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So new gig, big license for CS3, installing Master Collection.
This is, without doubt, the shittiest installer I have ever dealt with.
No, really.
First, there are no less than THREE executable launches. THREE. It launches, has me authenticate BEFORE I SAY WHAT I WANT TO INSTALL, if ANYTHING. Once that's done, there's some big fucking custom progress bar that reminds me of Strata 3-D circa 1998, that's just there to LAUNCH THE INSTALLER. The real one. On a brand new MacBook Pro 2.5GHz, with 4GB of RAM, this takes about a minute. FOR WHAT?
No one knows, it's a meatcake thing. Of course, it's Adobe, they can't just use the fucking OS-provided installer. Oh no, heaven forfend. So I don't know what's installing where, there's no fucking log.
It bitches if Firefox is running, but not Webkit. Note, I'm not even installing Acrobat 8, I already have that. Do I know WHY the installer cares? Of-fucking-COURSE not, this is Adobe. Fuck you and your convenience, we make fucking Photoshop, Illustrator and all the rest. You can just line up and kiss our fucking asses if you don't like it.
Evidently, when it asks for DVD four, if you click OK before the disk mounts, it FAILS THE INSTALLER, and you have to re-do the entire thing. Why? Because by disk fucking four, it hasn't completely installed anything. That's four DVDs by the way. Not a single fucking program completely installed. So not only is it a fucking pain in my ass to use, but it can't even do the one thing it was built to do right! IT DIDN'T INSTALL SHIT!
EVEN BETTER: The installer can only recognize that there was an attempt at installing. It has no fucking logging to keep track of where it left off, so it's COMPLETELY repeating the ENTIRE install process. This shit has taken OVER A FUCKING HOUR at this point. There are people being BORN in less time than it the Adobe installer to do it's thing. I can install HUMANS faster than I can install CS3!!!
What
The
Fuck?
Did Adobe decide that Fred Ibrahimi had the right customer relationship model and that daring your customers to use something else is cool?
Look, I know people think this is hard, but I will now give you the big fucking secret of installing. You ready? Here it is:
Copy a bunch of files from <source> to <destination>!That's it. That's the big fucking secret. Copy files from point-fucking-A to point-fucking-B. Microsoft gets this right, Apple gets this right, companies that are one fucking person get this right.
How THE FUCK does Adobe fuck this up? How do they make copying fucking files from a fucking DVD or 4 not only fragile, prone to failure and tedious in the extreme, but also slower than an Atkins fanboy taking a shit?
I'm sure someone will try to explain how "Oh, installing is a lot more than copying files". Bullshit. There's, at most, less than a handful of steps, all involving things like "Can this computer actually handle this application" and "Let's make sure we didn't fuck up the permissions" and "Let's clean up any temp files we created". Everything else is extraneous bullshit that some moron dreamed up and has nothing to do with installing software. Activation, custom progress bars, all that crap is just bullshit that gets in the way of COPYING A BIG BUNCH OF FILES.
Holy fuck, installing CS3 is my FIRST experience with it, and I already hate the entire fucking thing. Is this the effect the CS3 team is shooting for? "Hey, let's make our customers want to re-enact the end of "Fargo" with us as Steve Buscemi! YAH BRA, THAT FUCKING RULES!!!"? GIHI^&(HL:IT&P:H AAAAAAGH!
I like some of the individuals that work for Adobe, but holy fucking hell, I'd rather be a taste-tester for "2 Girls 1 Cup Part 2: The Habanero Highway" than install Adobe products. Let me put it this way: When the fucking Acrobat installer, from a team that could give a fuck about Mac users, is a shining example of competence compared to the CS3 installer, you know CS3's installer is fucked up.
There better be a fucking handjob in this suite after this bullshit, that's all I'm going to say.
Technorati Tags:
Bad Installers, Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Installers MATTER, Don't make things harder
Posted by John C. Welch at 19:44 | Permalink
Comments
Speaking as somebody who still uses a very old (7.0) version of Photoshop and won't upgrade until it starts working for me (I still have 1.0.7 and 2.5.X, and 3.something around on my old computers too) I found this a very funny read... in a sort of (melvin) HA HA! (/melvin) sort of way.
So sorry if my pointing and laughing causes you further pain.
--chuck
http://chuck.goolsbee.org
Posted by:
chuckgoolsbee 
|
April 7, 2008 8:02 PM
That was so fucking good.
Thanks, John.
Posted by:
leonardodamian |
April 7, 2008 8:12 PM
Mr. W., I sympathize with your vulnerability to Adobe's lack of capability. But as far as my simple luser experience with CS3 (Design Premium/Upgrade) was concerned, they actually got better.
Fewer disks (for the same package), a slightly faster install (on the same system and optical drive), and most important for me, no mysterious, spontaneous quits out of the installer, which CS2 (finally) forced me to rectify by reinstalling my OS.
Despite the lack of confirming evidence of my personal sample, I'd suspect that whomever is creating these packages doesn't have a whole lot of enterprise-level IT experience, but they just might be tweaking for peon designers like me.
