The Tools Behind It All

I was talking to a co-worker today about the development applications I use. I realized that I don’t upgrade often, I’ll find an application that works for me and I’ll stick with it and get experienced with using it…

A good example of this would be Photoshop, for any design work I use Photoshop 7.0 which was released back in 2002. I have used CS, CS2 and even beta tested CS3 and I have stuck with 7 because it’s super-lean, it works, and it offers all of the essential features I need. For FTP I use SmartFTP 1.0.9 which also just so happens to be released in 2002 and for an editor I just upgraded to Dreamweaver 8 just to check out what it has to offer, but I’ve been using MX for years.

It seems that a lot of people out there will update their apps not because of the additional features or completely changed functionality (notice I didn’t say better functionality) but because they want to have latest in software that has hardly changed from the version before. This concept can apply to any software too; operating systems, office applications, or something online such as a BBS or CMS.

On Tuesday, Adobe will announce the prices for the upcoming of Creative Suite 3.0 (CS3). As I mentioned I tried out Photoshop CS3 for a few weeks and there was almost no difference in features when compared to CS2. The worst part however is that the base functionality is identical to PS 7, all of the old features are there, unchanged, and very few new ones were added. For the people out there that pay for these $ 300-700 development applications this is a huge expense and companies are making a fortune off releasing old code over and over. I was reading a blog the other night which was authored by a programmer from Microsoft. He was talking about the work he did with early versions of IE and such and he went on about what kinds of code he has seen go into the modern Microsoft operating systems such as Vista and how a lot of it, for the OS itself dates back as far as Windows 3.1.

I thought that was interesting because it really makes you wonder how much you’re really getting out of that big $$ software upgrade.