12 ms·

Adobe software shamefully, frustratingly incompetent

75 points by mad44 18y ago

ieatpaste 18y ago
While I agree that your experience is frustrating, this is one isolated incident. Adobe has been making quality products that I've personally been using for the past 10 years.
- old-gregg 18y ago
  One isolated incident? Please... Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows? I don't have anything against Adobe, I haven't ever spent a dime on their software, so who am I to complain, however: Just about the only reason I need to reboot my Mac is whenever I watch flash video (southparkstudios.com) and forget to close it before I shut the lid down. When laptop wakes up, it's frozen and I can't kill the browser. Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound, but it also crashes regularly and generally looks and feels completely fucked up: wrong font rendering, steals focus and mouse clicks form the browser, etc. Ughh.. Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world. And finally, their ridiculous Flash implementation burns my lap, I'm not kidding - whenever I visit a heavily flash-infected site, my MBP gets burning hot even for small video inserts on ESPN. BTW it also greatly reduces my battery time. Adobe software is probably the only reason why surfing the web on a 5 year old PC is a very unpleasant experience. They are one of these old, big fat monopolies the world would be better without, but we have no choice. Suggesting switching to GIMP isn't an argument. All our designers use Photoshop and nobody needs conversion headaches, Adobe owns the industry, it's called the vendor lock-in.
  - ijntybvrt 18y ago
    >Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows? Is that really serious? OK so Adobe9 doesn't work on Vista, you can't rollback to 8 and Adobe's site won't let you download 8 if you are on Vista. But that's not really serious for the majority of PDF users who are happy to fiddle with the registry to fix things but aren't capable of installing Foxit.
  - GeneralMaximus 18y ago
    I've experienced the same performance issues with the Flash plugin on OS X. I use the iStat menus to keep a tab on my CPU usage, RAM usage and system temperature. Browsing the web takes very little CPU, and there are spikes in CPU usage only when I open a new page and the browser tries to render it. Just reading a webpage takes no CPU, as expected. Temperature remains in the range of 35 to 45 degrees Celsius. Enter Flash. CPU usage oscillates rapidly between 0% and 30%, sometimes even going upto 70%. The temperature rises to 70 degrees Celsius. This problem is not just Mac-related. I've experienced high CPU usage even on my Linux PC. IMHO, Flash is pure evil.
  - wizlb 18y ago
    "Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world." I guess you hate apt and yum too? Gee, having a list of programs that are installed is really lame. Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg. Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish.
  - katz 18y ago
    What amazes me is that Adobe Acrobat gets larger and larger in every new version. And it always wants to access the internet. I don't know about flash - I disable it by default. Disabling it gets rid of both annoying moving advertisements and crap plugins...
    - zmimon 18y ago
      Yep. Add to that, the acrobat installer, silently without notice or any option to avoid it, installs Adobe AIR without your consent. I take this as a sign of a company entering a stage of decline. Successful companies on the rise do not need to use subterfuge to get deployment of their products. When a company starts to become hostile to its own customers you can tell the rot has set in. These days it is nearly impossible to download simple software without getting crapware along side it (Sun is another prime offender, and even Flash tries to shove toolbars down your throat.).
  - LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
    Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound I walked a friend through the installation of Ubuntu on his laptop last week. The single sticking point we had was Flash's poor interaction with the sound system. That one issue took longer than the entire rest of the setup process.
  - fwrwejrghzxclm 18y ago
    "Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world." I guess you hate apt and yum too? Gee, having a list of programs that are installed is really lame. Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg. Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish. (originally posted by user: wizlb)
    - old-gregg 18y ago
      Lame? Mounting a DMG is no different from unpacking an archive, but unlike self-extracting executables this operation is 100% safe since no code gets to run. This is much better than "Are you fucking insane to run this?!" scary dialog boxes that Windows throws at you when you click on a downloaded .exe. Do you know how many people actually do get scared and delete your precious app instead? Second, inside of a .dmg you normally find an application bundle that you simply copy into your Applications folder. What can possibly be simpler than copying a file?
- psyklic 18y ago
  I agree, I think this is kind of ridiculous. I installed many of their CS4 products (non-trial) a few weeks ago. I did not notice anything out of the ordinary or feel that it was an overwhelming process.
thinkcomp 18y ago
