My girlfriend is a graphic designer and I used most of those tools back in the day when I was in school for web development. Back then though, I was using dreamweaver 2, flash 4, photoshop 5 etc, these tools have come a long way since then.
You do your work on Mac or pc or both?
Photoshop 5, Flash 3, Dreamweaver 2 all sound about the same time I got into those programs. I've been keeping up to date and track with most of them up until just the last year or so.
Most of the tools are still pretty much the same, but I have noticed some have improved here and there, plus more tools added which make things a lot easier.
I have worked effectively on both Mac and PC, however I have preference to PC over Mac. Although Macs claim better operation for graphical purposes over PCs, supposed to run faster and be more stable, that wasn't my personal experience with them, as the ol G4 and G5's I worked on with Photoshop used to give me many issues with very few solutions, while PC's have been a lot more versitile with options to correct any issues.
As an example, when I worked on the Macs... sure they were a few seconds faster in some things, but my job consisted of working on a lot of high quality photos all day. While the Macs worked good with one or two files, once you have the computer running hundreds and sometimes thousands of pictures in a day, they locked up, quickly shut down Photoshop, or just plain shut down and restarted with no warnings or protection of the work I was doing.... which got pretty frustating. All I could do was restart my work and hope it didn't happen again.
With the PC's I work on, they are customed built for specifically what I need, I know what it can and can't do, I can sense when it's getting bogged down and shut down extra things in the background to make it work better or faster, my programs rarely shut down on me, I rarely lose any files I was working on, and if something locked up, I could still fix it without shutting the whole system down. If it does, I usually have explinations as to what caused it, and then I could correct the problem.
Maybe it's because I have more experience in PC's over Macs and I know more of what I can do in PC's then Macs, but even when I brought my problems to my boss who was a Mac Head for years, even he didn't have any explinations or solutions..... the Mac was just the way it is.
Maybe it was just the few Macs I worked on, the rest are more stable and I just had some bad experiences... but Mac's had their chance to win me over and they failed.
If you never experienced these issuses with a mac and you like having a computer 3-4 seconds faster in what it can operate graphically, then the Mac's for you.... but for me, the extra 3-4 seconds per project didn't add up compared to the times crashed, hours of work lossed and waiting for reboot.
When it comes to stability in what I do, as odd as it may sound, PC's have been a lot more reliable for me over the Mac's I have used. Not to mention, their price and availability for quick and cheap upgrades.... in my professional opinion from working in the graphic design industry since 2002, PC's are the way to go.
Sure Mac's are pretty, have a lot of eye candy and can operate a few specific graphical operations faster then a PC, but none of that matters when you're sitting there with your thumb up yer arse, wondering where the hell your project just disappeared to and there's no explination or solution.
I won't go into too much detail about my company's computer specs, but where I work (Sign Industry) we all have PC's.... not one Mac in the building.
