Main

December 18, 2008

Well, meeting, singular. Today I wandered over from the San Jose Fairmont to Adobe for my meeting with the install team.

Aside the first: The directions to get there from the Fairmont were far too complicated. It should be "Walk out of the main entrance of the Fairmont to the street. Look up. See the big building with "Adobe" on the side? Go there.

I had lunch with Barry Hills, whose title is Sr. Director, Engineering and Program Management, CSBU, but whom I think of as "The Installer team guy". Not totally accurate I suppose, but lets me keep track of it. Now, for obvious reasons, I wasn't sure what to think. I didn't think he'd throw stuff at me, or try to punch me in the gob, but, I wasn't sure if there'd be a barely-disguised hostility. Face it folks, I've been beating his team like a bad dog for months now.

Instead, what I got was someone who was really friendly, and who bought me lunch at the Adobe company cafeteria.

Aside the second: It's the first company cafeteria I've ever seen serve Beef Wellington. I had the meatloaf, it was outstanding.

Barry, and really all the folks I met with today, (since Barry "outed" himself on John Nack's blog, he's going to be the only person who I actually name), were not only completely friendly, but repeatedly thanked me for coming out. I repeatedly thanked them for bringing me out. In other words, it was not mortal combat with chainsaws and rail guns in the courtyard. They didn't act, at all, like I'd pissed on their baby, but rather were really open in talking about the obvious mistakes and problems with the installer, why some of them were there, that yes, the enterprise took it in the shorts even with CS4, (the exact phrase used, by one of the folks there was "raped the enterprise". You can't accuse them of not knowing there's a problem with that description.)

I liked that, because while I am willing to be a hardass where necessary, I'd rather not have to start that way. I was very pleased to not have to do that at all. They went over what they're planning for CS5, and even into CS6, (I'm pretty sure those aren't under NDA...everyone knows what they're going to call the friggin' suite), and what they could change and what they couldn't. I was also impressed that it wasn't just the installer team there. There were people from the CS Team, and I don't mean low-level engineers, but folks who actually make decisions. That I wasn't expecting, and it was a huge help

Some things I learned:

• As it turns out, MSI creation and use is a lot more messed up than Apple Packages. Some of that is just Windows, a lot of it is just MSI. This was news to me, and I'm not being snide here.


• One of the limitations they have, (and I'll guess any installer team from any company has when dealing with a large suite like CS), is that they can't tell the product teams to build the product in a way that makes the install easier. That's not to say they can't, and, (I'll guess), don't talk to the various CS product teams about doing things to make the install better, but, they have limited influence, so a lot of what they can do is limited by having to work with what the product teams are doing. In other words, sometimes, it ain't their fault.


• They completely agree that a lot the the installed file structure is incomprehensible, and that they should do a better job of explaining what's in there, and going forward, naming things better. They actually were very agreeable to this idea, since removing the "black box"-ness of the CS structure would be advantageous to both them and us.


• They talked about some of the reasons why CS installers want you to quit so many apps. (Without going into detail, there are a lot of non-Adobe apps that like to lock files, even in a read-only situation, and the "quit EVERYTHING" was a misguided attempt at working around that. It's not all about web plugins.) I recommended they start talking about such things, even without naming names, (since sometimes they can't).


• They were really open about the changes they're making, and wanted to hear what I had to say about them, and I don't mean in that "We'll take that feedback under advisement" way. They asked me as many questions as I asked them, they asked me about possible edge cases, and "what if someone does this thing". I have found that people don't ask you a shitload of questions if they're not taking what you're saying seriously.


• We agreed that John Nack has gone above and beyond in his willingness to use his blog as a place to talk about stuff that has NOTHING to do with Photoshop

There are a lot of things we talked about that I can't talk about here yet. (I'm actually being somewhat conservative about this, but they extended a lot of trust to me today, I'll not pay that back by breaking it.) However, as I get the okay from them to give out details, i will. I can say:

They are serious about fixing the installer. It fucks up their world too. I also mean "fix" in the best sense, not just in the "let's patch the sucker up more".

No, we are not getting everything we wanted right away. But we are over time, getting a lot of what we wanted in the fairly short term, and they want to give us MORE of what we want as they are able. They are also committed to doing their own work, and not making their customers pay for the shit end of the stick.

They agreed that they need to be more open about things, both about what they're doing now, and in the future. They agreed that an Installer Team blog was a great idea, so that we as a group can talk to them without going through Nack, who is pretty much the Metatron of Adobe. I don't know when they'd be able to start it, but they were talking about it as a when, not an if. (Standard warnings about working in <BigCorp> apply. I'm guessing after the holidays at the earliest. Yes, they do have families, and they get to spend time with them.)

They want to make things better in the CS4 time frame. They agree that it is not only a legitimate need from a customer point of view, but that it would be a good show of faith, and that such things have value.

If anyone expected that at 1700 hours, Pacific Time, I'd be announcing some monster change, um...dude, scale back the drugs...a LOT. Honestly, I was expecting a lot less than what I got. I think that as we get past the holidays, and they can give me real info to talk about, (and other people too. God knows, I don't want to become the Metatron for Enterprise Installers at Adobe. I dunno about you, but I pay for this bandwidth, let them spread that love around!), we'll see that they are going to make this better. I was really afraid that I'd be talking to people who were completely clueless about the seriousness of the problem, and was delighted to discover that no, they aren't. They really do understand how bad this is, and have really good ideas on making it better.

Oh, and no, it doesn't mean I stop watching them, and prodding them, or that anyone else should either. But, they asked for some rope to work with, and I am willing to give it to them, because if what I saw today was genuine, and I really do think it is, they aren't going to hang themselves with it. So let's see what happens, and as I can, I'll talk about more stuff.

(aside from the NDA, we talked about a LOT. I also need some time to cogitate on it too, it's kind of a jumble at the moment.)

So TL;DR version:

They know it sucks. They have great ideas on how to fix. They accepted a lot of feedback in a serious, willing manner. They're going to be more open about stuff as they can. They can't give us everything, but they can give us a lot. Let's give them a chance to deliver, I think they will.

Technorati Tags:
Installers MATTER, Adobe Installer Team

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

December 15, 2008

'nother brick to your skull...

So last night, I had cause to use Illustrator CS3. I keep both CS3 and CS4 on my drive, as I have to support users with both versions. The Adobe updater launches.

