Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

On Tuesday, after suffering a day of blowback, Adobe rescinds its kill order and announces the program is going into maintenance mode. The original email sent to registered and paying users apparently said "We're contacting you to let you know that Adobe will be discontinuing Adobe Animate on March 1, 2026. As an existing Animate user, you may continue to use Animate, but please note that technical support will no longer be available after March 1, 2027."

Animate was, more or less, the successor to the Flash development package which was killed ages ago in favor of HTML 5. And apparently much more used than Adobe thought.

Reactions to the Monday announcement: ... were swift and angry on social media. "Adobe discontinuing Animate out of the blue is nuts," writes artist and animator Julia Glassman on BlueSky. "Many television productions, games, and all sorts of animated media still rely (on) Animate/Flash pipelines. They're all supposed to just...pivot to entirely new software and pipelines?!"

Animator Christopher Linoleum brought up how many big-name shows utilize the program: "Adobe Animate remains an industry standard for TV animation. Star Trek: Lower Decks was made in Animate. Haunted Hotel was made in Animate. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was made in Animate. And because you can't buy a permanent license anymore, it'll just be gone."

YIKES! So a pretty important program to the entertainment industry! The original kill date was announced as March 1, 2027. But a bigger problem was that apparently either cloud storage is required or a major component of the program, and that would be shut down at the same time, so users would lose all their assets and data! Remember, folks - all the cloud means is that it's somebody else's server. The "Cloud" isn't anything mystical, it's just someone's server.

After getting bombarded with hate and flamed to cinders, Adobe "... now says that Animate will now be in maintenance mode going forward and that it has “no plans to discontinue or remove access” to the app. Animate will still receive “ongoing security and bug fixes” and will still be available for “both new and existing users,” but it won’t get new features."

There's one unmentioned problem. With no updates and it being in maintenance mode, it will eventually be bypassed by operating system changes. It may take 5-10 years or more, but it will happen. And it may become glitchy before it dies. Smart production houses are going to start looking for better alternatives now and start planning migrations and new work flows soon. Sadly, apparently Reddit threads say there's no real alternative for professional production. I'm not familiar with that field so I have no idea.

The article that I saw yesterday announcing the original kill order:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/adobe-is-killing-a-popular-animation-and-game-development-program/1100-6537851/

Adobe backing away:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/873621/adobe-animate-maintenance-mode-reverse-course

Slashdot mocking the back-off:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/0730222/adobe-actually-wont-discontinue-animate


EDIT: I should have checked Ars Technica. Their article on all this was quite informative, telling me that Animate is actually the original Flash, but renamed! I was unaware of this, I've never been involved in creating things with Flash.

Some comments in the Ars article had a very cogent observation: there's no AI assistant in Animate, and it's probably based on a very old code base, so it would be hard to retrofit it. Which means Adobe can't realistically increase its current price of $23/month. If they can't make more money from the product, kill it. Occam's Razor that's a pretty good guess.

And yes, people are already thinking Adobe cannot be trusted and are rethinking their production pipelines.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/adobe-reverses-decision-to-discontinue-animate-after-a-lot-of-confusion-and-angst/

Adobe software is expensive stuff, and you can't buy it, only rent it. With their most expensive package you can get it for $60 a month under their 'Yearly, paid monthly' plan.

But what happens if you cancel?

First off, good luck finding how to cancel! It's kinda hidden. And that's one of the complaints. Second, prepare to get slammed with an immediate charge of half of the remaining annual fee!

The Feds and the BBB have been receiving complaints about Adobe's practices for some time, and now they're taking action.

https://gizmodo.com/adobe-federal-lawsuit-doj-creative-cloud-apm-1851544519

First, a little explanation about Postscript.

Back in the early days of laser printers, in the '80s, Postscript appeared. It is actually a programming language for lasers that used math to describe vector fonts that allowed the explosion of desktop publishing to begin (as a programming geek, I have a book on it!). There are basically two types of fonts or graphics, vector and raster. A vector font is described using math or a formula, and as a result can be rendered at any size, from one point up to a size beyond imagination, and it will be the exact same design regardless. A raster is an image, and it may look fine at the resolution at which it was scanned or smaller, but when you start enlarging it, the quality of it falls off dramatically. You've all seen horribly pixelated examples of this, even if you didn't know what the technical details of it were.

One interesting thing about Postscript is the language would allow you to define a line that was one point wide and infinitely long! It would continue printing on that laser until the printer died, as long as you kept feeding it paper.

