I'm a developer, and I only use Adobes products to pull images and the like out of Photoshop/Illustrator files given to me by my design team. I don't want to use Adobes software, as its entirely wasted on me. But I don't think any of the other apps handle PSD's (a horrid file format) well enough to allow me to replace them :( Anyone in my position that has replaced them? What should I look at?
I've had fair success using Gimp for similar use-cases -- with the caveat that that is mostly for design mock-ups made in photoshop (no vector graphics to speak of).
There's definitely a learning curve, and Gimp still has a long way to go -- but it's passed into "usable" quite a while ago for my uses.
[edit: if anyone knows of other alternatives (preferably that runs on Linux and/or under Wine, preferably Free software - but also closed source -- I'd love to hear about it]
I used to do this until somebody sent me an Illustrator file. GIMP or any other free alternative (e.g. Inkscape) I've found won't handle those correctly.
I recently had to open a simple Illustrator file in Inkscape and it worked well enough. But yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if it choked on more complicated stuff. You can of course always ask your clients to save as SVG.
I found that SVGs between Illustrator and InkScape aren't fully compatible either. Sometimes objects wouldn't get filled in the same way. Most problems seemed to be on the Illustrator side, though, not InkScape. Or maybe the other guy didn't quite know what he was doing, but still that's a real problem, and he isn't dumb either.
I bet you'd get all sorts of minor glitches and artefacts with even more complicated vector imagery.
what made Fireworks cool is that it used png as native file format,so even if you didnt have the software installed,you could open the file with any soft that support PNG. And guess what ,that wonderfull piece of software was retired by adobe.
