I've had a chance to talk to Adobe folks about the switch to the CC and why they dropped the perpetual license. For the most part, Adobe claims they were caught off guard by how people gravitated to the CC. While they didn't provide actual numbers, they did claim the vast majority of people who upgraded did not purchase CS6. Rather, they bought into the CC. Adobe started preparing CS7, but at a certain point they realized that the cost of preparing two versions of the same software—one that would be updated and one that would not—was going to not be a wise use of their resources. Ergo, drop the less popular option.

If you want a perpetual license for the Adobe Suite, go out and buy CS6. Yes it's a year old, but a year from now you will still have the same suite, no more payments, it will always be on your desktop. Today at Adobe MAX, Adobe announced that the Perpetual license, that which you buy and you are done, will no longer be sold. Now, if you want the latest from Adobe, you rent it. This is a mixed bag, truly.

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On Monday, April 23rd, Adobe made a double announcement regarding Creative Suite 6 (no surprise) and the Creative Cloud (also no surprise). There was no surprise because Adobe has been presenting us with sneak peaks of upcoming features for some time, and the Creative Cloud was informally announced back in October at the Adobe MAX in Los Angeles. Now that details are coming in, this cloud has a very silver lining.

The MacSpeech Dictate 1.5.9 update addresses several issues, and is available free of charge to registered MacSpeech Dictate 1.5 customers using the Check for Updates feature

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Free Open Source word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and more

SintraWorks announces PDFClerk Pro 3.9.5, an update to their very popular PDF Document Editor for Mac OS X. PDFClerk Pro is a multi-faceted PDF editor with powerful and unique capabilities. It is designed to make standard operations easy and accessible, while allowing ample flexibility and adjustment to more complicated workflows for those with more advanced needs. Version 3.9.5 sports added scripting properties, sticky sketch creation mode and a number of bug fixes

• Scribus Open Source Desktop Publishing
• Skim

The Aquamacs Project announces the release of Aquamacs 2.0, the leading Mac-friendly variant of the widely-used editor Emacs. It is a versatile, fast and mature editor for source code, web pages, typesetting documents and all other forms of text. Emacs is a text editor of legendary flexibility and has made millions of programmers and writers very productive. Numerous packages allow users to extend its functionality

Easily Convert PDF to Microsoft Word, Excel, and more with Solid PDF to Word! Turn your PDFs into Word documents you can edit. Solid PDF to Word for Mac converts PDF files into Microsoft® Word (.docx), iWork Pages (.pages), Rich Text Format (.rtf), or plain text files (.txt). Extract data to Excel (.xlsx and .csv). Reflow document into continuous HTML (.htm) format

BBEdit 9.5 is a free update for all customers with BBEdit 9.0 through 9.3. You will need a BBEdit 9 serial number to use this version