The majority of those files actually have nothing to do with Flash--they're the help system, and it's frustrated me too that someone at Adobe thinks that every single help page for every single product should have its own static HTML file that sits on my hard drive. It's completely stupid. Check out http://www.dearadobe.com http://www.dearadobe.com for more constructive criticism (which I may have initially found through Hacker News, but I don't really remember).
dcurtis 18y ago
This is not how it has always been. The quality of Adobe products has gone down over the last few versions. CS4 is the worst. Photoshop has an incredible number of bugs. So many that it is almost unusable. It occasionally crashes while trying to save a file, which is the worst user experience infraction possible. I hope they fix this crap. It's getting more bloated every revision, and their UI is becoming more and more bizarre with each revision (why did they hack OS X to put window resizers on all four sides? It just makes it impossible to click behind Photoshop).
- neovive 18y ago
  I think Adobe realizes this and going forward is going to have to make some changes. They are in the midst of transitioning from a desktop software company to a platform provider (Flash Platform, PDF and Flex) and are still integrating the wide range of apps that they have purchased over the years. Unfortunately, at this point, it would be hard for them to justify completely rewriting their core apps and possibly miss future releases (e.g. CS5) which is a major part of their earnings. At some point, their new online apps and Eclipse-based products will mature and they will slowly begin to fix (or trim) things on the desktop side. Hopefully, this comes sooner rather than later.
- joe_the_user 18y ago
  I have always had a serious problem with Adobe's UI style in Adobe app I have ever tried. Corel graphics applications seem so much intuitive that I feel they give a measurable increase in productivity. Too bad they are generally not accepted for professional work.
  - access_denied 18y ago
    Yeah, I started out with Corel Draw! 3. What an app! I loved it. Pitty the Mac versions were crashy beyond insanity. I would have re-switched otherwise.
jrockway 18y ago
Isn't proprietary software nice? It doesn't work well, you have to pay for it, and you are legally prohibited from fixing it. Sounds like a great deal.
- dasil003 18y ago
  And yet I'm not flocking to the Gimp download site, why not?
  - jrockway 18y ago
    Because you've convinced yourself that you need some feature it doesn't have. So instead you pay $900 for something that doesn't work right either, and then you "make fun of me" on a social news site. Clearly you win!
    - tom_rath 18y ago
      I paid around $150 for Jasc's Paint Shop over five years ago. It gave me 90% of the features of Photoshop at around 15% of the price. It's worked fine from day one through to today and I've not had to torture myself with mysterious config file adjustments every time I upgrade my o/s. The hassle saved has been worth every penny.
      - joe_the_user 18y ago
        The problem is that 90% of the features is not good enough much of the time. I am not a designer but I know enough about design to know that getting the last pixel right is often 90% of expertise. It is a different world from software.
    - wyday 18y ago
      GIMP vs. Photoshop isn't just about features. It's about polish. I don't think I'll be able to convince you of this, but proprietary apps are usually more polished than the open source counterparts. I'm talking about every sense of the word polish: usability, reasonable bug levels, compatibility, etc. It's not that open source is bad. It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do (real usability testing, compatibility, etc.).
proee 18y ago
I agree with this article 100%. My latest installs have been on windows and it's the same story. In order to download a product you need to do the following: 1.)Register for Trial 2.)Download installer Software 3.)Download Product (Freeaking HUGE Arse Files 1GB) 4.)Run installer (starts to uncompress the download - takes forever) 5.)Run real installer (again, takes forever) 6.)Jump through tons on splash screen startup nags 7.)Finally get software to start - my computer with dual core processor now crawls to a hault. 8.)Trial expires, but Adobe "auto updater" still thinks I want updates for my expired trial???? 9.)Unistall (get coffee and wait 30 minutes - no joke) FAIL
- jcromartie 18y ago
  Trust me, deadling with the real discs is just as frustrating. I don't know where they went wrong along the way, but it's a hopeless mess now.
  - katamole 18y ago
    Reminds me of the trouble a large number of users had trying to install CS3 on Vista. The installer wouldn't initialise properly, and of course it didn't print any meaningful errors. Eventually I found a fix for this on someone's blog which suggested changing one of the environment variables. After searching the Adobe forums and finding many users with the same problem, it seemed pretty obvious that Adobe just didn't know what the solution was. Edit: found the relevant paragraph in the below mentioned Adobe blog: "In CS3, there were some serious problems that customers faced and the time it took to resolve those issues in customer support made the initial experience with CS3 painful for some customers." Painful? Oh yes...
callmeed 18y ago
I've been using Photoshop since version 3 (first version with layers) but I don't think it's had a "must have" feature since version 7. However, I think that's just a trait of very mature software. Been using Flash since it was called FutureSplash. I develop on Flash CS3 almost daily Is Adobe software frustrating? Yes, at times. Is it incompetent? No, I wouldn't say so. And this line: >> Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product. Well, that's just silly.