"The Adobe Updater needs to be updated"

"Okay, go ahead"

"Authenticate please"

"Sure, have fun"

"The Adobe Updater needs to be updated"

"Okay, go ahead"

"Authenticate please"

"...Okay"

"The Adobe Updater needs to be updated"

"Okay, go ahead"

"Authenticate please"

"...Didn't I just...<sigh> okay, fine"

"The Adobe Updater needs to be updated"

"Okay, go ahead"

"Authenticate please"

"...I.said.go.ahead"

"The Adobe Updater needs to be updated"

"Okay, go ahead"

"Authenticate please"

"FUCK OFF, I'M NOT UPDATING YOU, EAT SHIT AND DIE"

Yet another, another, another reason why Adobe's overcomplicated installer philosphy is bad. I had no idea what the problem was, there was never an error. It would auth, download, and bam, goto 10.

Logs? We don't need no steenking logs! If it doesn't install, it's your fault! Why you run other software besides CS?

I wish I could bill them for all the hours I've wasted with this kind of shit.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy, Bad Installers, Installers MATTER

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

December 8, 2008

During all the talks I've had with people about Adobe, and their many issues, a recurring theme is "Don't they care? It seems like all they care about is that we use their products. The fact that the way they do things makes us hate them, that if there was any serious competition to them, we'd flock to them in a heartbeat doesn't seem to matter to them."

I don't know for sure, because Adobe is both a faceless conglomerate and a collection of people who do care, and some of those people are friends of mine. But I think that it's possible to get so caught up in a certain way of looking at things, that you stop caring about things that don't...that aren't a part of the things you think are important. That's dangerous, because the things you dismiss are really important to a lot of your customers.

A perfect example is this article by Duff Johnson, on Why Reader remains the standard for PDF viewing. Duff has some factual points. Reader is the best at dealing with truly mucked-up PDFs. I always keep a copy around, because every so often, maybe once a year, I get a PDF I can't read in Preview.

So, once a year, I need Reader. Obviously, I'm not a statistically valid sample, or even vaguely representative of any group of users. So this is, just me.

However, look at what Duff dismisses. He blithely dismisses the real speed issues in the Reader plugin, especially on Mac OS X. (It's not much better on Windows. Adobe plays some "load a bunch of Reader into RAM on login" games to make it seem faster on Windows. Disable that, and it slows down rather a lot. You still pay that piper, but most of the money changes hands unseen.) Reader is slow. BOG slow. When its loading, it eats Safari for lunch. God help you if you have to read and close multiple PDFs throughout the day. The UI load alone sucks. With Safari's built-in PDF viewing, my delay is PDF download time. That's it. Really, for 99% or possibly more of my PDF viewing needs, Preview and the Safari-native PDF features not only work just fine, but work smoothly, and seamlessly, with no pain whatsoever. In light of that, the fact that Reader has a more technically correct PDF engine doesn't really matter much.

Duff completely ignores the fact that when it comes to reading PDFs, which is still, (Hopefully) the main purpose of Reader, it's not as intuitive or fast as Preview. I still, on occasion, have to authenticate to launch Reader so it can "repair" its installation. Why? I don't know. I have no useful information from Reader on this. It's not installing the Safari plugin, I told it not to. But, it needs an administrator password, or it won't work.

I never.

Ever.

EVER get that from Preview. But Reader handles malformed PDFs better, and so that's all Duff cares about.

Note that I say "Safari" plugin, not "Web Browser" plugin. The reason is that Acrobat, even today, even two versions after their initial Mac OS X release can ONLY talk to Safari. You use FireFox, or Opera? No Acrobat for you!

But Reader handles malformed PDFs better, so that's all that matters, right?

The truth is, using any Acrobat product, (ESPECIALLY on a Mac) and dealing with Adobe as an IT manager creates a low-level miasma of misery, not unlike this bit from "Good Omens" (MANY thanks to James Bennett for using this in his article on Python 3.0. I'd forgotten what an incredibly great description of so many things in the IT world it is.):

What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves? For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

That, is what using Reader creates in so many people. Low-level misery and a slight tarnish on your soul.

To be fair, Duff is not an Adobe employee, so his opinions are not "official" in any way. But I have heard his point used to dismiss every.single.complaint about Reader by people who are on the Acrobat team and do work for Adobe. So his point isn't "official" but I have to say it is, at the very least, "representative".

This makes talking to Adobe about some issues incredibly frustrating, because you soon realize, (and trust me, the Acrobat team is FAR worse about such things than the installer team. I WISH the Acrobat team were as open as the Installer team), that nothing you say is getting through, because you're not talking about the one thing they care about. So in a sense, no, they really don't care that you hate them, only that you use their stuff, even if it is only grudgingly. It's frustrating as hell to deal with, but that's Adobe for you.

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

December 3, 2008

So since I was mentioned in a post on John Nack's site about my favorite thing in the world, namely Adobe installers, I want to say something here:

If there is any credit for this to be passed around, it is to many, many other people who are not me. The folks who make up the communities at MacEnterprise, AFP548.com, and hundreds, if not thousands of other IT professionals have been working patiently, and hard for years to get Adobe to listen about the problems their installers cause. I'm a johnny-come-loudly to this process.

Perhaps my...colorfullness and lack of shyness...had enough volume to rise above the threshold and get noticed. I know I'm not the first, the hundredth, or even the thousandth person to try to get Adobe to fix their installers. If I stand out in any way, it is for my willingness to to scream loud and ugly when needed, and my refusal to stop until I see some real progress.

The fact that Adobe is, to my eyes at least, taking this issue far more seriously than they have in the past, (at least from the outside. I can't know what they do inside, and if I did, I wouldn't talk about it here anyway) is fantastic. If my ranting and foaming and occasional good suggestion on many long phone calls with Barry and his folks have helped, that's great, although I'd have been just as happy had the ranting and foaming been unnecessary and nonexistent. As far as credit goes, I defer to Sir Isaac's comment:

If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

November 25, 2008

I just figured out one reason why you have to "repair" CS 4 Applications if you move them after installing, even if you move them before the first time you run them.

Because if you don't, the Adobe Updater doesn't know where they are, and so instead of telling you "Hey, I know you installed <applications>, but they're not in the same place, do you want me to look for them?", maybe with an option for the drive/folders/etc., the updater just fails silently if you run it from /Utilities/Adobe Utilities/Adobe Updater6/

Just brilliant.

