Things like this will just undermine the trust of regular users in open formats because "it doesn't work". And at this point it doesn't matter at all, who's to blame; a few years later the good ol' Adobe as we know it will sneak around the corner with a new proprietary format which is there to save the users from their horrible experience with this open crap.
Adobe just made snap.svg[1] last year. If they have a long-term plan to kill and supplant the format like you describe, then I guess somebody missed a memo.
2 years ago, and it's Dmitry Baranovsky's update to Raphäel.js rather than a big Adobe Project™ (which sacks off support for older browsers in favour of newer). And there's never been that much movement bar minor bugfixes for a long time. Not that there necessarily needs to be, it does what it does, but there doesn't seem to be any movement toward integrating closely with Adobe vector products (which would be useful) or seriously optimising (like, say, Greensock's really nice SVG animation stuff that's come out recently). Also IMO the two main competitors are better (SVG.js for simplicity & very nice plugins, Paper.js for complex stuff with amazing documentation). Note Paper.js is the successor to the Illustrator plugin Scriptographer, which was fantastic, but was killed by Adobe Illustrator updates - Adobe had something they could have used that worked really, really well, but didn't back it.
Snap is good, and useful, but it's not that useful, it's just a tiny library, and a bit of a wasted opportunity IMO. With fairly crap documentation beyond the basics. I would love it if there was movement on this, a better SVG workflow from Illustrator -> Web would make my life a lot less frustrating, but v0v it's Adobe and they either move at the speed of a geriatric snail or they stomp all over tools I find useful
Adobe has been pushing SVG and the tooling hard. Illustrator is great at SVG. If they want to kill it and replace it with a proprietary format, they're doing a fucking awful job.
I think that this is a symptom of Adobe’s de facto monopoly position; if there was a viable competitor who could keep Adobe honest it would probably be different.
Remember that it was actually Microsoft who created and pushed for the RTF format as a common interoperability file format for word processing documents. This was way back when Microsoft and its Microsoft Word™ was the newcomer against the established giants in the field of word processing: Word Perfect, WordStar, etc. Of course, when Microsoft Word gained popularity (through no direct advantage of its own – it was using its coupling with Microsoft Windows, which the competition was wary of), then Microsoft lost all interest in RTF standardization.
OTOH if your release testing process is so terrible you can't catch when some basic feature like SVG export isn't working, you're not in a position to do continuous, quick updates.
I could not help myself. We have had a nightmare dealing with the money extracting CC. Between their licensing and their use of Flash for their horrible UI. Upvoted.
Glad that Affinity Designer / Photo is coming into the fray to steal more Adobe share. Because it will make all the software better. If only it were cross platform, not just mac for now.
I am continually amazed by the guys at Serif. First, they are offering Designer at £29.99. Secondly, in spite of the trumpeted GPU preview updates in CC 2015, Affinity Designer just blows Illustrator away in rendering and moving around the document. It's really impressive and ends up being much more pleasant to work in.
Not to take anything away from the Serif guys, they’re doing a fantastic job, but most of the underlaying value of these software packages (Affinity Designer, Pixelmator, Sketch, iDraw, etc.) come from the strong frameworks in place on Apple’s platforms (i.e. CoreGraphics, Quartz, Metal, etc.). Moving to another platform would mean to either find replacements or having to roll their own, which they probably wouldn’t want to do. There is nothing bad about focus. I’d much rather have a platform-specific, focused tool that does a great job than having cross platform, half-assed set of barely decent tools like what Adobe does with their desktop apps.
Yeah I have had several problems working with .svg in illustrator, the biggest one being wacky arbatray resizing of the document bounds when I try to open and edit an .svg. I was forced to export off a master .ai file rather than re-edit native .svg, a pain in the arse!
The workaround I use is opening the .svg in a text editor and editing the properties manually, you can clear out a bunch of adobe auto generated garbage and get the file nice and small.
Of course, the real reason is to extract more revenue, reduce piracy, etc. At the very least Adobe offers the option to download an older version from CC.
But SaaS is a bleak future where we are completely at the mercy of such companies.