joshwa 18y ago
An illustrated version of this rant: http://www.betalogue.com/2008/11/13/adobe-cs4-installer/ http://www.betalogue.com/2008/11/13/adobe-cs4-installer/ ...and a response from Adobe: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/12/notes_from_installer_mgmt.html http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/12/notes_from_installer_mg...
- Maro 18y ago
  Interesting reading! The response from Adobe can be summed up pretty concisely: their products have reached such complexity and bloat that they can't do much about it. (Given the management's hunger for regular releases and spending as little as possible on development.) I used to work for a company which was in the exact same state, and among other things I was in charge of creating the installers, so I've seen this exact phenomenon up close and personal. Smart engineers were leaving the company left and right.
carlosrr 18y ago
He mentions wanting an open source solution for developing on Chumby. I have used Sprouts [http://www.projectsprouts.org/ http://www.projectsprouts.org/] for some Chumby projects and I have been very happy with it. It doesn't have a drag and drop UI like Flash (it's more for hackers than for average users) but it is easy to work with and to setup.
mojonixon 18y ago
http://seenonslash.com/node/2411 http://seenonslash.com/node/2411 That's all I have to say on this subject.
sfphotoarts 18y ago
wow, what a lot of whining. Just because you have a slow old mac you can't really complain too much about this. And doing the math on 2/3 1000 at a typical flash programmer hourly of say $100, that means it took you over six hours of time... Something I find very hard to believe. I would suggest upgrading to an Intel Mac. In general Adobe products are some of the most functional, feature rich and reliable on the market. Photoshop is an amazing piece of software. Saying it has 'ugliest, least intuitive, inconsistent UI’ is just plain wrong. Adapting to the differences in UI's between products and operating systems has never been much of a challenge; it is a complex piece of software, but then so is gcc, but I also don't complain about that. Complex problems require sophisticated and complex solutions. Not everything can be Mickey Mouse. Welcome to the world of programming...
petercooper 18y ago
So it took him 2 hours to install so I guess he consults at about $300 an hour.. then he complains that it's too expensive? This “free trial” download experience does not encourage me to shell out the $995 Adobe wants for the product. (Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product.) If you can buy a key tool for merely three hours of your labor, it's cheap. It's equivalent to someone on minimum wage buying a DVD or something..
bonaldi 18y ago
I'm surprised at the number of Adobe supporters in this thread; it's Stockholm syndrome-esque. For those who like the UI: Sure, it's better than the GiMP. But it's still awful. http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ has been on HN before. It's a compendium of more-or-less small things that are just howlingly wrong. For those suggesting the installers aren't awful, Bynkii has spent plenty of time destroying that idea (and, yes, he swears): http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/dear_adobe.html http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/dear_adobe.html (the installer rant that ultimately led to a meeting with Adobe and the installer team starting a blog) http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/why_wont_they_stop.html http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/why_wont_they_stop.ht... (Why install two out-of-date copies of Opera, Adobe?) http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/02/adobe_takes_back_the_crown.html http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/02/adobe_takes_back_the_... (Comedy licensing ineptness) http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/11/dont_manage_the_message_tell_t.html http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/11/dont_manage_the_messa... (on John Nack's message-massaging over the installer nightmare) So, Adobe software "shamefully, frustratingly incompetent"? Seems spot-on to me. The most frustrating and depressing thing is that it wasn't always this way. This is the firm that gave us Postscript, Photoshop, usable digital typography, Illustrator, PDFs and arguably played a large role in the birth of DTP, FFS. How have they become this marketing-encumbered hell-shop, trying to ram Flash everywhere and stamping all over their heritage?
- joe_the_user 18y ago
  Part of the reason for both Adobe's awfulness and for it's loyal following is that it has been the most faithful "paper emulator" of any major software company. Their software emulates all the awful pen-and-paper techniques that real artist used before there were computers. PDF is like having a real piece of paper jammed awkwardly inside the cover of your laptop and trying to push it around a track ball. And so forth. The thing is those folks who knew the paper-pencil techniques has generally been those who had no use for learning anything about computers, including how to use efficiently or whether there were alternatives. So Adobe's paper emulation has massive, undeserved loyalty built into it.
  - access_denied 18y ago
lgriffith 18y ago
