In an era not so far away I once purchased and used expensive software to edit images and build web site animations. I am looking at you Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Flash. I bought updates over the years excited to get some new feature that promised to wow my customers and make my life easier and building output faster.

I was hooked until the subscription service model became the standard. I didn’t like buying use of something I would technically never own. For the record, I am a software developer too, I really understand why companies use this model. It brings in steady revenue streams.

There is always someone who wants to “build a better mouse trap” so to speak! (I have a friend who says why reinvent the wheel? My response would be: Well someone wanted a different looking wheel, a smoother wheel, or just to say they did it themselves.) Competition is a good thing for consumers.

Affinity – https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

One day a short couple of years back I stumbled upon Affinity’s product’s - Photo and Designer. The promotion even was touting no subscription!!! The price point was great and the quality of the tools excellent. I grabbed them up at prices that were almost unbelievable for such feature powerful software. I use them nowadays and can run them on both Mac OS and Windows. They work perfectly with my Wacom Cintiq 16 too.

Tumult Hype – https://tumult.com/hype/

One evening while reading tech news I saw mention of a tool that was described to be much like Flash in that it had a timeline edit type functionality for animations and output as HTML and video. I quickly went to the home page – Tumult.com and looked around at the Hype 4 product. It was the last few hours of the last day of their sale. I don’t often impusle buy, but I figured the price point was one I could live with if I were disappointed. Let me say, I was NOT disappointed. I have used this little application to generate animated logos, short cartoons animations using SVGs, and I have other ideas I am longing to try with it in the future.

These are a few of the tools I use. They help make my time behind the computer more productive and get me back out there doing what I enjoy doing!