[Nekto Nektovich]

>>I’d see it having to be some sort of plugin, possibly a script.
You’re reading my mind. I think this is a great startup idea. So many things need to be automated and it’s good for business – such feature would save loads of time when it comes to quick design iteration.
Unfortunately I’m not a programmer ☹ I’m even willing to give this idea away with no credit, because I just want these features since they will make life a whole lot better ☺

>>Currently only using it at work. Home is still CS.
Amen! I really miss the CS6 apps. They were perfect and high performance – photoshop used to open itself faster than a folder in Windows! The deisgn trio – AI, PS, InDD – were samples of highly stable and fast programs, they were the best. And now with this CC crap I have to wait for like a minute while PS opens and creates a new file, on an Intel i7 / 8GB RAM computer! Ridiculous. AI is crashing all the time, like every 15 minutes. InDD constantly refuses to start because of some error and it won’t work until I manually delete some strange file in the settings folder. All sorts of bugs, lags and crashes. No good. Geez!

[Nekto Nektovich]

@Vincent Rosati

Thank you for answering and thank you for not sending me to the CC Library description page, which is often advised but doesn’t solve the problem of automatic updates of linked assets.

I didn’t really understand this part:
If you just need to globally update colors, you could File > Place a TIF, AI, EPS

How exactly does this work? I mean, when I place a file it seems to be incapsulated and doesn’t affect or interfere in anyway with the destination file’s assets – it just becomes one of the assets, doesn’t it?

And I’ll comment this one too:
What I do in a similar situation is, as I’m sure you’ve considered, is to just maintain a master file ‘Swatches and Patterns.ai’, then copy and paste.

Does this mean that I’d have to manually replace all assets (from master file)? The workflow would look like this:
I make changes to assets in the master file, then I open all of the affected AI files and paste the changed assets into them, replacing destination assets (assuming they have same names)? It’s a workaround, I guess, but will result in mind blowing tedious and confusing work in case there are tens or hundreds of assets across tens or hundreds AI files…

And a little offtopic, just for the chitchat. Don’t you think that such features are so obviously useful and necessary that it’s really weird that none of the graphic editors has them?? I mean, what can be as simple and useful as linked swatches, symbols, styles? Adobe allows to place and link all sorts of stuff – images, vector files, smart objects and even Microsoft Office documents! But not internal libraries! Oh my god, right?

They created this Creative Cloud. And they proudly say on its description page that all your assets will be linked to the Creative Cloud. But that’s not true – they are NOT linked, and you even can’t modify an asset in your CC Library. It even doesn’t override it if you add an asset with a same name. Don’t you find this ridiculous? Or I’m crazy? And everyone seems to be fine with this, even though the workflow on big projects becomes a pain just because of lack of these simplest features.