The Three Laws of Software (with apologies to The Three Laws of Thermodynamics) 1. Software written by someone else is bad software aka. You can't get ahead. 2. Software written by me more than six weeks ago is bad software. aka. You can't even break even. 3. Its been at least two months since I have written software of any significance. aka. You are behind before you start. The bottom line is that software universally sucks. The reason we keep trying to make and use it, its far better than what it replaces. Maybe, if we try real hard, we will finally get it right. If history is any guide, don't hold your breath.
- davi 18y ago
  Agreed. See also these pearls from Greenspun [1]: Computers are the tools of the devil. ... Everything I've learned about computers at MIT I've boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, he can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't. [1] http://books.google.com/books?id=RpCERTXtzJIC&pg=PA202&lpg=PA202&dq=philip+greenspun+software+devil&source=bl&ots=RSjZA6HmFy&sig=q_yH2aRbduIo_G0IHj5VKmz0vuM&hl=en&ei=8WmcSayrB4GCtweOt6nfBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result http://books.google.com/books?id=RpCERTXtzJIC&pg=PA202&#...
  - lgriffith 18y ago
    At least the Unix wizard can pretend he is going to make it work. All he needs to do is pipe this into that and write just one more filter. Then he can .... By that time both he are you are lost in a blur of keystrokes and flashing characters on the display. As you leave the computer room, you can hear him muttering: "Oh, damn. I am in the wrong shell. I have to do it this other way...tap...tap...tap...." The truth is, it doesn't really work there either. You are simply tired of waiting and are willing to accept almost anything to stop the annoying tapping noise and the endless muttering. Hey, it keeps us off the streets so it isn't all bad.
    - davi 18y ago
      No, no, don't you see, that's a bad wizard. You just have to go on a quest for a good wizard. Then everything will be fine.
weegee 18y ago
The main problem is this guy is still using a G4 Mac. My iMac G4 isn't even powerful enough to render a YouTube video smoothly for chrissakes.
- Devilboy 18y ago
  Thats also Adobe's fault (Youtube vids = Flash)
juliend2 18y ago
Over time, the Adobe softwares got significantly slower and the features amount did not followed. We have pretty much the same old features than photoshop 6, but much much slower. I was running Photoshop 5 on a Celeron 300mhz when i began learning it. I will not upgrade from cs3 to cs4 anytime soon.
malkia 18y ago
What always suprised me of INSTALLER applications (More specifically windows) is that those are compressed .EXE files that get uncompressed to your TEMP folder as another archive, that then gets decompressed again (and again... )... InstallShield is prime suspect. Then again, EULA (And please, get a pet - cat or dog to sign them) stuff coming from Microsoft needs always to be an .EXE - why - well because you need some kind of dialog to sign off the EULA (even a .doc file might come as EXE). I just hate installer programs... And Adobe screwing up on the Mac where this could be avoided by using plain-old DMG files - is just stoopid.
jdowdell 18y ago
Hi, the CS3 installer did indeed take longer than the current installers. More context here: http://blogs.adobe.com/OOBE/ http://blogs.adobe.com/OOBE/ (Lots of text here at Hacker News on that year-old plaint...?) btw, if you're developing for Chumby, there are many options besides Adobe's Creative Suite: http://osflash.org/ http://osflash.org/ http://swftools.org/ http://swftools.org/ jd/adobe
nazgulnarsil 18y ago
as the UI of popular products bloats over time, a market opportunity opens up for the people that the app originally served: people who just wanted a simple_____. Mint.com is a perfect example of filling the vacuum left by accounting programs like quickbooks becoming too complicated for the average person.
jonasb 18y ago
I haven't used Photoshop in years, so I can't really comment. But I was a fan of Illustrator for a long time, and Lightroom is probably one of the best UIs ever. The thing is that when you get proficient in their apps you get really productive, so I can see why professionals go for their products.
- blasdel 18y ago
  Lightroom is an extraodinary case -- the entire UI was written from scratch, mostly in Lua, by a new team at Adobe. It wasn't bought from some other shithead company like most of their products. The only code that's shared with other apps is the image processing engine.
trezor 18y ago
I have no issues with Adobe software. Granted I haven't tried CS4 and Adobe Acrobat had a period where it got constantly worse before Adobe got their act together. Still it seems to me that mostly there's only the Mac crowd which is complaining here. Something I find amusing since they typically market the Mac as a machine ideal for creative work.
evaneykelen 18y ago
...and insult added to injury: if you ever try to re-install your (purchased, legitimate) copies of Adobe products you're faced with a very 'unpleasant' (I wanted to use an other word) activation process, referring you back to files on CDs that are simply not there, rejecting perfectly fine serial numbers and randomly quitting the installation process. Reinstallation tip: call the Adobe support desk and explain your situation, they can somehow reset the activation process. This call will cost you an hour or more but believe me, reinstalling will cost you 2-3 hours if you try it yourself.
miratom 18y ago
"Maybe Adobe is used to Windows users accepting this level of user insult." Why are mac people always so freakin arrogant?

