A pleasant surprise from Adobe

I bought Macromedia Homesite 5.5 from Macromedia’s web store back in 2005, just after Adobe bought Macromedia. They’ve long since killed off Homesite but it’s never been beaten in my opinion as a HTML/web code editor. I had a need yesterday to make a minor change to a PHP file and I decided to dust off Homesite rather than edit in notepad. I went to my CD wallet and couldn’t find the CD so I thought I was pretty much stuffed. Most of my on-line purchases have been from Digital River and I expected similar treatment (at best) from Adobe. DR expects you to pay a premium to download your software again later. Here’s a sample from Symentec’s online store provided by DR. It’s a total piss take, but what can you do?

I dug out my old order confirmation email and clicked on the link to Macromedia’s web store. I got redirected to the Adobe store login, where my old Macromedia login worked, and could go straight to my order history and not only re-download my purchase 4 years later, I could also view my license key! If only all online stored operated this way I’d shop online for software more often.