PTPL 198 · Own Your Work, Not Just the App

How to keep your work accessible no matter what happens to the software you used to create it

Could you complete your work today if your usual apps were inaccessible? Consider this your wake up call is to store your work in open formats, even if (actually, especially if) you are required to use closed format apps to do your daily work.

Open vs. Closed: it really does matter

What’s a closed format app? One that is necessary to access whatever information you have fed into it. E.g. You create a document in Notion today. You need Notion in order to access that document tomorrow.

What’s an open format app? One that stores your work in files that can be accessed and worked with by other apps. E.g. You create a document in Obsidian today. You can access1 that same document in any text editor tomorrow.

When Adobe killed Animate

I used the Adobe Suite for nigh on twenty-five years because it was (still is) the standard for the graphics industry. Every design job description demanded competence in Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop — or all three. Because Adobe apps will be around forever, right?

Wrong!

Last month Adobe announced that they were killing Animate. This is a tool used by large and small companies around the world for decades, and taught in design courses.

Overnight, animators were faced with the prospect of retraining on new software and exporting huge numbers of assets to new formats. Saying that this would be disruptive to the teams using it as a daily driver is a vast understatement.

And my oh my, was the backlash swift! A veritable whirlwind of fury rained down upon Adobe. So they did an about-face (sort of), stating that they were listening and had decided they would indeed maintain the software — just not actively develop it. source

Animate, and Adobe in general, is not an easy app or ecosystem to just up and leave. Many seek alternatives — and save a fair packet of dough in the process — but not all can. All too often it’s a case of “this is what we have to use at work”.

So what do you do when the software you’ve invested significant amounts of time and resources into, pulls a stunt like this?

You develop a workflow that makes you immune to the coming and going of any app that is part of a closed system.

Remember, a closed system is one where your work is not freely accessible without the app that created it. In other words, it’s one where your work is not truly yours , unless you get canny and start taking control.

Case Study: Brochure redesign

I’ve just completed a brochure redesign in the new Affinity app. That app is a pleasure to use, but despite its shiny new Canva-fueled visage it would be foolish to assume it will be around forever. Currently, Brochure.af requires Affinity to open it.

Now that I know the dangers of keeping the only copy of my work inside a closed system, I export major versions of the .af file to layered PDFs as I work. These can be opened by many other graphics apps.

Each new version is given a date and time stamp so I always know which is the most recent. No, you do not want to rely on file creation and modification dates here; those can be scrambled more easily than you might think.

All assets for the job are in the project’s RESOURCES file, in formats any graphics software can read.

This is not about seatbelts, not paranoia

Lest you think this advice smacks of doomsday prepperism, remember this: some people go their entire lives without a seatbelt actively saving them from injury or death. Statistics are no justification for not wearing a seatbelt, because the risks are too great to gamble with.

Ensuring you always have access to up-to-date versions of your work in a format that can be read by apps other than the one in which you created it, is the digital equivalent of wearing a seatbelt.

I cannot overstate the importance of keeping files and resources in open, portable formats on your local (backed up) device!

You are not “making a copy” of things because you read an article like this one that claimed it was a good idea to do so. You are changing your mindset to view your folder of JPEGs or PDFs as first class citizens. They are your foundation, and the only things that can be considered truly yours.

When you have this mindset, assets (like JPEGs) living inside an app (like Adobe Animate), will be viewed as copies of your foundation files, imported for convenience.

Also consider the impact of any one-app-only feature, like plugins in Obsidian. You may be using ‘open’ Markdown files, but are you leaning too heavily on a workflow that relies on extensions that have no guarantee of working in the future?

Wake up and take the wheel!

So, if your favourite app disappeared or was inaccessible, could you still access your work? How long would it take you to get set up with alternative tools?

Losing easy access to what you’ve always unconsciously believed was yours and yours alone is a horrible feeling; one that users of Adobe Animate became excruciatingly aware of in February 2026.

Following these principles gives you the keys, and gives you the freedom to throw your kit into another vehicle and continue driving to your destination. Ignoring them makes you vulnerable to being locked out of a vehicle you don’t own, into which you’ve bolted down the only copies of your work.

If the price, the rules, and the access are controlled by someone else, you’re inside someone else’s system. If access to something can be delayed, restricted, or withdrawn, is it really yours?2

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1. And by ‘access’ I mean not just open but also read, edit, export, the works↩︎

2. Paraphrased from this informative video about the coming gold reset↩︎