75 points by mad44 18y ago

While I agree that your experience is frustrating, this is one isolated incident. Adobe has been making quality products that I've personally been using for the past 10 years.

old-gregg 18y ago
One isolated incident? Please... Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows? I don't have anything against Adobe, I haven't ever spent a dime on their software, so who am I to complain, however: Just about the only reason I need to reboot my Mac is whenever I watch flash video (southparkstudios.com) and forget to close it before I shut the lid down. When laptop wakes up, it's frozen and I can't kill the browser. Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound, but it also crashes regularly and generally looks and feels completely fucked up: wrong font rendering, steals focus and mouse clicks form the browser, etc. Ughh.. Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world. And finally, their ridiculous Flash implementation burns my lap, I'm not kidding - whenever I visit a heavily flash-infected site, my MBP gets burning hot even for small video inserts on ESPN. BTW it also greatly reduces my battery time. Adobe software is probably the only reason why surfing the web on a 5 year old PC is a very unpleasant experience. They are one of these old, big fat monopolies the world would be better without, but we have no choice. Suggesting switching to GIMP isn't an argument. All our designers use Photoshop and nobody needs conversion headaches, Adobe owns the industry, it's called the vendor lock-in.
- ijntybvrt 18y ago
  >Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows? Is that really serious? OK so Adobe9 doesn't work on Vista, you can't rollback to 8 and Adobe's site won't let you download 8 if you are on Vista. But that's not really serious for the majority of PDF users who are happy to fiddle with the registry to fix things but aren't capable of installing Foxit.
- GeneralMaximus 18y ago
  I've experienced the same performance issues with the Flash plugin on OS X. I use the iStat menus to keep a tab on my CPU usage, RAM usage and system temperature. Browsing the web takes very little CPU, and there are spikes in CPU usage only when I open a new page and the browser tries to render it. Just reading a webpage takes no CPU, as expected. Temperature remains in the range of 35 to 45 degrees Celsius. Enter Flash. CPU usage oscillates rapidly between 0% and 30%, sometimes even going upto 70%. The temperature rises to 70 degrees Celsius. This problem is not just Mac-related. I've experienced high CPU usage even on my Linux PC. IMHO, Flash is pure evil.
- wizlb 18y ago
  "Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world." I guess you hate apt and yum too? Gee, having a list of programs that are installed is really lame. Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg. Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish.
- katz 18y ago
  What amazes me is that Adobe Acrobat gets larger and larger in every new version. And it always wants to access the internet. I don't know about flash - I disable it by default. Disabling it gets rid of both annoying moving advertisements and crap plugins...
  - zmimon 18y ago
    Yep. Add to that, the acrobat installer, silently without notice or any option to avoid it, installs Adobe AIR without your consent. I take this as a sign of a company entering a stage of decline. Successful companies on the rise do not need to use subterfuge to get deployment of their products. When a company starts to become hostile to its own customers you can tell the rot has set in. These days it is nearly impossible to download simple software without getting crapware along side it (Sun is another prime offender, and even Flash tries to shove toolbars down your throat.).
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
  Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound I walked a friend through the installation of Ubuntu on his laptop last week. The single sticking point we had was Flash's poor interaction with the sound system. That one issue took longer than the entire rest of the setup process.
- fwrwejrghzxclm 18y ago
  "Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world." I guess you hate apt and yum too? Gee, having a list of programs that are installed is really lame. Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg. Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish. (originally posted by user: wizlb)
  - old-gregg 18y ago
    Lame? Mounting a DMG is no different from unpacking an archive, but unlike self-extracting executables this operation is 100% safe since no code gets to run. This is much better than "Are you fucking insane to run this?!" scary dialog boxes that Windows throws at you when you click on a downloaded .exe. Do you know how many people actually do get scared and delete your precious app instead? Second, inside of a .dmg you normally find an application bundle that you simply copy into your Applications folder. What can possibly be simpler than copying a file?
psyklic 18y ago
I agree, I think this is kind of ridiculous. I installed many of their CS4 products (non-trial) a few weeks ago. I did not notice anything out of the ordinary or feel that it was an overwhelming process.

thinkcomp 18y ago

The majority of those files actually have nothing to do with Flash--they're the help system, and it's frustrated me too that someone at Adobe thinks that every single help page for every single product should have its own static HTML file that sits on my hard drive. It's completely stupid. Check out http://www.dearadobe.com http://www.dearadobe.com for more constructive criticism (which I may have initially found through Hacker News, but I don't really remember).

