Maybe you’ve seen it. It’s been all over the internet and YouTube. Artcraft is an open-source dream for people that want to use Adobe. By no means want to pay that Adobe price tag, or that hefty cancellation fee. The man behind this is Brandon Thomas. He made these apps out of spite. Brandon didn’t like the concept of renting forever, and that outrageous cancellation fee if you wanted to opt out early. Using Claude AI, he managed to create six apps in seven days.
It is important to remember that many of these are in early alpha stages. But what makes this insane is that it’s open-sourced. Meaning the code that wrote these programs are out in the wild. They can be improved, modified, and owned forever.
Not only has he created Adobe versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, but he has early Microsoft Office apps to. You can see them on the website. As someone that uses version of these “from off the high seas”, I wanted to see if they would work on my low-end Asus laptop (i.e. cheap ass laptop).
Using some Artcraft apps
PhotoCraft (Photoshop) and FilmCraft (Premiere) download in like a second and installed even faster. What surprised me was the load time, or lack thereof, when you opened the programs. As of now, PhotoCraft and PDFCraft (Adobe Reader) are listed as “early alpha”, while other are “in development”.
PhotoCraft, so far, works really well and is just like Photoshop. Premier is a little buggy and not as smooth. However, since DaVinci runs like shit on my laptop, it runs pretty smooth for the quick test I did. Currently, I have to use OpenShot, which I hate. I tried their WordCraft, because I wanted to write this piece in it. Unfortunately, it gives you the option to save but won’t let you save anything. It will let you open Word files, which is nice.
YouTube is filled with people how amazing/shitty it is. Again, many of those people don’t understand what early alpha means. Believe me, I don’t like using “ill-gotten programs”, but I am not about to pay their fees for their software that have been hosing us for decades at this point. Especially Adobe and Microsoft.
The Bigger Question: Will This Affect Them
Too many people are looking for that headline. “Adobe crusher”. “The End of Adobe”. It’s not quite there yet. As far as lawsuits go, maybe one against the identical layout as Adobe. However, if they tried to sue for copyright, the law isn’t on Adobe’s side. Not to mention, it contains none of the source code, and was reversed engineered.
Even if Adobe were to sue, the genie is already out of the bottle. The source code is out there. It becomes a game of whack-a-mole to stop this. As the old saying goes, “fixing the barn door after the horses come home.”
Adobe will either let it be, because a lawsuit would bring a lot more attention to it, or go after layout. Many companies have tried to copy Adobe’s layout before and was forced to change it. Libre Office has done that to prevent Microsoft from suing.
As for me, I will continue using my current programs, which includes Affinity. I gave up on Gimp. Too much of learning curve. One of the coolest things about Artcraft is that it’s available on Mac, Windows, and Linux. I mean, if someone is sending you a message about how you suck, this is one way to go about it.
As I mentioned to Adam, a company that overcharges everyone nearly every year. Uses our content to train its AI without compensation. Outrageous cancellation fees. Are we really supposed to feel back about getting revenge on them? I’ll sleep just fine.
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