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Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in

Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. It's slow and sluggish, riddled with dark patterns and annoying pop ups, disrespects the user in every possible way, and hides basic editing functionality behind subscriptions. The trashiest piece of crap software. It's up there with MS Word (which gets progressively more bloated on Mac). Edit: Added "software" after crap for clarity.

ethin 1y ago
The only thing I use Adobe Reader/Acrobat for is converting PDFs to text. Literally that's it, and that's only because, for some PDFs, it's much better than pdftotext is.
perching_aix 1y ago
> annoying pop ups Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :) Been on mind a lot lately actually, and I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice. Not from a user perspective anyways (from a dev perspective, it's an easy way out and a "good" way to attention grab... and then not hold).
- diggan 1y ago
  > Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :) Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)
- eviks 1y ago
  Maybe when you repeatedly try to do an impossible action and don't understand more subtle UI cues? The the popup would be correctly interfering to explain the frustration of the repeated fails?
- egypturnash 1y ago
  I have a plugin for Illustrator that has several options for helping to make sure your file gets saved regularly. I have it configured to just pop up a polite little warning after fifteen minutes of unsaved work. Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am. Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.
- IChrisI 1y ago
  "Are you sure you want to close 146 tabs?"
  - Timwi 1y ago
    This is a great example of an unnecessary pop-up. There should just be an obvious way to undo it.
    - msephton 1y ago
      There is, but not everybody will know how to find it. Whereas everybody will see the warning alert. Personally, I wouldn't call this a popup because this was a result of a user action.
- wtallis 1y ago
  Consider how some developers today talk about "toast" notifications: they understand on some level that calling them pop-ups is bad, but came to a consensus that using a different name was appropriate, rather than not actually making pop-ups in the first place.
  - alexthehurst 1y ago
    But aren’t toasts fundamentally different by being intentionally designed not to block your work?
    - wtallis 1y ago
      Pop-up ads from the dark ages of the web largely weren't modal dialog boxes. For the most part, clicking to dismiss them, or clicking to bring the window you cared about back to the foreground was at least as easy as getting rid of "toast" style pop-ups. Both are intentionally distracting, neither is blocking in the sense of preventing you from continuing to interact with the window they partially obscure.
  - netsharc 1y ago
    Theme Hospital (a funny 90's game) had a cool way to do notifications, watch on the bottom left as icons pop up: https://youtu.be/26O35BOTVSI?t=693 https://youtu.be/26O35BOTVSI?t=693 Some disappear if left unclicked, I guess if the problem is no longer relevant (e.g. a patient bored of waiting leaves), and they can be attended to in any order.
- ponector 1y ago
  >> I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice How about pop-up with 2fa request? Better to have pop-up for push notification than to look for auth app by yourself.
robin_reala 1y ago
If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.
- diggan 1y ago
  > joining multiple PDFs together What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.
  - mynameismon 1y ago
    For those who have an installation of LaTeX: It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this. Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"? If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)
      - fooofw 1y ago
        pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be: pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme). [1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam
  - episteme 1y ago
maxloh 1y ago
Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Reader) is still the industry standard for PDF documents, though. I once found that a PDF file created with OnlyOffice displayed as intended on Chrome, but its embedded font couldn't be recognized or rendered correctly on Acrobat. I keep Acrobat installed only for verifying the integrity of the PDF files I've created.
- pseudosavant 1y ago
  I had to have Adobe Reader installed at my last job because there were official federal and state government PDFs we had to work with that only displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader. So they intentionally broke the documents for anything not Reader?
    - exmadscientist 1y ago
      There are multiple PDF standards. It is possible to rig up documents that display differently depending on which standards are supported. Acrobat is (or at least used to be) the only thing which truly supports them all.
- exmadscientist 1y ago
  What I miss from Acrobat is its Print dialog. Yes, really, the Print dialog. I've had to install the whole bloated mess just to get that dialog. Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.
tines 1y ago
> Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. Bravo. Reminds me of that song that goes something like "When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be me."
- hbn 1y ago
  I listen to a prank call show where one of his recurring bits is to call people who listed used items for sale to let them know that he's not interested in purchasing their item.
  - MortyWaves 1y ago
    Got a link?
    - hbn 1y ago
      Not sure if I can find a particular episode right now that has that type of call but if you look up Phone Losers of America, or The Snow Plow Show (both are the same guy) you can find lots of Craigslist calls. Here's a similar idea where he pretends to be calling from AT&T to let them know they have no incoming calls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1sxF6vN3Ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1sxF6vN3Ho
      - MortyWaves 1y ago
        That’s pretty funny. The UK had something like it called PhoneJackers for a while.
  - somat 1y ago
    "People like to tell you why they're not buying things that they never intended to buy in the first place" -- the techmoan yt channel
znpy 1y ago
Back in the days of windows xp i fell in love with Foxit Reader. It just opened PDF documents, no fuss.
pjmlp 1y ago
While I share same feelings, I do install it, because I keep getting PDFs that only Acrobat is able to process. All alternatives always fail short, especially in business context where people get inventive with PDF capabilities.

ethin 1y ago

The only thing I use Adobe Reader/Acrobat for is converting PDFs to text. Literally that's it, and that's only because, for some PDFs, it's much better than pdftotext is.