dcurtis 18y ago

This is not how it has always been. The quality of Adobe products has gone down over the last few versions. CS4 is the worst. Photoshop has an incredible number of bugs. So many that it is almost unusable. It occasionally crashes while trying to save a file, which is the worst user experience infraction possible. I hope they fix this crap. It's getting more bloated every revision, and their UI is becoming more and more bizarre with each revision (why did they hack OS X to put window resizers on all four sides? It just makes it impossible to click behind Photoshop).

neovive 18y ago
I think Adobe realizes this and going forward is going to have to make some changes. They are in the midst of transitioning from a desktop software company to a platform provider (Flash Platform, PDF and Flex) and are still integrating the wide range of apps that they have purchased over the years. Unfortunately, at this point, it would be hard for them to justify completely rewriting their core apps and possibly miss future releases (e.g. CS5) which is a major part of their earnings. At some point, their new online apps and Eclipse-based products will mature and they will slowly begin to fix (or trim) things on the desktop side. Hopefully, this comes sooner rather than later.
joe_the_user 18y ago
I have always had a serious problem with Adobe's UI style in Adobe app I have ever tried. Corel graphics applications seem so much intuitive that I feel they give a measurable increase in productivity. Too bad they are generally not accepted for professional work.
- access_denied 18y ago
  Yeah, I started out with Corel Draw! 3. What an app! I loved it. Pitty the Mac versions were crashy beyond insanity. I would have re-switched otherwise.

jrockway 18y ago

Isn't proprietary software nice? It doesn't work well, you have to pay for it, and you are legally prohibited from fixing it. Sounds like a great deal.

dasil003 18y ago
And yet I'm not flocking to the Gimp download site, why not?
- jrockway 18y ago
  Because you've convinced yourself that you need some feature it doesn't have. So instead you pay $900 for something that doesn't work right either, and then you "make fun of me" on a social news site. Clearly you win!
  - tom_rath 18y ago
    I paid around $150 for Jasc's Paint Shop over five years ago. It gave me 90% of the features of Photoshop at around 15% of the price. It's worked fine from day one through to today and I've not had to torture myself with mysterious config file adjustments every time I upgrade my o/s. The hassle saved has been worth every penny.
    - joe_the_user 18y ago
      The problem is that 90% of the features is not good enough much of the time. I am not a designer but I know enough about design to know that getting the last pixel right is often 90% of expertise. It is a different world from software.
  - wyday 18y ago
    GIMP vs. Photoshop isn't just about features. It's about polish. I don't think I'll be able to convince you of this, but proprietary apps are usually more polished than the open source counterparts. I'm talking about every sense of the word polish: usability, reasonable bug levels, compatibility, etc. It's not that open source is bad. It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do (real usability testing, compatibility, etc.).

proee 18y ago

I agree with this article 100%. My latest installs have been on windows and it's the same story. In order to download a product you need to do the following: 1.)Register for Trial 2.)Download installer Software 3.)Download Product (Freeaking HUGE Arse Files 1GB) 4.)Run installer (starts to uncompress the download - takes forever) 5.)Run real installer (again, takes forever) 6.)Jump through tons on splash screen startup nags 7.)Finally get software to start - my computer with dual core processor now crawls to a hault. 8.)Trial expires, but Adobe "auto updater" still thinks I want updates for my expired trial???? 9.)Unistall (get coffee and wait 30 minutes - no joke) FAIL

jcromartie 18y ago
Trust me, deadling with the real discs is just as frustrating. I don't know where they went wrong along the way, but it's a hopeless mess now.
- katamole 18y ago
  Reminds me of the trouble a large number of users had trying to install CS3 on Vista. The installer wouldn't initialise properly, and of course it didn't print any meaningful errors. Eventually I found a fix for this on someone's blog which suggested changing one of the environment variables. After searching the Adobe forums and finding many users with the same problem, it seemed pretty obvious that Adobe just didn't know what the solution was. Edit: found the relevant paragraph in the below mentioned Adobe blog: "In CS3, there were some serious problems that customers faced and the time it took to resolve those issues in customer support made the initial experience with CS3 painful for some customers." Painful? Oh yes...

callmeed 18y ago

I've been using Photoshop since version 3 (first version with layers) but I don't think it's had a "must have" feature since version 7. However, I think that's just a trait of very mature software. Been using Flash since it was called FutureSplash. I develop on Flash CS3 almost daily Is Adobe software frustrating? Yes, at times. Is it incompetent? No, I wouldn't say so. And this line: >> Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product. Well, that's just silly.

joshwa 18y ago

An illustrated version of this rant: http://www.betalogue.com/2008/11/13/adobe-cs4-installer/ http://www.betalogue.com/2008/11/13/adobe-cs4-installer/ ...and a response from Adobe: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/12/notes_from_installer_mgmt.html http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/12/notes_from_installer_mg...

