Thread by @metaning

Been doing #DTP for 26-odd years. Started with Quark Xpress 3.32 (AU$1900), and Photoshop 3.01 (AU$1200), bought Adobe GoLive 4 (~AU$4-500) & PS 6. CS1, & CS2. CS3 was the ruination of CS, with Dreamweaver & Fireworks clumsily replacing GoLive & Imageready, + Flash infection.

Nowdays, I’ve replaced InDesign, Photoshop and IIlustrator with @affinitybyserif Publisher, Photo and Designer, each for about AU$79.

Best description of Publisher, is “Frictionless”. You can be as rigidly process-oriented as you like, or you can also work quickly and loosely.

There a little relearning along the way, but even when you get the natural frustration at things being different, once you get the new methods, they’re just such comfortable apps to use.

And while I like to criticise Macromedia for Flash & Fireworks, Director remains the finest, and most empowering piece of software anyone has ever created for rich content creation.

I’ve used all sorts of media orchestration packages sine, and none of them ever came close.

And he real thing that Director had, was just how much of its event and interaction model was exposed through contextual palettes.

You’d select an object on the canvas, and EVERY interaction event that could apply to it would be in a dropdown in palette.

Then, for that event, EVERY action that could be performed in respose, was available in a connected dropmenu next to it in the palette.

Almost every other product attempting this sort of thing would drop you straight to scripting at this stage (eg LiveStage Pro).

You could do SUCH complicated stuff with zero code in Director.

That’s empowerment.