I was surprised that they do allow for downloading previous versions. Counts for something. But it actually hurts their argument for their new pricing model, because they really stressed how they can't keep supporting old versions while innovating.
And once everyone is on CC, they have no business reason to keep spending money on improvements.
Historically Adobe hasn't had a lot of competition for much of this software. But they were kept "honest" by the boxed software model, and the fact that they wanted people to re-buy the same software every few years.
If they failed to offer compelling new features, the older Adobe software would just continue to be used indefinitely (and they'd lose income). Same with MS Office (it competes with itself).
Now, with CC, you aren't paying for new versions and instead just paying for "basic" access to their software. So if they just bug fix and don't provide any substantive improvements for ten years, you're still stuck paying them $10/month or whatever. Only actual competition could change this equation, and there isn't much.
Several years ago, Adobe inexplicably took SVG out of the optimization-focused “Save for Web…” modal, requiring users to revert to the existing “Export…” functionality with fewer optimization options.
The reason they gave was, in effect, “well, the internet is faster now, so you don’t need to optimize your SVGs.”
What I've always found intriguing about Adobe, is the absence of public betas for its main softwares. How do they manage to ship without large, real world usage ?
Especially since they now have a pretty straightforward beta seeding program available with Creative Cloud subscriptions. Pretty sure a public beta would have caught the SVG issue.
NEVER switch completely to a x.0 Adobe CS/CC release.
ALWAYS wait for the x.0.1 and keep your prior versions handy.
The only problem with this update is Adobe forgot how bad they are at x.0 releases, defaulted to deleting prior versions, and made it cumbersome to just say no.
Also new to 2015, god forbid you lose internet for 2 seconds because the Creative Cloud menu instantly takes over your screen to complain. Every time. So far, it really doesn't feel like software that is moving forward. I totally agree: 4-6 weeks to restore functionality you broke doesn't fly on a SaaS model.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 60.9 ms ] thread[1] http://snapsvg.io/
Snap is good, and useful, but it's not that useful, it's just a tiny library, and a bit of a wasted opportunity IMO. With fairly crap documentation beyond the basics. I would love it if there was movement on this, a better SVG workflow from Illustrator -> Web would make my life a lot less frustrating, but v0v it's Adobe and they either move at the speed of a geriatric snail or they stomp all over tools I find useful
Adobe has been pushing SVG and the tooling hard. Illustrator is great at SVG. If they want to kill it and replace it with a proprietary format, they're doing a fucking awful job.
Remember that it was actually Microsoft who created and pushed for the RTF format as a common interoperability file format for word processing documents. This was way back when Microsoft and its Microsoft Word™ was the newcomer against the established giants in the field of word processing: Word Perfect, WordStar, etc. Of course, when Microsoft Word gained popularity (through no direct advantage of its own – it was using its coupling with Microsoft Windows, which the competition was wary of), then Microsoft lost all interest in RTF standardization.
The workaround I use is opening the .svg in a text editor and editing the properties manually, you can clear out a bunch of adobe auto generated garbage and get the file nice and small.
But SaaS is a bleak future where we are completely at the mercy of such companies.
Historically Adobe hasn't had a lot of competition for much of this software. But they were kept "honest" by the boxed software model, and the fact that they wanted people to re-buy the same software every few years.
If they failed to offer compelling new features, the older Adobe software would just continue to be used indefinitely (and they'd lose income). Same with MS Office (it competes with itself).
Now, with CC, you aren't paying for new versions and instead just paying for "basic" access to their software. So if they just bug fix and don't provide any substantive improvements for ten years, you're still stuck paying them $10/month or whatever. Only actual competition could change this equation, and there isn't much.
When I read that quote I thought for a second you might be parodying them, but that is actually what they said...
4-6 weeks is bonkers. It isn't like they're spending that time doing QA, as is self-evident by this issue.
The reason they gave was, in effect, “well, the internet is faster now, so you don’t need to optimize your SVGs.”
ALWAYS wait for the x.0.1 and keep your prior versions handy.
The only problem with this update is Adobe forgot how bad they are at x.0 releases, defaulted to deleting prior versions, and made it cumbersome to just say no.