Maro 18y ago
Interesting reading! The response from Adobe can be summed up pretty concisely: their products have reached such complexity and bloat that they can't do much about it. (Given the management's hunger for regular releases and spending as little as possible on development.) I used to work for a company which was in the exact same state, and among other things I was in charge of creating the installers, so I've seen this exact phenomenon up close and personal. Smart engineers were leaving the company left and right.

carlosrr 18y ago

He mentions wanting an open source solution for developing on Chumby. I have used Sprouts [http://www.projectsprouts.org/ http://www.projectsprouts.org/] for some Chumby projects and I have been very happy with it. It doesn't have a drag and drop UI like Flash (it's more for hackers than for average users) but it is easy to work with and to setup.

mojonixon 18y ago

http://seenonslash.com/node/2411 http://seenonslash.com/node/2411 That's all I have to say on this subject.

sfphotoarts 18y ago

wow, what a lot of whining. Just because you have a slow old mac you can't really complain too much about this. And doing the math on 2/3 1000 at a typical flash programmer hourly of say $100, that means it took you over six hours of time... Something I find very hard to believe. I would suggest upgrading to an Intel Mac. In general Adobe products are some of the most functional, feature rich and reliable on the market. Photoshop is an amazing piece of software. Saying it has 'ugliest, least intuitive, inconsistent UI’ is just plain wrong. Adapting to the differences in UI's between products and operating systems has never been much of a challenge; it is a complex piece of software, but then so is gcc, but I also don't complain about that. Complex problems require sophisticated and complex solutions. Not everything can be Mickey Mouse. Welcome to the world of programming...

petercooper 18y ago

So it took him 2 hours to install so I guess he consults at about $300 an hour.. then he complains that it's too expensive? This “free trial” download experience does not encourage me to shell out the $995 Adobe wants for the product. (Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product.) If you can buy a key tool for merely three hours of your labor, it's cheap. It's equivalent to someone on minimum wage buying a DVD or something..

bonaldi 18y ago

I'm surprised at the number of Adobe supporters in this thread; it's Stockholm syndrome-esque. For those who like the UI: Sure, it's better than the GiMP. But it's still awful. http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ has been on HN before. It's a compendium of more-or-less small things that are just howlingly wrong. For those suggesting the installers aren't awful, Bynkii has spent plenty of time destroying that idea (and, yes, he swears): http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/dear_adobe.html http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/dear_adobe.html (the installer rant that ultimately led to a meeting with Adobe and the installer team starting a blog) http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/why_wont_they_stop.html http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/why_wont_they_stop.ht... (Why install two out-of-date copies of Opera, Adobe?) http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/02/adobe_takes_back_the_crown.html http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/02/adobe_takes_back_the_... (Comedy licensing ineptness) http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/11/dont_manage_the_message_tell_t.html http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/11/dont_manage_the_messa... (on John Nack's message-massaging over the installer nightmare) So, Adobe software "shamefully, frustratingly incompetent"? Seems spot-on to me. The most frustrating and depressing thing is that it wasn't always this way. This is the firm that gave us Postscript, Photoshop, usable digital typography, Illustrator, PDFs and arguably played a large role in the birth of DTP, FFS. How have they become this marketing-encumbered hell-shop, trying to ram Flash everywhere and stamping all over their heritage?

joe_the_user 18y ago
Part of the reason for both Adobe's awfulness and for it's loyal following is that it has been the most faithful "paper emulator" of any major software company. Their software emulates all the awful pen-and-paper techniques that real artist used before there were computers. PDF is like having a real piece of paper jammed awkwardly inside the cover of your laptop and trying to push it around a track ball. And so forth. The thing is those folks who knew the paper-pencil techniques has generally been those who had no use for learning anything about computers, including how to use efficiently or whether there were alternatives. So Adobe's paper emulation has massive, undeserved loyalty built into it.
- access_denied 18y ago

lgriffith 18y ago

The Three Laws of Software (with apologies to The Three Laws of Thermodynamics) 1. Software written by someone else is bad software aka. You can't get ahead. 2. Software written by me more than six weeks ago is bad software. aka. You can't even break even. 3. Its been at least two months since I have written software of any significance. aka. You are behind before you start. The bottom line is that software universally sucks. The reason we keep trying to make and use it, its far better than what it replaces. Maybe, if we try real hard, we will finally get it right. If history is any guide, don't hold your breath.