So, back to uneditable documents. And a little info on how PDFs work.

When you create a PDF, the font definition is embedded inside the PDF file. When you open that file on a computer other than the one that you created it on, your PDF reader program, which may or may not be Adobe Acrobat, says "This file contains Font X!" and looks to see if that font is loaded. If it is, then all is well and the font is loaded and the document continues processing for display. If Font X is not installed on the system, the PDF also contains information on Font X's "family", let's say that font is part of the Courier family, so the computer says to itself 'I don't have Font X, but I have lots of Courier fonts, so I'll grab one of those and continue rendering the document!'

The computer is happy and the document comes up on your screen, or gets spat out by your printer.

Now the problem. The earliest form of fonts in PDFs were Postscript, known as Type 1. And Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has pulled the Type 1 fonts from Office 365 as of the middle of this month. This includes both Mac and Windows. Open Office had already pulled support. If you bought Postscript from a third party, you should still be good.

According to Adobe, from the article, "[the] PDF and EPS files with Type 1 fonts will continue to render properly, as long as those fonts are "placed for display or printing as graphic elements." That text will not be editable, however."

Also, "If you want to see what kinds of fonts you have installed on your system, Windows and macOS will show you that information with a little tweaking. In macOS, open the Font Book app and switch to List view and font formats will be listed under the "Format" column on the right. In Windows 10 or 11, open the legacy Control Panel, select Fonts, switch to Details view using the button in the upper-right corner, right-click the top row, and check the "Font Type" box. PostScript fonts can also be identified by their file extension if you can see it, typically either .pfb or .pfm."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/microsoft-adobe-and-others-have-dropped-support-for-old-postscript-fonts/

I apologize for the crudity.

First, they are "considering" doubling the price of some of their monthly subscriptions from $10 a month to $20. (The Verge) So an annual fee goes from $120 to $240. Ouch. And I believe that's billed as one big chunk, not on a monthly basis.

Now read this, I just found it on Slashdot:
Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers who haven't updated their apps in a while may want to check their inboxes. The software company has sent out emails to customers warning them of being "at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties" if they continue using outdated versions of CC apps, including Photoshop and Lightroom. From a report:

These emails even list the old applications installed on the subscribers' systems, and in some cases, they mention what the newest available versions are. In a response to a customer complaint on Twitter, the AdobeCare account said users can only download the two most recent variants of CC apps going forward.

A spokesperson said in a statement, "Adobe recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications. Customers using those versions have been notified that they are no longer licensed to use them and were provided guidance on how to upgrade to the latest authorized versions." However, the spokesperson said Adobe can't comment on claims of third-party infringement, as it concerns ongoing litigation.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/05/14/1353209/adobe-warns-creative-cloud-users-with-older-apps-of-legal-problems

This is the problem with renting software. When Adobe went to their rental program however many years ago, I bought full versions of their Creative Suite CS6 and still use it. I'm going to have to figure out what I'm going to do in the future as Apple is drifting towards an architecture change that may require me to lock down my OS version or run Photoshop in a virtual machine, but I'll worry about it when it becomes an issue. Plus, I paid a one-time cost of probably about $500 when the change happened, which I could easily afford then as I was employed. Since that job ended, my employment has been spotty, never lasting more than about 2.5 years, and paying annual subscriptions would have been a real PITB.

Oh, and by the way, if there's a problem with processing your payment through your bank: your software is shut off. And as has happened to someone I know, if you download a trial of a product and uninstall it, it can utterly bork your production apps.

This is also a problem with cloud services and anything encumbered with DRM in general. I received an email a couple of months ago from the movie streaming service Ultraviolet that they were ceasing operations and any movies that I'd bought from them would no longer be available. OH NOES! Now, I could care less. As it happens, the only reason why I had an account with them was because I'd taken all of my movies that came with digital copies and gone on a binge and activated all of them, and a few had gone through Ultraviolet. Now, if I'd paid money for them, I'd be deeply pissed, and I'd be out the money and without the movie. But I did not, and I still have the physical copies. When I buy music, I get a physical CD and rip it myself to MP3. So yes, I'm sort of a belt and suspenders kind of guy. I don't trust companies to take something away and not give a damn whether or not I get screwed in the process.

I am ever so glad I bought that Adobe DVD with all that software on it, and Adobe can fall off the edge of a cliff for all I care.

[/rant]