Why is it that when I move Office, I can update it just fine, but CS has no clue how to handle this? (Yes, I know, Apple is even stupider about it. However, as I said on Nack's site, just because Billy kicks a puppy every morning, it's still wrong for you to punch a baby at lunch. 7-year-old logic is not valid.)

Oh, and what a grand, intuitive name for the CS4 Updater Folder: Updater6. Man, could you even begin to get more intuitive? I don't see how.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

November 21, 2008

So I finally give up on the Adobe Updater, (note: after five days), and download the specific update.

First oddity, the Updater was trying to install Premiere Pro 3.2, but the Adobe download site has 3.01, 3.1, 3.11, and 3.2. Meh, what the hell, download them all.

Let's run the 3.2 updater. Start it, authenticate, it dies.

Whaa?

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Well, that's not right. Hmm, let's read the logs. Oh look, line after line of babble, and then the money shot: Safari was running. No dialogs, no warnings, just silent failure. No really, look, here are the log files:

11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (45) : ^[Aa][Dd][Oo][Bb][Ee] [Ii][Ll][Ll][Uu][Ss][Tt][Rr][Aa][Tt][Oo][Rr]*
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (46) : ^[Ii][Ll][Ll][Uu][Ss][Tt][Rr][Aa][Tt][Oo][Rr]*
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (47) : ^[Aa][Dd][Oo][Bb][Ee] [Ii][Nn][Cc][Oo][Pp][Yy] [Cc][Ss]*
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (48) : ^[Aa][Dd][Oo][Bb][Ee] [Ii][Nn][Dd][Ee][Ss][Ii][Gg][Nn] [Cc][Ss]*
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (49) : ^[Ii][Nn][Cc][Oo][Pp][Yy] [Cc][Ss]*
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (50) : ^[Ii][Nn][Dd][Ee][Ss][Ii][Gg][Nn] [Cc][Ss]*
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (51) : ^[Ii][Nn][Dd][Ee][Ss][Ii][Gg][Nn][Ss][Ee][Rr][Vv][Ee][Rr]
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (52) : ^[Vv][Cc][Pp][Rr][Ee][Ff][Ss][Hh][Ee][Ll][Pp][Ee][Rr]
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (53) : ^[Vv][Ee][Rr][Ss][Ii][Oo][Nn][Cc][Uu][Ee][Cc][Ss]3[Cc][Tt][Ll]
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (54) : ^[Aa][Uu][Dd][Ii][Tt][Ii][Oo][Nn]
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Conflicting Processes (55) : ^[Aa][Dd][Oo][Bb][Ee] [Pp][Rr][Ee][Mm][Ii][Ee][Rr][Ee]*
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] SPACE REQUIREMENT:
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Space required on system volume : 27416 KBytes
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Space required on target volume : 6854 KBytes
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] .................................................................
11/21/08 9:34:06 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Path to driver dmg, /Volumes/PatcherApplication/RIBSWrapper.app/Contents/Resources/Setup.dmg
11/21/08 9:34:10 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Applications were Quit result (non zero mean quit) = 0
11/21/08 9:34:10 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Following applications were found running, Safari

11/21/08 9:34:10 AM RIBSWrapper[316] Exit Code: 8
11/21/08 9:34:10 AM com.apple.launchd[122] ([0x0-0x2b02b].com.Adobe.RIBSWrapper[316]) Exited with exit code: 8

Wow...good thing there's all that detail about conflicting processes...not.

Why, why, WHY does this have to happen?

It happens with the After Effects updater too. I'm beyond infuriated and well into agog at this point.

---Update---

Even more agog at how the After Effects 8.0.2 updater has NO UI, but LOCKS UP MY MACHINE. Fucking Console isn't updating, can't even SSH into it.

Whomever made the decision to do this installer should be tased in the taint.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy, Installers MATTER

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

November 19, 2008

So I go to install Adobe Reader 9. It has many updates, security and otherwise. Even better, it's an installer package. True, architecture specific, but it's still an installer package, so this should should be cake, right?

BAAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA

What are you smoking?

See, the Apple Installer Package is just a wrapper for an iNosso "powered" archive. No really, here's a screen shot that someone else kindly took. So it doesn't work via Apple Remote Desktop, it doesn't work via /usr/sbin/installer. It only works...by doubleclicking it and running it manually on every machine, or repackaging it.

My god, it's gone from custom installers that work with nothing to customer installers that work with nothing wrapped in an Apple Installer Package so you think it will work right.

FAIL

Once again, when it comes to making the lives of IT suck, Adobe takes the cake.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy, Bad Installers, Installers MATTER

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

November 17, 2008

So while John Nack is busily doing his John Nack thing of "managing the message" with regard to the debacle of Adobe's Installers, I thought I'd help craft what Adobe should be saying:

"We've gotten, over the years, a lot of email from people about the custom installers we've created at Adobe. Most of it has been negative. Very negative, and to be honest, rightly so. To be fair, we didn't set out to create a bad installer. We wanted to create an installer that worked the same on both platforms. We thought we could do this. Maybe we could have, but that would have required far more resources than we gave it, and still would have ultimately been a failure.

We forgot that the installer for both the product, and product updates is a critical experience, especially in the case of the former, since that is a customer's first experience with the product. We forgot that installing software is, in the end, the copying of data from one location to another. We forgot that while people want a simple, easy to use install, that doesn't justify making a mess of their drives, and creating ever more complicated schemes that require ever more complicated install and uninstall procedures. We forgot that we aren't the sole source of good ideas in the computing universe. We forgot that one size fits poorly.

So here's what we'll do. While we cannot change the initial installation for CS4, what we can do is ensure that any updates for any Adobe product are designed in the way that is best for the platform that product runs on. For Windows, that means MSI installers, for Mac OS X, that means Apple Installers, and so on. It means that we will not make people quit applications they aren't updating, or that aren't Adobe products. We won't make you quit your browser just to update Flash, especially if that update is being applied remotely. For someone installing manually, we'll give them the option of restarting their browser at the end of the install.

For CS5, we're going to again, use platform-correct installers. We're going to ensure that we're doing things efficiently, but safely. You're all right, we don't need 5-7 disk operations per file copy when installing, and we certainly don't need to log permissions of files we're going to delete during an uninstall. We're also going to have a major, and hopefully welcome change to our directory structure. All common CS5 support files will be in one directory called "CS5". Within that directory, application - specific support files will be in a subdirectory with a name that clearly indicates that. Common support files will be in another clearly named directory. All directories will have clear, concise names.

