Adobe Drops the Ball

Marissa Lyttle wrote:
Hi Professor Nevins,

I have read over the information on the blog and would like to confirm that I understand the you expectations. Do you want us to post a sample of our work on the blog and then invite the other classmates to view the projects in our fotothing.com profile? Once classmates have looked at the projects, should they post comments back in the comment section of the blog?

Also, I received a message when I tried to download photoshop stating that free downloads are not available until July 1, 2008. Do you have any other suggestions for software that are pretty user friendly? I downloaded GIMP but it does seem to be a bit complicated.

Thanks,
Marissa Lyttle


Hi Marissa,

Yes, post one or two examples on your work on the blog, not everything... you can comment on others work both on the blog and on fotothing.. You don't need to post comments on the blog to work you found on fotothing....

Thanks for the heads up... apparently this new restriction went into effect Friday night when Adobe closed business for the week... Here's what I found out on a forum...
"

Anyone visiting Adobe’s website for the next five weeks or so looking for product demos is going to be greeted with a one sentence statement:

Product trials are unavailable until July 1. We apologize for any
inconvenience. For additional details, please refer to the
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

The reason according the referenced FAQ is a bug that causes the 30 day trial period to expire after only one day if the product is launched for the first time in the month of June. More alarming is the fact that this bug will also cause purchased products that have been installed and launched but not activated to expire in the same one day.

Given the fact that once a demo has been run on a machine, there’s no way to run it again (short of a low level harddrive format) it seems like a good idea to pull the trials off the website. But, a full read of those FAQs leads to a Tech Note article shows that not only is there a fix for this problem, that fix actually extends the trial period to 65 days.

So, if you’ve already downloaded the demo but haven’t installed or launched it yet, you might want to wait until June to do so. You’ll need to jump through a few hoops, but you’ll get more than double the usual time to test drive it. If you haven’t done so, unless the powers that be at Adobe change their minds, I’m afraid you’re out of luck until July.

If you purchase the product and launch it in June for the first time and for some reason won’t be able to activate it immediately make sure to download the appropriate patch for either Windows or Mac .

The aforementioned Tech Note has all the instructions for running it."


Paint Shop Pro from Corel is very powerful too and could have won the competition for being top program if Adobe didn't win... There is a trial too and their full version sells for $59 at the education price...

http://store.corel.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?partNumber=OL_PR12AA&srcid=&pculicenseid=&promocode=0&countryCode=US&storeId=10302&catalogId=10103&langId=-1

I think you would be happier using Corel rather than Gimp... There is a slightly friendlier opensource GIMP called Gimpshop Here is a link to it...

http://www.gimpshop.com/

I'll post your note and my response on the blog...

Take care,

Jerry