Annoying Adobe Programmers!

After upgrading my four-year old Powermac tower to an All-in-one, Intel-based iMac, I needed to upgrade my Adobe applications in order to get the universal version. The experience hasn’t been thrilling; to put it mildly.

First mistake: I got it from Adobe’s site.

Adobe, in their attempt to use their own technologies on their own site, have opted to make it nearly all in Flash. You can never see where links lead and you can never be sure whether you downloaded a certain file or not yet. Not only that, but some features, like their feature comparison page between various version os CS3 suite do stupid things like open in a popup window. In an age where almost every browser on the whole internet is configured to block popup windows, they do it.

First I thought that their site was broken with Safari. But when I accessed it in Firefox, it was broken too. Only when I accessed it with IE7 on Windows did I get a clue.

See, on the Mac, Safari and Firefox didn’t do anything when I clicked the link to the comparison page. But IE7, well, it opened the popup window and then closed it; how smart is that?

Second mistake: I opted for their download immediately option.

When you download from Adobe, they use Akamai to serve the download, but it doesn’t work normally from a web browser like Apple’s site for example. It requires a Java client to download. That took me a while to figure out too. See, as a security aware web developer, I always run with Java disabled in my browsers. That Java client is the crappiest thing I’ve seen. It stopped downloading few times and the only thing that got it to resume downloading is to quit Safari, relaunch, re-login to Adobe’s site and start downloading again. It took an insane 8 hours (full of interruptions) to download the 2.5 GB file, over my 10 Mbit connection.

And the latest annoying thing is Photoshop. Sorry, excuse me, it’s ‘Adobe Photoshop CS3.app‘.

See, after installation, I tried renaming ‘Adobe Photoshop CS3.app‘ to ‘Photoshop.app’ in order to have a shorter name in my dock. But, Adobe’s programmers, in their infinite wisdom, insist that the application be called ‘Adobe Photoshop CS3.app‘.

Every time I launched ‘Photoshop.app’, it complained that the application has been moved from its original installation location, and some settings needed repair. Each time it asked for my password to perform these ‘repairs’ and yet they never stuck.

After 10 times or so, I broke down and renamed the application ‘Adobe Photoshop CS3.app‘.

The annoying thing is that only ‘Adobe Photoshop CS3.app‘ insists on this naming convention. Illustrator (formerly known as ‘Adobe Illustrator CS3.app’) didn’t mind the change at all. And why aren’t all the applications in the suite named like that? Dreamweaver is simply ‘Dreamweaver.app’ along with ‘Contribute.app’ and ‘Bridge CS3.app’.

And now, ‘Adobe Reader.app’, insists on making my browsers open any pdf file using Adobe’s extremely bloated plug in. Each time I delete their plugin from my internet plugins folder, some Adobe process insists on ‘fixing the problem’. This experience make me wish that some company steps up and give Adobe some serious competition in this domain. They’re starting to seriously abuse their users.

There, I feel much better now…

A start of a new era of design

A new era of computer, and I’m sure other electronics, design is starting. Apple’s design influence is clearly showing in the new Gateway ‘One’.

Here is the new Gateway One, and below it you’ll find the new Aluminum iMac released back in August. A blind man could possibly see the similarities.

By the way, I’m using one of those iMacs with a 24″ screen. It’s sweet. I can’t believe how much quieter it is compared to my four-year-old G5 Tower. The quality of my office’s atmosphere is immeasurably better because of the lack of noise.

While the G5 was much quieter than the ‘Wind Tunnel’ G4 tower it replaced 4 years ago, it’s still a noisy beast, especially in the days of summer when the 9 fans it has would kick up because of the ambient temperature.