We're also going to make sure that we vet new installers with a team made up of not just our traditional customers, but IT professionals, so that we know that installing our software on one, or one thousand machines is, if not pleasurable, at least not painful. Finally, the days of treating only certain platforms as "business" platforms, at least from the installation point of view are done. There are no more "business" platforms and "designer" platforms. There are only platforms our customers use, and we need to make sure that installing our products on those platforms is simple, easy, and "just works", no matter the platform.

Adobe has always prided itself on the care and quality of our applications, and now, we're going to make sure that our installation procedures show that care and quality too."

It's not hard. Admit you screwed up, then talk about how you're going to do better. It's even easier when the way to do better is right there. Trying to pretend otherwise is, at best, treating your customers like they're stupid, and at worst, treating them like they're stupid while lying to them.

You want to send the right message, just tell the damned truth.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy, Installers MATTER

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

November 14, 2008

John Gruber asks, in reference to this article:

Is there a worse installation experience for any mainstream Mac software?

No

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

November 1, 2008

But I'd love to know why Adobe Bridge and Device central need an email and IRC client to function.

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

October 29, 2008

Just discovered that the only way to run the Adobe updater for CS3 is to be logged in as an administrator.

No, it won't do the smart thing and say "HEY! You need to authenticate as an administrator first!"

Nope. It won't run if double-clicked, and the "Check for updates" options in the various applications is grayed out.

Just checked CS4...same thing. Well, at least it's consistent stupidity.

Once again, Adobe shows that they don't have the slightest fucking clue when it comes to enterprise issues on the Mac. But then again, there's a big chunk of Adobe that doesn't think the Mac is used for anything but makin' pretty pitchers.

<Note: this may be the case on Windows too, but I'm not about to install CS3 and/or CS4 on Windows just to see if Adobe's stupid is cross-platform.>

The Adobe stupid burns ever brighter.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

October 26, 2008

So here's one for your "Why the fuck did that happen" file.

I'm wanting to see if Photoshop CS4 supports Services. (Yes, I know I should already know what the answer will be, but I'm maso that way.)

So, I open a PNG file on my desktop, click on the text tool, and type some random shit in. I then select the text.

Not only is the ENTIRE services menu not clickable, even though it's not grayed out, but "About Photoshop" IS grayed out. The entire application menu is completely unusable in that situation.

BRILLIANT!

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

October 23, 2008

So, I still can't figure out why Adobe Bridge needs a full copy of Opera. No, seriously, I deleted it out of the Bridge bundle, and no change.

But that's not why I'm bitching today.

No, it's because including Opera in Bridge isn't enough. It's also in Device Central.

Yes, you heard me, another full copy of Opera in Device Central.app/Contents/MacOS/Required/

Opera.app, version 9.20. So not only does Adobe sneak two versions of Opera, but they're BOTH OUT OF DATE.

The worst part is, I can't figure out what either do. The applications run, clicking help takes me to the Adobe support site.

So why the fuck are they even there?

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

October 2, 2008

Obviously, I've been expecting too much from you.

The idea that as a company, you would put the same care and work into your installers as they product they install is well, just too much for you to understand on your own. It's too much to expect that the obvious issue of "The installer is the very, very first thing our customers see, so it should, at worst, be a neutral, painless experience" is just not a concept you can figure out on your own.

So I'm going to help. Because $DEITY$ knows, you are more in need of it than a man with no limbs in a mountain-climbing contest.

So for CS5:

Kill the Adobe installer. Dead. I don't care how, but kill it dead and delete the code. Lobotomies for the people who insist on remembering it are not too extreme here. There is no excuse for that festering, maggot-ridden shitpile in execution or concept. There is nothing about it that doesn't suck. It is not fast, nor is it easily automatable, nor does it make it easy to uninstall the application. It sucks on both Windows and Mac OS X. The answer is obvious: Use the native installer technologies on each platform. Yes, that would require you to have separate installer code.

Suck it up princess, you gave it a good try, but you fucked it up, and you fucked it up worse every edition. (Before anyone says shit, yes, I am INTIMATELY familiar with the changes in CS4. I speak from that experience when I say it got worse.) When the best an idea can manage is continual degradation on all levels, it is time to cowboy up, admit defeat, and use what your enterprise customers have been asking you for.

Some specifics:

1. Your stupid installer still insists on making your file copies suck as much as possible. Let's say the Adobe installer has to create a folder called "Plug-ins" and in that folder are multiple subfolders, and each subfolder has 1 or more plugins, that are all packages. But every file & folder in "Plug-ins" has the same permissions. In the land of the sane, you'd copy over the entire contents of "Plug-ins", then chmod/chown once and you're done. So your logs look like:
   copyfile
   verifyfile
   copyfile
   verifyfile
   chmod -R
   chown -R

   Simple, right? And to be honest, you don't need to log successful copies and verifies, only the problems. Seriously, we expect shit to work correctly. I only need to know about problems. So really, assuming no problems, this entire thing could log as:

   starting $PRODUCTNAME$/Plug-ins install
   changing ownership to <foo>
   changing permissions to <bar>

   Three lines of log for thousands of files, and it goes faster because your copy methods are faster.

   OF COURSE Adobe doesn't do this. Instead, you get shit like this:

   790 Copying file "/tmp/.tempdirDpiClT6r/Assets/AdobeCommon/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html" to "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html"
790 Copied
User "0" resolved to uid 0 for path "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html"
Group "80" resolved to gid 80 for path "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html"
791 Saved owner 0 and group 80 for "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html"
791 Setting owner to 0 and group to 80
791 Set


   FOR EVERY FUCKING FILE. The worst part is, THIS IS NOT NEW. They did it for CS3 too. The logs for CS 4 Master Collection are around 30MB compressed, and over half a fucking gigabyte uncompressed. Text files. Half a fucking gigabyte.

   shit like this is why Adobe installers have to have gobs of dancing baloney. Because otherwise you might realize how slow they are due to this kind of institutionalized stupidity

   Now, I've talked about this before, but since Adobe is never ever fixing this for CS 4, for CS 5...DON'T FUCKING DO THIS. Log the start of a folder copy if you must, and if you must, the results of things like chown and chmod, but not seven fucking lines per file. Also, if a folder has n files and they all have the same permissions and ownership, set it fucking once! Recursive switches, they aren't just for geeks anymore.



