. For a while now, all of Adobe’s products have been subscription-based, with a lot of cloud stuff going on. The idea is that it’s all online and you can access it anywhere. Also allows Adobe to offer advice every five seconds. I’ve considered trying out Adobe CC for a while, but I never got around to testing the free trial.
So, uh, I tried the free trial. And I wasn’t impressed.
First things first, the trial requires a card.
You can’t get the free trial unless you enter in your card. You get 7 days of free trial and have to cancel manually yourself before those days are up. I have never liked this practice. While I understand not wanting free loaders, the fact that YOU have to cancel is a scummy way to make extra money off the forgetful.
That being said, when I entered my card, Adobe didn’t accept it anyway. Didn’t accept my other card either. That’s super weird because, well, I use these cards without any problems elsewhere. So I had to turn to support, and they just gave me a download link. I guess that works.
So I tried Creative Cloud.
I only really tried a handful of programs. Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, the three programs I most often use in CS6. To try them, I had to download and install Creative Cloud, then download and install the trial versions of these programs. The downloads themselves were fine, but Creative Cloud kept on insisting I had to update Acrobat. Which I don’t have installed.
Honestly though, there wasn’t much to see. Sure, there were new features and stuff, but nothing really revolutionary for me. Most of the cool features are kinda tied to the Creative Cloud. Things like constant updates, online cloud storage and… backups. Backups for Adobe programs only became a thing with Creative Cloud. Before then, if your program crashed, all your data would be gone forever. A backup feature is definitely useful, but, well, I feel like it’s a little too late. Especially since Corel programs have had backup features for years.
Creative Cloud also has a bunch of other features, like stock images and fonts. These are all premium services though that you have to pay for. Of course, you can get these features included in the bigger monthly subscription packs. Which is great because Adobe stock photos on their own feel weirdly expensive, and buying individual fonts REALLY adds up fast.
All for something that loaded slower than CS6
At the end of the day though, these programs all loaded more slowly than what I already had. There was no significant performance boost, and I found that, somehow, InDesign CC ran noticeably slower than InDesign CS6. There was also stuff running constantly in the background. Every time I ran a program, Creative Cloud ran alongside it, as well as an updater and stuff like that. This probably is why these programs took far longer to load than their CS6 equivalents.
I decided that I didn’t need to use all 7 days of my free trial. Wanting to be cautious, I checked that my card wasn’t connected and that I wouldn’t be paying for anything, then set about uninstalling Creative Cloud.
But I couldn’t uninstall it.
First though, I had to uninstall the three programs I downloaded. That wasn’t too bad, but I would have liked to uninstall Creative Cloud and its programs all in one go. However, even after I uninstalled Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator, Creative Cloud still wouldn’t let me uninstall. It insisted that I had Acrobat Pro installed, despite, well, not having it installed.
In the end, I had to resort to downloading the Adobe Cleaner program to uninstall Creative Cloud for me. This tool didn’t even have an actual menu, it just ran in Command Prompt, which is… kinda sad, to be honest. Like, they couldn’t even be bothered to give us a proper user interface. Thankfully though, the cleaner tool worked and I was finally rid of Creative Cloud.
The way I see it? Creative Cloud is probably worth it for bigger companies. They can happily support the always-online side of things, and the costs scale better depending on number of users. But I’m perfectly happy with my Creative Suite 6, which runs fine.