The adobe tools mentioned are excellent for what they do, but they are never without interface quirks that can range from mildly irritating to bizarre -- I have consistently found the Edit Styles box in InDesign to work counterintuitively in small ways, like forgetting that I checked 'preview' or overwriting my edits if a dropdown has been incorrectly fiddled with.
Adobe stuff also completely lacks decent version control. "Version Cue" is pretty clunky and has no conception of diff-ing. If I make edits to the story in an InDesign file and replace 3 FPO images with real ones, why can't I have a repository I can browse, in which I can see an awesome and self-explanatory visualization of these changes? Maybe you need InCopy servers for something like that but I don't think that's a feature they have.
Contrastingly, with the latest XCode preview, versioning was almost seamless and very nice to work with. After installing the XCode preview, I was able to check out a project from GitHub, run it, edit it, and commit the changes, with a lovely two-pane view of the diff in question when committing, showing additions and deletions. I didn't have to think about it at all -- it was only "almost" seamless as I had to manually do 'git push', which I'm sure they'll fix that in the final release.
You can do scripting with JavaScript inside the Adobe apps, but it's slow and the API takes some considerable getting-used-to. Some things most programmers would consider scriptable are not: I'd love to be able to bust out a regex or some conditional logic when building a Photoshop automation, for example; the current interface for that feels condescending and ridiculous if you're coming from TextMate or emacs.
The adobe tools mentioned are excellent for what they do, but they are never without interface quirks that can range from mildly irritating to bizarre -- I have consistently found the Edit Styles box in InDesign to work counterintuitively in small ways, like forgetting that I checked 'preview' or overwriting my edits if a dropdown has been incorrectly fiddled with.
Adobe stuff also completely lacks decent version control. "Version Cue" is pretty clunky and has no conception of diff-ing. If I make edits to the story in an InDesign file and replace 3 FPO images with real ones, why can't I have a repository I can browse, in which I can see an awesome and self-explanatory visualization of these changes? Maybe you need InCopy servers for something like that but I don't think that's a feature they have.
Contrastingly, with the latest XCode preview, versioning was almost seamless and very nice to work with. After installing the XCode preview, I was able to check out a project from GitHub, run it, edit it, and commit the changes, with a lovely two-pane view of the diff in question when committing, showing additions and deletions. I didn't have to think about it at all -- it was only "almost" seamless as I had to manually do 'git push', which I'm sure they'll fix that in the final release.
You can do scripting with JavaScript inside the Adobe apps, but it's slow and the API takes some considerable getting-used-to. Some things most programmers would consider scriptable are not: I'd love to be able to bust out a regex or some conditional logic when building a Photoshop automation, for example; the current interface for that feels condescending and ridiculous if you're coming from TextMate or emacs.
Always greener. I'm just sayin.