2. Stop writing your own installer, you have yet to have it not suck. You know, I agree that neither the Windows MSI installers or the Mac OS X Package installers are perfect for your needs. Too fucking bad, because your installer sucks ass for everyone one trying to remote install your fucking product on multiple machines, and your attempts at automation suck more every time. Stop it. Fucking.Stop.It. Here's a hint...my company is covered by your uber-licenses where we get upgrades for as many computers as we want when we want them.

   However, the unjustifiable pain in your installer means that we aren't even going to look at starting the testing for figuring out how to deal with your shitbag installers until we have to. Meaning, there is a feature in CS 4 that we have to have. Since we're an all-Mac shop, it ain't like we're getting new integration features in Acrobat. (no, I haven't forgotten my great hope that someone comes out with a real Mac OS X version of Acrobat and Distiller and cleans your fucking clock with it, but I'm busy playing with the installer kids right now.) So until there's a technical gun at our head, fuck you and your installer too, you cannot pay us enough to deal with it. Yes, the new attempt at a remote installer in CS4 was an interesting take on things, but it's ultimately a failure because it's fragile as hell and still requires far too much setup and prep work per install.

   If you use the OS-native installers, then you don't have to write your own half-assed automation tool. You just give us a native installer, and we can use whatever tools are out there. On the Mac, that's Apple Remote Desktop, /usr/sbin/installer, LANRev, Casper, LANDesk, and there are just as many, if not more on Windows. It is only your bizarre fixation on "doing it all by ourselves" like some kind of three-year-old Don Quixote that is causing administrators problems. Since you are causing us problems, we make sure to return the favor. If you stop getting your installers from the insanely bad thoughts of the zombie Nixon, we'll stop flaming you like we would said zombie Dick.

   So again for the managers, who are kinda slow: USE THE FUCKING OS-NATIVE INSTALLER, YOURS STINKS WORSE THAN THE SANTORUM LEFT AFTER A RABID DONKEY ORGY.



3. Stop trying to make your file setup as fucking obtuse and stupid as possible. Right now, it is physically impossible to manually uninstall your applications without nuking and paving the whole suite, and no, your fucking uninstaller is not perfect. How complicated is this? THEY USE SQLITE DATABASES TO TRACK THE INSTALLS.

   Installing is simple. You move files from point a to point b, and log it. In the case of Mac OS X, you add a fucking receipt in the right place. Why you insist on fucking this all up is beyond everyone, including a lot of Adobe people I've talked to. Yeah, you can't even convince your fellow employees this shit is not, well, shit. That's a bad sign.

   Here's one, for CS5, how about this for say, stuff that goes in /Library/Application Support/:

   For things relating to a product: /Library/Application Support/CS5/<applicationname>/
   For items shared amongst all applications: /Library/Application Support/CS5/<Shared Items>/
   For Applications: /Applications/Adobe CS5/<applicationname>
   For CS 5 Utility apps: /Applications/Adobe CS5/Utilities/<utilityapplicationname>/

   Look, right there, I just made your shit easy to identify and uninstall, and you DON'T NEED SQL DATABASES TO TRACK THE FUCKERS! There's no reason to overcomplicate it to where your uninstall scripts have to include Python 2.5 IN ITS ENTIRETY so you can uninstall on fucking Mac OS X 10.4. Again, think about this...you have to include a major language framework so that you can UNINSTALL PROGRAMS. The fact this passed the laugh test shows how far up your asses your heads are.



4. One last thing: Stop sneaking other applications in. Yes, we know about Opera hidden in Bridge, even though you aren't up front about it. But then if you were, you'd have to actually apply security updates to Opera too, and we all know you aren't doing that at all. Hiding shit like that is a form of lying, and I really hate that.

So there, some tips and a whole mess o' profanity on how to make your installers not suck worse than a Dyson fired out of the LHC.

No, I don't think CS5's installers will be any better. But at least they can't say "We didn't know you hated it". It's nothing, but it's what we have.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Acrobat Team = Annoying, Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy, Installers MATTER

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

September 23, 2008

Big fucking deal.

However, if anyone has the actual release, can they check and see if Photoshop et al still have that fucking retarded "phantom window border" around the document windows? You know, the one they had to create because they decided to shoehorn fucking Windows UI paradigms onto the Mac, in keeping with EVERYTHING MUST BE THE SAME.

Nimrods.

Oh, and is that full copy of Opera that they sneak into Bridge still way out of date?

It's like they're going out of their way to make you work harder to like it.

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

July 7, 2008

I love the idea behind this site. Furthermore, I think everytime we get some fucking stupid Adobe dialog that doesn't really make any sense and is not clear, we should email it to the highest level Adobe email address we have, with a note asking them if they'd perhaps thought about hiring some designers and/or writers for the next version of that product.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

July 4, 2008

Adobe Reader 9? Still not Universal. You have to deal with PPC or Intel versions.

<roy stalin>Lookin' real good there guys, lookin' real good</roy stalin>

All that idiot collective is missing is to package a VISE installer in a sitx'd, binhex'd, tarballed disk image, and their failure would be complete.

What, Adobe's 2008 New Year's resolution was "We're a-gonna fuck everything up in every possible way at every possible turn"?

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Acrobat Team = Annoying, Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

July 3, 2008

So Acrobat et al don't work with Firefox.

Indesign doesn't work with Firefox.

In fact, I think I can safely say that on the Mac, Firefox doesn't fucking exist for CS3

Yet, during an Indesign update, I have to quit FIREFOX or the update won't complete.

What

The

Fuck

Over?

What, is there a fucking random "make them quit <application>" function, just to fuck with people? Safari at least I sort of understand...for Acrobat updates.

But Indesign?

Idiots.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Acrobat Team = Annoying, Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

July 2, 2008

Can someone tell me why, if the Acrobat team is so fuckin' smart, they can't get it to work with Firefox on the Mac?

