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Adobe Illustrator vs Sketch performance (youtube.com)

almost 9 years ago from Johan Ronsse, Interface designer at Mono

  • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, almost 9 years ago (edited almost 9 years ago )

    What piece me off is how little adobe actually cares about illustrator. I remember i had to wait 2 years before they made a 64 bit version of it.

    I think a big part of that is supporting legacy features, documents and workflows. As apps get older it becomes harder to make changes, for technical, strategic and user-cetric reasons.

    Often, the only two available paths are:

    1. Wipe the slate clean, anger many of your best customers and get a modern, fast, flexible codebase with fewer features. This is what Apple did with Final Cut Pro X and the latest versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

    2. Try as hard as you can to modernise and remove unneeded features, using your existing codebase. Adobe and Microsoft are best known for taking this approach.

    Both approaches have their challenges and advantages. For pro apps, and if you're in near-monopoly position, option 1 can be a disaster, so I understand why Adobe typically don't go down that path, even if some users of their apps would like them to.

    I think there should be even more alternatives for designers... than those two.

    There will be. I think Bohemian have done a great job, and I really like Illustrator and Photoshop, but you can expect more from Adobe, and more from other teams as the needs of designers diversifies and as software design becomes even more important to the world.

    Disclaimer: We're working on a design tool as well, so the challenges outlined above have been on my mind for a very long time. :)

    2 points
    • Diego LafuenteDiego Lafuente, almost 9 years ago

      I think the majority is on 64-bit already since... 2010? Anyone who has bought an Apple computer should have that kind of access. Prior to that, well, I don't know...

      0 points
      • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, almost 9 years ago

        Yeah, but the difficultly is changing mountains of code that’s 32bit (often with no performance benefit). My point was that older apps are often harder to transition to new tech. Being older and bigger is a disadvantage in that situation.

        0 points
        • Diego LafuenteDiego Lafuente, almost 9 years ago

          Good to know. Some people told me 64-bit is not so great speed benefit as they advertise. What about multi-core?

          0 points
          • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, almost 9 years ago

            What about multi-core?

            Often that’s even harder to take advantage of than 64bit. Making the most of multiple cores can require huge structural changes, if you haven’t planned well for it. It’s worth noting that not all parts of an app will benefit... it’s usually just the heavy processing that needs to be split into different threads.

            0 points
    • Charles PearsonCharles Pearson, almost 9 years ago

      This is a core struggle w Photoshop, which is almost 25 years old and has millions of lines of code. Sometimes we feel like we're #winning with new features and workflows, but there's always trade-offs. To echo Marc's point though, this is a great moment for screen design. Small and big teams all over are building (and revising :) tools, getting on the edge of workflows and trends and pushing everything forward. From efforts at Bjango to BC to Adobe to Macaw to Pixate and so on, its just going to be an eternal feast for designers over the next few years. Let's have fun with it!

      1 point