1FPS|by David Chartier

I know the title’s snarky and that there are some genuinely useful reasons for letting PDFs display ads (after all, a URL isn’t the only way to visit a commercial publication). Still, seeing this headline got a knee-jerk “wtf” reaction out of me considering all the crap, especially Flash, that Adobe is dumping into PDFs these days.

I’m finally getting around to installing a few CS3 Web Premium components on my MacBook Air, and was again annoyed by Adobe’s installer requirements of quitting all open browsers. There’s no reason to require this, and all my Adobe apps worked just fine even though I restarted both Safari and Firefox immediately after the installation began. Adobe’s similarly terrible software and installation experiences across the rest of its products are well-documented on various other sites.

Adobe, you are a design company, and probably the Earth’s largest supplier of design software. You can do so much better than this.

So here’s a bug report I just submitted to Adobe. I encourage you to send a similar message if you’re fed up with Adobe’s terrible software experiences:

Concise problem statement: Your software installation experience is a crime against the technology industry.
Steps to reproduce bug:
1. Install Creative Suite
2. Get warned that Safari and Firefox need to be quit to install Creative Suite. I then quit said apps.
3. Restart both browsers right after installation begins, continue scratching head as to why in the hell I had to stop everything I was doing and quit my browsers in the first place.
Results: Everything works fine, can find no apparent reason for shutting down browsers and breaking my workflow just to install Adobe software.
Expected results: Better software and installation experience after spending hundreds of dollars on a package from a **design** company as massive as Adobe.

Prompted by Jamie Phelps’ post about Adobe Reader’s aggravating hijack of PDF viewing in browsers, I finally got inspired to track down Adobe’s feedback page and left them this:

Installing Acrobat Professional CS3 apparently hijacks Mac OS X’s default PDF viewer in my browser, Safari. Now your fat, bloated Acrobat/PDF plug-in starts up whenever I need to read a PDF from a website, and I’ve looked high and low for a way to turn this behavior off.

This is wrong.

Unequivocally, inarguably wrong. Stop it.

I don’t want a reply from you. I don’t want some excuse that you’ve done studies that show your users prefer this. I don’t want some ridiculous marketing barf about providing better service for your users. This is a problem that you need to fix. Now. You’re hijacking our computers and altering behavior without so much as asking our permission or even letting us know you’re doing it. Fucking stop.

Fix this problem and issue an update. At the very least, give us the ability to change this behavior back to Mac OS X’s default.

If you’re upset about this insulting and time-wasting behavior, I urge you to let Adobe know. The form allows you to chose between filing this issue as a feature request or a bug report. Considering the fact that this behavior shouldn’t happen in the first place, I chose bug report.

Via Adobe’s After Effects Design Center, the company apparently has a team of designers/pros/site editors who bookmark AE-related goodies on del.icio.us. They’ve been going to town with the tagging too: del.icio.us / adobe / AfterEffects.

In iChat, replying to my friend Chris while joking about how bad CS3 screwed up his Leopard testing workstation: “man it’s Adobe software - I’m surprised it didn’t spit out Leopard’s balls from your optical drive”

Tweetr Betr 0.76 * now with URL shortening

This is exactly why I have such a vendetta against Flash on the whole as a platform for any serious app development. Tweetr is a Twitter app built in Adobe’s Apollo, their new cross-platform application environment that incorporates Flash, HTML, CSS, etc. It basically allows people to build web apps using already existing technologies that can live on the desktop. Sadly, it has to brag about mouse wheel scrolling as a new feature:

cleaner design, use mouse wheel to scroll message window

Even in its latest form, Flash (and apparently by extension, Apollo) is still riddled with usability stupidity like this. Why the hell hasn’t Flash done this by default since 1.0? Since pre-alpha-beta-0.0.1? Why do developers seemingly have to spend time to build this in as a feature or added functionality when desktop software has done it since the dawn of the mouse wheel itself?

So it’s true - Adobe completely screwed up their window controls (minimize, close, etc.) in the rewritten Mac version of Creative Suite 3.

A design company
screwed up on a design and UI fundamental
when writing their design software
for an OS with high standards and a design following

Astounding.

• Twitter Blog: Twitter shirt - me wantsy. now
• John Nack on Adobe: Acrobat makes people throw cameras - interesting bit about the ‘camera toss’ technique used to create the image for the new Acrobat 8 packaging
• Camera Toss pool slideshow on Flickr - a subsequent Flickr slideshow of camera toss pics. Really interesting stuff
• Boing Boing: David Byrne: Who needs music labels? - Mr. Byrne on the wonderful doors that digital distribution opens for artists. Three cheers for sending these asshole labels back where they came from
• Boing Boing: Photo of $53 million in cash confiscated in Mexico - probably the closest many of us will ever get to seeing this much cash
• Macworld: News: Vaja I-volution Shell protects 15-inch MacBook Pro - Vaja has officially entered the realm of ridiculousness with these cases. $500 for a MacBook Pro messenger case? I’d rather buy an Apple TV or, hell, an iPod Hi-Fi - and still have cash to bring home to put a smile on my wife’s face
• TechCrunch has 15,000 Spam Comments Per Day - Holy crap. This is why I don’t believe in anonymous comments anymore. Casualty of the trade, but give me a break; all those spam comments have to be costing them at least *some* traffic, and weeding through all of it is wasting someone’s time. Turn off anonymity guys. It’s better from both a conversational and accountability standpoint, and the web will be better for it

Sure, Adobe’s John Nack tried to elaborate why the new CS3 icons are so bare and boxy, but the marketing campaign they just unleashed seals the deal. I bet $10 this was a product of marketing dictating design, instead of vice versa or even the two informing each other. Ugh.

At the end of the day though, I’m still buying a copy as soon as I can. Intel Macs FTW!

Now Adobe, about that Intel-optimized version of After Effects…

[tags]Adobe, CS3, design, marketing[/tags]

Mewonders if a new version of Studio (or is it all a variant of CS these days?) could be on the horizon. Could a ship date of 3/3 be a possibility?

[via Daring Fireball]