davi 18y ago
Agreed. See also these pearls from Greenspun [1]: Computers are the tools of the devil. ... Everything I've learned about computers at MIT I've boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, he can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't. [1] http://books.google.com/books?id=RpCERTXtzJIC&pg=PA202&lpg=PA202&dq=philip+greenspun+software+devil&source=bl&ots=RSjZA6HmFy&sig=q_yH2aRbduIo_G0IHj5VKmz0vuM&hl=en&ei=8WmcSayrB4GCtweOt6nfBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result http://books.google.com/books?id=RpCERTXtzJIC&pg=PA202&#...
- lgriffith 18y ago
  At least the Unix wizard can pretend he is going to make it work. All he needs to do is pipe this into that and write just one more filter. Then he can .... By that time both he are you are lost in a blur of keystrokes and flashing characters on the display. As you leave the computer room, you can hear him muttering: "Oh, damn. I am in the wrong shell. I have to do it this other way...tap...tap...tap...." The truth is, it doesn't really work there either. You are simply tired of waiting and are willing to accept almost anything to stop the annoying tapping noise and the endless muttering. Hey, it keeps us off the streets so it isn't all bad.
  - davi 18y ago
    No, no, don't you see, that's a bad wizard. You just have to go on a quest for a good wizard. Then everything will be fine.

weegee 18y ago

The main problem is this guy is still using a G4 Mac. My iMac G4 isn't even powerful enough to render a YouTube video smoothly for chrissakes.

Devilboy 18y ago
Thats also Adobe's fault (Youtube vids = Flash)

juliend2 18y ago

Over time, the Adobe softwares got significantly slower and the features amount did not followed. We have pretty much the same old features than photoshop 6, but much much slower. I was running Photoshop 5 on a Celeron 300mhz when i began learning it. I will not upgrade from cs3 to cs4 anytime soon.

malkia 18y ago

What always suprised me of INSTALLER applications (More specifically windows) is that those are compressed .EXE files that get uncompressed to your TEMP folder as another archive, that then gets decompressed again (and again... )... InstallShield is prime suspect. Then again, EULA (And please, get a pet - cat or dog to sign them) stuff coming from Microsoft needs always to be an .EXE - why - well because you need some kind of dialog to sign off the EULA (even a .doc file might come as EXE). I just hate installer programs... And Adobe screwing up on the Mac where this could be avoided by using plain-old DMG files - is just stoopid.

jdowdell 18y ago

Hi, the CS3 installer did indeed take longer than the current installers. More context here: http://blogs.adobe.com/OOBE/ http://blogs.adobe.com/OOBE/ (Lots of text here at Hacker News on that year-old plaint...?) btw, if you're developing for Chumby, there are many options besides Adobe's Creative Suite: http://osflash.org/ http://osflash.org/ http://swftools.org/ http://swftools.org/ jd/adobe

nazgulnarsil 18y ago

as the UI of popular products bloats over time, a market opportunity opens up for the people that the app originally served: people who just wanted a simple_____. Mint.com is a perfect example of filling the vacuum left by accounting programs like quickbooks becoming too complicated for the average person.

jonasb 18y ago

I haven't used Photoshop in years, so I can't really comment. But I was a fan of Illustrator for a long time, and Lightroom is probably one of the best UIs ever. The thing is that when you get proficient in their apps you get really productive, so I can see why professionals go for their products.

blasdel 18y ago
Lightroom is an extraodinary case -- the entire UI was written from scratch, mostly in Lua, by a new team at Adobe. It wasn't bought from some other shithead company like most of their products. The only code that's shared with other apps is the image processing engine.

trezor 18y ago

I have no issues with Adobe software. Granted I haven't tried CS4 and Adobe Acrobat had a period where it got constantly worse before Adobe got their act together. Still it seems to me that mostly there's only the Mac crowd which is complaining here. Something I find amusing since they typically market the Mac as a machine ideal for creative work.

evaneykelen 18y ago

...and insult added to injury: if you ever try to re-install your (purchased, legitimate) copies of Adobe products you're faced with a very 'unpleasant' (I wanted to use an other word) activation process, referring you back to files on CDs that are simply not there, rejecting perfectly fine serial numbers and randomly quitting the installation process. Reinstallation tip: call the Adobe support desk and explain your situation, they can somehow reset the activation process. This call will cost you an hour or more but believe me, reinstalling will cost you 2-3 hours if you try it yourself.

miratom 18y ago

"Maybe Adobe is used to Windows users accepting this level of user insult." Why are mac people always so freakin arrogant?