Annoying Adobe Programmers!
September 29, 2007 11:49 amRant
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…
March 19th, 2008 at 3:07 am
hmmm. Seems like you’re upset about things that regular users, who don’t expect such degrees of customizability and application consistency, don’t see need to spend much effort caring about. I doubt this inconsistency qualifies as “serious abuse”. I’m sure you’ve been involved in engineering either devices or technology that is complex. And, I’m sure you’re aware that there’s a limited amount of time and money for creating an upgrade. You’ll know then that sometimes it is wise to make sure important facets of the feature set are taken care of, and that esoteric application consistency be left for later. I much prefer to live with irritating inconsistencies that only technology professionals will notice than with gaping holes in the main functions of the applications.
In other words, I sense that your very educated and very real observation of various inconsistencies be more qualified to how development cycles function. No development cycle runs without prioritization of resources. What you’ve observed seems to me to be more indicative of organizational labor divisions than with programming acumen, or even with executive decision making.
March 19th, 2008 at 3:12 am
…. to continue. So, the observations you’ve made are great and valuable. In my opinion they need to be targeted effectively. Various competitors to Adobe will never conquer Adobe’s market share though attentive detail to application interface and functional consistencies unless Adobe’s product is rendered completely non-functional by those errors. This, of course, is not the case.
Anyway, great work in noting these inconsistencies. I think it takes a great eye to spot them when in development, and not after the fact. You appear to have a talent for seeing them and I think that could be useful for a company like Adobe. In my experience in software development, seeing these things when you’re deep in the development cycle is very difficult, unless the cycle itself captures them. No development cycle captures everything, so observant people like you are incredibly valuable.
Keep up the good work!