I know there are a lot of designers on the board, so just wanted to get your opinions on Adobe Creative Cloud & CS6. I'm a complete novice myself, so my opinion is probably ill-informed. But I'm disappointed by this shift from owning your software to renting your software. As for physical copies of CS6, it now appears to be further tiered than it was in the past, meaning several hundred dollars more to get Dreamweaver included in the package. Several years back I was able to get the "Student/Teacher" CS4 or 5 for about $300, but now I'm looking at $600 - or just get DW alone for $150. I'm just beginning to learn HTML/CSS coding and was thinking of buying a laptop and CS6. But now I'm rethinking the upgrade and just sticking with whatever CS edition I'm currently using. Any advice for a coding newb?
From experience, if you really want to learn coding/programming don't rely on programs like Dreamweaver to start out. Open up a simple text editor that will let you save in .html and other extensions; write code in there. As for Adobe's new Cloud based system, don't worry someone will figure a way around it...
Check out Adube muse, it's a subscription software that is 15 bucks a month. You basically design a website like you were working in indesign, no coding needed. You can make some beautiful sites, probably more so than working with html code.
The code that Dreamweaver writes is generally garbage. Get a copy of Coda for writing code, and Espresso for writing CSS. That's all I use. As far as Creative Cloud goes, I'm ALL for it. If you're upgrading annually like many professionals already are, the cost is significantly lower than it ever was. And for occasional users or students, they offer student pricing that's lower than the standard subscription price, and they offer upgrade pricing if you're an existing license holder. If you have a license for CS3 through CS5.5, you can get 40% off, and if you're a CS6 license holder you can get 60% off. Also, a lot of people think that because it's called Creative Cloud that it doesn't live on your machine locally. That's incorrect. It stays on your computer just like it always did, and it runs a tiny background application that checks in online every day to make sure you're a registered user. It's no different than what Steam does with games if you're familiar with that platform.
I haven't actually used Dreamweaver yet - I'm currently just taking my first steps with Code Academy. I was planning on using DW because I already have a version of it (albeit old). But based on the responses and some PMs I'm going to look into Coda, etc. Thanks for the advice! As for the Cloud, I can see that it would be beneficial for professionals. But for someone like me, even with the "student" discount (I'm not a student, I just work at a university), it comes out to $240 (or $360 w previous CS discount, but no "student" discount), and unfortunately you DON'T get to keep the software if you don't renew your membership. You keep your files, but the software is never yours. That's my issue with the Cloud (not just Adobe, but in general). Otherwise it'd be a good deal. But I probably wouldn't get $240 worth of use out of it in a year's time. BUT - that's all moot now that I know to look to other programs once I get to the point where I'll be doing this outside of the Code Academy tutorial. Thanks for the responses and suggestions!
Adobe announced today that they're offering Photoshop CC with Lightroom for $9.99 a month for existing Photoshop owners who have CS3 or higher. Sounds like a good deal to me!