Oh, now, you need Adobe AIR to fucking read PDFs. At least the installer is finally an Apple Installer Package, and they haven't fucked up the UI ala the CS4 previews. Wow. When you're holding up Acro-fucking-bat as a model of UI correctness, there's something really wrong.
...
...
...
Really, really wrong.
...
...
....
Can someone just put a fucking bullet in Adobe's Senior Management? and let a group of SANE people take this company over? I think we've established the current team is out playing with goddamned Unicorns and Smurfs.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Acrobat Team = Annoying, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

June 25, 2008

I know, I know, I should stop being surprised that every release of Acrobat 9 for the Mac sucks a little bit more. But I am, at least somewhat. Every time.

So, in a quick look, based solely on what you can see at Adobe's Acrobat site, what do Mac users not get?

First, we don't get Standard. This isn't new mind you. Due to Adobe's complete and utter Mac marketing incompetence, along with their apathy towards any market that isn't full to bursting with 50,000 seat companies, they decided to drop Standard on the Mac. So if you need more than Reader and you want it to come from Adobe, your starting point is an MSRP of $449 new, or $159 new. (All monetary units are US Dollars.)

So what do you get for that? Well, you get most of the same features of the Windows users. What don't you get? Well, for 9, Adobe dropped Office integration. True, it sucked before, but now they stopped pretending. Now, Adobe won't tell you the real reason why unless you smack them around a bit but it comes down to the fact that they refuse, will not use any language for interapplication scripting but VBA.

No, not AppleScript, you're new here if you're asking that. The Acrobat team point-blank refuses to use anything that isn't VBA. So Office 2008 users? Fuck you, get a real copy of Office. One with VBA. Entourage users? Goddamned hippies, use a real client, like Outlook or Notes. Go ahead and complain, you know what you'll get told? I do, and it's here on the site courtesy of Leonard Rosenthal, from the Acrobat Team:

Yes, the PDFMaker macros are no longer present on the Mac. HOWEVER, the reason has NOTHING to do with VBA. As you point out, we could have continued to offer a LIMITED (compared to the Windows product) set of Macros using AppleScript/WebCapture, etc. However, we decided that we would rather "get it right" and spend the time to develop functionally equivalent solutions on the Mac instead of giving our users a "half-assed" product. Unfortunately, we weren't able to complete that work in the Acrobat 9 time frame. When it's complete - you'll get it.

That's a bullshit answer. They had NO problem, and I mean NONE shipping a half-assed version of the Windows Macros from Acrobat 5 through Acrobat 8. Half-assed didn't bother them until they couldn't use VBA. Then all of a sudden, stripping out functionality is the right solution, rather than using AppleScript to deliver what would have been far more capability than they'd ever shipped with regard to Office Integration.

They may suck as Mac ISVs, but the Acrobat team kicks ASS when it comes to bullshitting you.

You can't convert email to PDF. Because evidently, this is so hard on the Mac, that only a DEITY could do it. So the only explanation as to why I was able to script this (in AppleScript and shell) from Entourage to Acrobat is that Adobe is either bullshitting Mac users once again, and won't do interapplication scripting in anything but VBA, or I'm smarter than the entire Acrobat team.

Now, while the latter does warm the cockles of my heart, reality and past behavior dictates that the answer here is "The Acrobat team couldn't do it in VBA, so they won't fuckin' do it at all". Once again, bullshit.

There's an enhanced version of the web page capture, but the part where you can get just a part of the web page? Windows Only.

It doesn't specifically say Windows only, but since Acrobat on the Mac doesn't talk to Office, and there's no AutoCAD on the Mac anymore, I'm not sure how this feature will be able to work on the Mac:

"Export comments to Word or AutoCAD
Select and export comments back to your original Word or AutoCAD file. Comments appear in Word as tracked changes and in AutoCAD as a separate layer."

I'm real sure that LiveCycle Designer is still Windows only, so this bit should have the Windows-only asterisk too:

"Create dynamic forms Enhanced
Use Adobe LiveCycle Designer, a professional form design tool included with Acrobat 9 Pro, to further customize and automate dynamic XML forms."

How sure of that am I? Well, once again, here's my source. That's right folks, let's welcome back Leonard Rosenthal:

While the need for LiveCycle Designer on the Mac may have been an issue in the past, we believe that the new "Forms Editing" mode of Acrobat 9 (yes, on the Mac!) combined with our new forms marketing/positioning will remove that requirement. If you feel otherwise, please let me know why you believe Designer is still a necessity on the Mac.

Oh Leonard. I don't have to tell you why I think it's necessary. One of your Adobe Cohorts did that for me:

One of the most requested features that we have in the LiveCycle community is to run LiveCycle Designer on a Mac. Well, good news. You can now run LiveCycle Designer 7.1 on Intel based Macs, using CrossOver Mac from CodeWeavers. The following instructions will work with CrossOver Mac, as well as CrossOver Linux, for those of you wanting to run LiveCycle Designer on Linux.

This is completely unsupported. If you need help, please visit the Adobe LiveCycle Designer on Mac forum on adobeforums.com.

That's how Adobe responds to something that is one of the most requested features in the LiveCycle community: Let's give them something else. Leonard, we could always edit forms in Acrobat. It just sucked. Somehow, I don't see it perfectly duplicating LiveCycle Designer's featureset. So it's not quite going to be able to transparently roundtrip is it? No, somehow, I doubt it. Better chrome on the wrong tool doesn't make it the right tool.

This one:

"Easily create and manage electronic forms New
Use the new Form Wizard to convert Microsoft Word and Excel documents or scanned paper to fillable PDF forms."

may work on the Mac, but I'd want to see it in action first. Considering that Adobe's main Acrobat Evangelist , Lori DeFurio didn't show this feature working with Word/Excel on the Mac, but ended up using InDesign as the source for the Mac version, I have extreme doubts. (When it comes to Acrobat, verify, THEN trust.)

Now, there is Acrobat Pro Extended, which adds support for things like 3D object conversion, a new presentation tool, PDF Map creation,etc.

I won't go over the whole list but there are a few that just stand out as "WTF?"

"Create interactive, on-demand presentations New
Use Adobe Presenter, included with Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, to liven up your Microsoft PowerPoint slides with video, voice-over, demos, and interactive quizzes, and then output to PDF for reliable, cross-platform sharing."

Yeah, after all, who does presentations on a Mac? It's not like we have PowerPoint on the Mac or anything.

"Easily create PDF documents from OpenGL applications
Instantly capture your CAD designs in Adobe PDF with one-button ease from OpenGL-based applications on Microsoft® Windows® and UNIX® systems."