Posted by:
Moeskido |
April 7, 2008 8:27 PM
My big peeve about CS3 is that it installs Opera. The *full* application is embedded inside Adobe Bridge CS3. If they need a web browser, why not use WebKit?
Posted by:
Mike Cohen |
April 7, 2008 8:40 PM
You know what's even MORE fucked up?
Let's imagine you're a shop with a design department of 5 growing to be a design department of 8. You graduate to a VL. You can't convert your existing 5 licenses into a Volume License until the next version (or so our rep claimed...) but they'll sell you the start of a VL for those new users... What's worse?
The installer is DIFFERENT for VL versions than it is for Single License versions. You can't serialize a Single License version with a VL Serial Number.
Which sucks, because it's part of your image...
I hate Adobe.
Posted by:
Tom Bridge |
April 7, 2008 8:56 PM
Hm, I think Chopper says it best, you need to _harden the fuck up_ ! :)
Posted by:
Funkdancer |
April 7, 2008 9:31 PM
If you think that the initial install of CS3 sucks donkey balls, just wait until you have to download and install all the updates that came out since the media was shipped in order to make the product actually work a damn. Kiss your afternoon goodbye.
Don't forget to download the updated installer using the installer update that spawns a series of anonymous applications to anonymously update the installed applications.
Adobe has become the new Extensis. Whereas I used to cheer for Adobe, I'm now waiting to see when Apple will release a "Pages Pro" layout product (you know they have one).
PS: First time poster. Recent reader. Working my way back through your archives. Good stuff. Please keep it up.
Posted by:
Wrinkle_In_Time |
April 7, 2008 9:57 PM
I feel your pain, having gone through the process a few months ago,
For an extra giggle, you should have tried looking for the CS2 uninstaller...if you did, you would find THERE ISN'T ONE. The only way to get rid of the fucking package is to do it manually:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=331301
At least CS3 comes with an uninstaller.
Posted by:
Fred |
April 8, 2008 1:38 AM
Brilliant. That's a good summary of my thoughts whenever I have to use an Adobe installer or updater.
Posted by:
Ölbaum |
April 8, 2008 3:20 AM
You know Funkdancer, I don't understand that POV. There is no excuse for making a simple process as complicated and full of glorious suck as Adobe, yet, your words indicate that it's the customer's duty to suck it up with a smile and be grateful we only get fucked in the ass in a chain instead of two at once.
That's bullshit.
If we all pretend it's okay, it never gets better.
Posted by:
John C. Welch 
|
April 8, 2008 7:54 AM
If you're ever in the mood for a metric ass-ton of pain and frustration, try using Adobe's "Enterprise Deployment Options" for CS3. You may think you've done everything correctly, but there's no way to find out until you try the installation and it unsurprisingly fails.
If you're thinking of doing a network install, you owe it to yourself to read this, which I found only after I had banged my head to a bloody pulp:
Posted by:
pmbuko |
April 8, 2008 8:40 AM
Hey John,
While I appreciate what you meant by your "Copy a bunch of files from to !" description of what an installer should be, you yourself have pointed out that this is not sufficient (although Adobe don't even get that right with CS3).
Here's my first draft of an installer manifesto (please revise):
1) Tell me what you are going to install. Be honest. Let me opt out of the crap that I don't need like support for Sanskrit, drivers for devices that I don't have and never will, fucking bundles toolbars/adware/spyware/etc.
2) Warn me that you are going to want to quit all my apps out of jealousy/paranoia and/or restart my system out of narcissism early in the process. It gives me time to drop my pants and bend over.
3) Just do it™. Copy A to B. No muss, no fuss. Don't tie up my computer doing a "search" for stuff: you should: i) know where it should be, or ii) ask me where I put it if it's not in the default location. Don't offer me support for Lotus Notes halfway through the install when there's no Lotus Notes client on my computer (I'm looking at you, PocketMac for Blackberry).
4) Respect the conventions of the OS. Use the standard installer method (fuck InstallerVISE). Put application support files in the conventional place (e.g., the obscurely named "Application Support" folder). Don't fuck up file/folder permissions. Don't make me have to install you as root to get around your file/folder permission fucking proclivities. Don't make me run Permission Repair afterwards as that causes some people with web sites to go ape shit and murder pixels discussing it.
5) Don't spawn multiple child apps that mysteriously come and go anonymously in the Dock without so much as a by-your-leave. That shit makes us nervous.
6) Progress indicators should indicate progress. Wow, what a difficult concept. Make them meaningful. Tell us some combination of: what you have done, what you are doing, what you will do next, how long this will all take. Don't just demonstrate that you have figured out how to do a spinning wheel or barber pole thingy.
7) Record what you did. In both human-readable form and in the way that the OS knows what you did. Which leads us to...
8) The uninstaller. Have one. Make it do what it says on the tin: uninstall. Everything. Pretend that you weren't even here. We won't tell anyone; it will be our little secret.
It's 11:00 PM on a Friday and alcohol has been consumed (some by me). I'm sure that I missed something. I'd be interested in what you and others think should be in an installer manifesto.
Pseudonymously,
W_I_T.
Posted by:
Wrinkle_In_Time |
April 11, 2008 10:15 PM
