Adobe Launches All-in-One Creative App, InDillushop/XD, Replacing Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign

InDesignSecrets

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[Editor’s note: This was our 2019 April Fool’s Post]

In a surprise mid-cycle move, Adobe announced today that their three core Creative Cloud applications — Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign — are being replaced with a new all-in-one application, InDillushop/XD. “We took the best and left the rest,” said Bryan L., Senior Vice President of Technology. “InDesign and those other programs had a good run, historically, but now it’s time to look ahead. We believe InDillushop/XD is the future of all visual design, from bus wraps to bubblegum wrappers, from digital magazines to XR via neural implants.”

Branding for Adobe’s new program was created by one of Adobe’s top designers.

The three stand-alone programs, which revolutionized the creative industry for the past three decades, have been moved into End-of-Life track as of today, meaning Adobe will no longer support them or issue updates and patches. Instead, active Creative Cloud subscribers who have Auto Update enabled in their Creative Cloud application settings will find all versions of those programs have been deleted from their hard drive overnight and replaced with InDillushop/XD, which weighs in at just 397 GB. Other CC subscribers can download the new app on their own from the CC application.

“Creatives have been asking for this single-app approach for as long as I’ve been with Adobe,” said Denise S., Senior Public Relations Manager, “and now they’re going to get it. And they’ll like it, if I have any say. Which I do.”

A first look under the hood

In our early pre-release testing, it appears that Adobe has created the ultimate app, with every useful feature from InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop included, from the Twirl filter to Conditional Text.

The final punch list of good vs. useless features was curated by Mike Z., Senior Manager of Partner Strategy and Programs. “Youth input is important to Adobe, so I asked my kids and their friends what they liked in each of the three apps. I just wrote down what they said and gave the list to the engineers,” he said. “Photoshop was the only program they had heard of, but after a demo they admitted InDesign and Illustrator had some features they might use one day, when they were old.”

InDillushop/XD is based on Adobe’s new XD framework, making the software lightning fast. Due to its advanced architecture, it can run on virtually any mobile device, including a smartphone, Apple Watch, Blackberry, and first-generation Kindles.

Note that a separate hardware product, the Adobe MagNifier™, can be attached to the user via a headstrap to enlarge the interface.

As you can see in the image above (click to enlarge), you may never have to open another program again! With over 1,200 panels and toolbars (tip: make a custom workspace), everything’s at your fingertips.

Adobe Senior Director of Design, Eric S., pointed out that besides users tiring of switching apps, another important market pressure led to the move: “We kept hearing from our creative pro customers that they wanted to be like the cool kids and use something with XD in its name. Now they can!”