OpenGL? UNIX? On a Mac? Yeah, right, when pigs fly out of my butt.

Once again, the Acrobat team shows exactly what they think of their Mac users: Very Little.

Again, if they'd just man the fuck up and say: "The Mac is not important to us, we only care about big enterprise, and we're not going to do more than the minimal amount of work, including marketing, for that platform. You get what we give you and you'll like it. What choice do you have? We're Adobe, bitches!", they'd still be kind of a douchebag collective, but they'd at least have stopped bullshitting their customers.

What am I thinking, it's Acrobat. Bullshitting their Mac customers is what they do best!

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

June 2, 2008

So of course, the Acrobat IT solutions page has a link to the Windows - only Adobe Customization Wizard, (for Acrobat 8 actually, they don't even have a link to one for 9 yet. Way to go.), and then no actual useful info for IT folks on Mac OS X or Windows.

Going to their "Enterprise Deployment Site", no 9 info at all. Of course, no Mac info for any version, because as we all know, no one uses Macs in enough numbers to need such things. <eyeroll> The info is out there for the Mac, you just have to look for it.

Alas, it's not like mass deployment of Acrobat doesn't suck balls on Windows too, there's just more documentation for the ball-sucking on Windows and it's easier to find.

Is there anyone on the Acrobat team with a clue as to Enterprise Deployment in general, and the state of IT on the Mac at all? If so, I'd love to buy you a beer at the WWDC, 'cause you have to be the loneliest, most unappreciated person on the planet, and I truly feel bad for you.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Acrobat Team = Annoying, Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

Now, with fewer features than the previous version, but at that same great too-high price!

Wait John, did you say fewer features?

Why yes Reader, yes I did!

But how can that be?

Well, it's simple. See, Acrobat's previous utter shit "Some of Office to PDF" Macros are gone, because they relied on VBA, and without VBA in Office 2008, then they won't work!

But that makes sense, right? I mean without VBA, how could they have done those Macros?

Oh simple, Naive Reader! They could have used AppleScript, which, since Office 2004 had been released, had been improved past what that creaky nigh-broken version of VBA offered. Prior to Office 2004, Adobe was indeed limited to VBA, but for the last 4 years? Not so much.

So you mean that Acrobat could have added more and better features in the Macros starting with Office 2004? Even supported Entourage?

Indeed Intrepid Reader. In fact, I showed this was possible with a rather inelgant, but functional AppleScript for Entourage: Structured PDF from Entourage, now at version 1.0.2!

So when the Acrobat team says they can't do proper PDF output from Microsoft Office on the Mac, and that they can't do it at all from Entourage, or really, any non-Adobe application, they're...full of shit?

Ah, the joy of knowledge sweeping out crap! Yes, that's right my Disillusioned Friend! When the Acrobat team says they can't do this, they mean they don't want to do it in any way that's not VBA and identical to how they do it on Windows!

But why?

Because Perplexed Reader, the Acrobat team has been bullshitting their Mac users for so long, they can't stop. Here's the deal: Acrobat is actually a really good application. It does some neat things that are hard to do in other applications. But, because Bruce Chizen et al decided that Adobe needed to be the next Microsoft, and suck Fortune 100 cock, they'd stop actively marketing Acrobat on the Mac other than occasional spasms of OMG, IF YOU DON'T USE ACROBAT, YOUR PDFs WILL BE UNUUUUUUUSABLE!!!!.

So what happens when you stop trying to sell a product to a market segment? Big shock, the sales drop. So by the time Acrobat 5 came out, 90% of Acrobat's sales were on Windows. Ever since, the only marketing done on the Mac for Acrobat is whatever the CS team feels like doing, and as you can see, that's limited to "Includes Adobe Acrobat Pro".

Thanks to this self-fulfilling prophecy, Acrobat sales on the Mac tanked so bad, you can't get Acrobat Standard on the Mac anymore. What did this do to companies who had bought many Standard licenses when Acrobat 8 came out? Well, let's ask one of them what their reaction was:

OWWWWW! MY ASS! IT BURNS! IT BURNS SO BAD!

Basically, it's like this: The Acrobat Team Leadership decided that only designers use Macs. Not programmers, no one in IT. Macs only are used for the making of pretty pictures. So on the Mac, Acrobat is really viewed solely as a better PDF engine for CS. Anything else it does is pretty much luck.

But John, that's completely stupid, and really, is a 1997 viewpoint.

I agree my Disenchanted Reader, but when you are actively ignoring a market segment, and devoting as few resources as possible to them, why do you care about facts? Hell, there are reasonably accurate reports of Acrobat Evangelists presenting in front of a Mac audience with the Windows version of Acrobat, as their MacBook sits forlorn and ignored, because they don't know enough about the Mac to use their own product on the Mac.

John...that's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. How can you be so deliberately ignorant of reality?

Ah my Innocent Reader: That's the Acrobat team for you. If you want to use their product, you'll do it in the way they tell you to, and you'll like it. Oh, it's not just the Mac segment that hates them. Read some of the SMB market comments on Acrobat and dealing with that team. You'll quickly realize that as far as the Acrobat team is concerned, if you aren't buying 50K seats, you don't matter, and you should be happy that the Acrobat team even allows you to buy Acrobat.

But I'm the customer, don't my needs matter even a little?

BAAAAAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAA...one of the biggest customer requests for Acrobat is to bring their new XML-based forms designer to Acrobat on the Mac. Adobe's answer?

Use WINE

But John, that's unsupported by anyone.

Yep.

So they are just blowing off customer requests unless it's something they were going to do anyway.

Yep.

That fucking sucks.

Yep, even more so because Acrobat is, when it's not giving you the finger, a really nice application that does some neat stuff with PDF that no one else does.

That's even worse!

Yep.

What's the answer then?

For some other party to write an inexpensive Acrobat knockoff for Linux and the Mac that takes care of things like standards - compliant structured PDF output from a variety of applications, doesn't cost $500 bucks, by a team that doesn't treat you like shit because you're not an F100 company. Were someone to do that, I, and a lot of other IT types on many platforms would evangelize the shit out of them.

The money is waiting, all that's needed is product. The scale of the Acrobat team hate by the SMB market in general and the entire Mac user base cannot be overstated, and we all have money. Give us the ability to kick that fucking team off our networks, and we'll send Adobe the videos of the burning product.

