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Participant
October 24, 2017
Question

How many people use CC 2015 or older?

  • October 24, 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 671 views

I am developing some cool extension now and I orients to the CC 2017 version.

Are there any reasons to optimize the extension to older version?

Which one of you uses the old versions and why?

It hurts to support old version...

This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

Kevin-Monahan
Community Manager
Community Manager
November 8, 2017

Not really an answerable question, kovart. I'll mark it as such.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio
Mylenium
Legend
October 25, 2017

Are there any reasons to optimize the extension to older version?

Depends on who you are aiming for. Many hobbyists still use CS6 or earlier as do many professionals who couldn't be bothered being forced into Creative Cloud or in addition to it as a fallback option for older projects or just in case. The spectrum of variations on this is endless, including people clinging on to older CC version for dear life because of too many bugs in recent outings. Szalam's statement of AE getting better with every new version is just plain wrong and slightly delusional. That said, if you are a developer, you can only do so much. Since Adobe in their infinite wisdom *sarcasm mode here* decided to screw around with too many things even for custom panels, you can only ever target a handful of versions before things break (unless you really care to maintain 10 different versions). Personally, though, for a commercial project I'd only support latests versions. This train is moving too fast and staying up to date and competitive in that department might be more important than satisfying someoen using an older version who won't be buying new plug-ins and other stuff, anyway.

Mylenium

Dave_LaRonde
Inspiring
October 25, 2017

Mylenium  wrote

Since Adobe in their infinite wisdom *sarcasm mode here* decided to screw around with too many things even for custom panels, you can only ever target a handful of versions before things break (unless you really care to maintain 10 different versions).

Well, that seems to be Adobe's way of doing things: offer new, half-baked features that attract new subscribers.  Never mind working on the things that really matter, such as the non-spectacular rewriting of core code that would bring AE into the twenty-first century.

Adobe has repeatedly said it's working on making AE faster for about five years, as I recall.  There has been NO significant change.  Just tiny-little, yet highly-touted improvements.

Dave_LaRonde
Inspiring
October 24, 2017

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I run a copy of AE CS 5.5 on as legacy machine at home.  It's all mine -- no rental, y'know -- and it's just fine for my volunteer work.

Szalam
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 24, 2017

With each release, as AE gets more stable (and faster), fewer people are using older versions. I would expect the release calling itself CC 2018 (even if Adobe is calling it "The October 2017 release of After Effects CC") will win even more people over from CC 2014. Anybody using CC 2015 is either a pirate or silly (or stuck that way due to weird government issues...) as CC 2015 was really buggy. The only old version worth holding on to is CC 2014, but as the new version of AE just added control for (and of) mask paths by expression and other recent releases of AE have added other must-have features, the number of folks holding onto CC 2014 is shrinking.

Flow is the extension I use the most. The new version of Flow doesn't support anything older than CC 2015, if that helps.

I wouldn't trust a poll in a forum like this to be a good indicator of overall version usage either. Some companies like to hold on to older versions for a while. This has always been the way. But a lot of freelancers and such like to be on the very latest. It's a mixed bag.

What extension are you making? I mean, what task does it do?

techgirlmphs52
Participant
October 25, 2017

I'm still running AE 2015 because I can't seem to get AE 2017 or 2018 to run my AE files. It keeps crashing in Windows 7. :-(