perching_aix 1y ago

> annoying pop ups Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :) Been on mind a lot lately actually, and I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice. Not from a user perspective anyways (from a dev perspective, it's an easy way out and a "good" way to attention grab... and then not hold).

diggan 1y ago
> Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :) Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)
eviks 1y ago
Maybe when you repeatedly try to do an impossible action and don't understand more subtle UI cues? The the popup would be correctly interfering to explain the frustration of the repeated fails?
egypturnash 1y ago
I have a plugin for Illustrator that has several options for helping to make sure your file gets saved regularly. I have it configured to just pop up a polite little warning after fifteen minutes of unsaved work. Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am. Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.
IChrisI 1y ago
"Are you sure you want to close 146 tabs?"
- Timwi 1y ago
  This is a great example of an unnecessary pop-up. There should just be an obvious way to undo it.
  - msephton 1y ago
    There is, but not everybody will know how to find it. Whereas everybody will see the warning alert. Personally, I wouldn't call this a popup because this was a result of a user action.
wtallis 1y ago
Consider how some developers today talk about "toast" notifications: they understand on some level that calling them pop-ups is bad, but came to a consensus that using a different name was appropriate, rather than not actually making pop-ups in the first place.
- alexthehurst 1y ago
  But aren’t toasts fundamentally different by being intentionally designed not to block your work?
  - wtallis 1y ago
    Pop-up ads from the dark ages of the web largely weren't modal dialog boxes. For the most part, clicking to dismiss them, or clicking to bring the window you cared about back to the foreground was at least as easy as getting rid of "toast" style pop-ups. Both are intentionally distracting, neither is blocking in the sense of preventing you from continuing to interact with the window they partially obscure.
- netsharc 1y ago
  Theme Hospital (a funny 90's game) had a cool way to do notifications, watch on the bottom left as icons pop up: https://youtu.be/26O35BOTVSI?t=693 https://youtu.be/26O35BOTVSI?t=693 Some disappear if left unclicked, I guess if the problem is no longer relevant (e.g. a patient bored of waiting leaves), and they can be attended to in any order.
ponector 1y ago
>> I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice How about pop-up with 2fa request? Better to have pop-up for push notification than to look for auth app by yourself.

robin_reala 1y ago

If you’re talking Mac, why on earth would you install Adobe Reader? I’m sure there’s a different set of 5% functionality for power users, but Preview does everything I need (including things like signature annotation, real redaction, joining multiple PDFs together) and it does it quickly and with everything enabled for free.

diggan 1y ago
> joining multiple PDFs together What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.
- mynameismon 1y ago
  For those who have an installation of LaTeX: It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > It is pretty easy to use LaTeX for this. Without looking it up the arguments/syntax, how do I do "join page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B"? If it's more than one CLI invocation, easy to remember/find in the shell history and less than 80 characters long, I'm not sure I'd call it easy :)
    - fooofw 1y ago
      pdfjam [1] uses a LaTeX package under the hood, is included with the TeX Live distribution and acts as a wrapper for a LaTeX package. With this, I believe your example would be: pdfjam PDF_A.pdf '2-3' PDF_B.pdf '7-23' --outfile joined.pdf I'll admit that I had to look it up but that only took about 3 minutes (it's an example in the readme). [1] https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam https://github.com/pdfjam/pdfjam
- episteme 1y ago

maxloh 1y ago

Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Reader) is still the industry standard for PDF documents, though. I once found that a PDF file created with OnlyOffice displayed as intended on Chrome, but its embedded font couldn't be recognized or rendered correctly on Acrobat. I keep Acrobat installed only for verifying the integrity of the PDF files I've created.

pseudosavant 1y ago
I had to have Adobe Reader installed at my last job because there were official federal and state government PDFs we had to work with that only displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader. So they intentionally broke the documents for anything not Reader?
  - exmadscientist 1y ago
    There are multiple PDF standards. It is possible to rig up documents that display differently depending on which standards are supported. Acrobat is (or at least used to be) the only thing which truly supports them all.
exmadscientist 1y ago
What I miss from Acrobat is its Print dialog. Yes, really, the Print dialog. I've had to install the whole bloated mess just to get that dialog. Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.

tines 1y ago

> Adobe Reader is the first app I don't install on new machines. Bravo. Reminds me of that song that goes something like "When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be me."

hbn 1y ago
I listen to a prank call show where one of his recurring bits is to call people who listed used items for sale to let them know that he's not interested in purchasing their item.
- MortyWaves 1y ago
  Got a link?
  - hbn 1y ago
    Not sure if I can find a particular episode right now that has that type of call but if you look up Phone Losers of America, or The Snow Plow Show (both are the same guy) you can find lots of Craigslist calls. Here's a similar idea where he pretends to be calling from AT&T to let them know they have no incoming calls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1sxF6vN3Ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1sxF6vN3Ho
    - MortyWaves 1y ago
      That’s pretty funny. The UK had something like it called PhoneJackers for a while.
- somat 1y ago
  "People like to tell you why they're not buying things that they never intended to buy in the first place" -- the techmoan yt channel

znpy 1y ago

Back in the days of windows xp i fell in love with Foxit Reader. It just opened PDF documents, no fuss.

pjmlp 1y ago

While I share same feelings, I do install it, because I keep getting PDFs that only Acrobat is able to process. All alternatives always fail short, especially in business context where people get inventive with PDF capabilities.