<Oh, and to any from Adobe or the Acrobat team who want to argue about this...until your actions reflect your rather weak protestations, and you change the facts of the situation, spare me and the rest of the Mac market the bullshit. You want to prove me wrong with real product that I can buy, I will happily change my opinion, in large type on this site, and any where else I can, but until then? You're all just bullshitting people, and you can't even come close to denying it.>

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Acrobat Team = Annoying, Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Bullshit

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

May 18, 2008

In this episode: Adobe Digital Editions, wherein our intrepid hero, (me), tries to read an eBook with Adobe Digital Editions. I swear, I think Adobe is secretly trying to kill eBooks, because they make installing this software so hard that you stop caring about ever using it, and just go to a bookstore, or order it off Amazon.com

In this case, I needed an update. Can I just install the update? No, I have to first manually remove the old version.

Sigh.

By the way, there's no real download link. It's a fucking Flash application, because evidently, everything at Adobe must use Flash wherever possible. I imagine at some point, everything Adobe makes will be Flash on PDF, and you'll boot into an Adobe OS to use it.

Yet the Mac community continually gives Adobe an unending bye, in spite of the fact that by and large, Adobe treats its Mac users far worse than even Microsoft does. The Mac community has been Stockholmed into thinking that Adobe has some special love for Mac users, and therefore, Mac users shouldn't criticize them too much.

Bullshit.

The Emperor has no fucking clothes, and the leadership at Adobe has been sucking Big Enterprise Cock since Bruce Chizen took it over, and if you think his replacement is going to remake that company into something that cares about you unless you have 50K computers, get lucid. Adobe wants to be a bigger player in the Enterprise than Microsoft, and they want to create their own platform, regardless of which OS you prefer. They're just smart enough not to to have a dingaling like Ballmer sticking his foot in his mouth once a week as their leader. But if you seriously think that outside of a few product teams, that Adobe wants Mac users to do anything but give them money and then STFU? You're delusional.

I'd love for Adobe to get some serious competition. Especially for Acrobat. Watching that team get their asses beat down by two people in a garage would fucking rule.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy, Incompetence, Installers MATTER

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

April 21, 2008

Trying to download Adobe Digital Editions. Should be easy, right? I downloaded an eBook from ebooks.com, and now I wish to read it. This is simple.

THIS!!!

IS!!!

ADOBE!!!!!!

Here's the drill:

Try to download it from the main site. BAAAHAHAHAHA...fuck you, you're running Mac OS X 10.5. So after looping through, literally looping a few times, I google it. I find the beta from Adobe labs, and download that. Yeah...that's my choice. A beta. Thanks a pantload Adobe.

Now I try to download the book I purchased legally. I get an ebx.etd file. Double click on it. Adobe Digital Editions opens in all its Flash glory. (Seriously, other than YouTube and Foamy, does Flash have any purpose OTHER than being the most useless pile of crap code on the planet? All it ever does is annoy people, and make everything it touches suck.) It initializes, and now it must authorize my content. Oh, but it can't, and here's the very simple error message I get:

Adobe DRM Error
System: 5
State: 4
Class: 400
Code: 41
Message: Error on response from server.
Scroll below or view error.log for more details.

Adobe DRM client Error: 441
Could not authenticate with voucher engine at server

Server Code: -4

Requested URL:
http://66.135.49.27/fulfill/ebx.etd ?action=purchase &orderid=411419592703012 &bookid=EBK:000216998

--- end ---

Man, that must suck if you aren't a sysadmin or a programmer. Way to make this usable for the nontechnical reader. And people wonder why ebooks are teh suck.

I could call Edna Buchanan and beg her for an autographed copy of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face" in the time it will take me to read a file.

This is why I hate eBooks. Because what should be a simple operation is now complicated beyond all sanity, and requires PDF, Flash, some complicated-assed DRM, and beta software.

Screw eBooks, screw Flash, and once again, just like their installers, a big middle finger to Adobe Digital Editions, for making reading a file take longer than ordering and receiving the physical book off of Amazon.

Adobe: We Make Everything Complicated, Because You Have No Choice.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

April 8, 2008

Here's a tip guys: When I say "Uninstall ALL of CS3", I mean UNINSTALL THE ENTIRE FUCKING THING.

Thus far, this installer has literally done NOTHING correctly.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Bad Installers, Don't make things harder, Don't suck

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

So even though I already had Acrobat 8 on my machine, somehow, in fucking up the installs of CS3, the glorious rotting shitpile that is the Adobe installer managed to fuck up my Acrobat 8 install too, so I can't use it until I go through and validate fucking CS3.

A simple competent installer. That's all I want. A simple, competent, installer. Why is it that Adobe can create fucking Photoshop, but can't manage to create a competent installer? Is that secretly harder than Photoshop? Is it actually simple to write CS3, but only $DEITY$ can write a good installer?

Fucking idiots, I should bill them for the time I've wasted on this bullshit.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Bad Installers, Don't make things harder, Don't suck, Installers MATTER

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

April 7, 2008

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

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

February 25, 2008

Hmm...it's over a month now since Office 2008, and still not even an announcement from Adobe regarding Office 2008 integration with Acrobat.

I know, I know, we all know what the answer's going to be, assuming the Acrobat team gives us the basic courtesy of an answer. Some vague bullshit about how without VBA, it can't be done with some even lamer blathering about workarounds, probably requiring InDesign.

Of course, if the Acrobat team would stop insisting that only VBA is the answer, then they could have been improving this integration since 2004. (Word's dictionary was kind of broke-dick prior to that, so Adobe did have a point about limitations prior to that. That's not saying that no improvement from Acrobat 5 until the release of Acrobat 8 was justified, just that they were rather limited in what they could have done.)

But, that would require the Acrobat team to change their EVERYONE MUST USE WINDOWS worldview, and we all know they've smoked too much of that crack to stop now. Addiction is indeed, a terrible thing. One might think the Acrobat team wants PDFKit to fully support the current PDF standard, so they can just dump any support for the Mac beyond PDF altogether.

I'm not sure why, it's not like they spend a lot of money making Acrobat a particularly good Mac application. Lord knows, the entire marketing savings won't even buy a cup of coffee at Dunkin' Donuts.

Of course, they could always surprise me, and do the right thing for their Mac users, and start making Acrobat Mac something better than a "Here, now STFU" application.

Right, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Acrobat Team = Annoying

Comments ()

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.