Brick Blues
When I first decided to write this it was a comment to a post Jon Hicks made in his weblog about his love/hate relationship with Fireworks, but I’ve instead decided to sweep away a bit of the cobwebs here and write something not font related. I can sympathise with Jon on this, and being reliant upon Adobe applications to do my job I’ve experienced much of the frustration with Adobe’s complete lack of sanity when it comes to their applications. I’m going to focus on their Macintosh releases, but much of what’s mentioned here very well does apply to their Windows releases as well.
Merlin Mann decided to write something about this as well, and I agree with everything he states. However, I don’t believe it is necessary to repetitively state that you’re not trying to insult the developers. If they’re incapable of taking constructive criticism then they really do need to find another job. Adobe’s applications have for quite some time now gotten so horrendous that if they continue down this track their users will be incapable of using their software because it simply isn’t stable enough for usage as anything but printing the applications’ binary data on toilet paper for removing shit from the crack of someone’s ass. Fireworks, today, fits that description. If this is an insult to developers so be it, but we don’t pay over a thousand dollars for a suite of applications to crash; for quite a few years now that’s what we’ve paid for.
Purchasing
The problems with Adobe’s applications don’t even begin with using them. In fact it begins before even purchasing them. I only use two of Adobe’s applications most of the time — Photoshop and Illustrator. I personally like to keep InDesign around for sparatic print work. Now to get three applications I had to purchase a suite of TEN applications:
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- InDesign
- Flash
- Dreamweaver
- Fireworks
- Acrobat
- Bridge
- Device Central
- Version Cue
Out of that list I despise Flash and Dreamweaver both out of principle and the trauma of actually having to use them at one point. I will never install any of those two on any computer I own. After trying really hard (and I mean really) I just can’t like Fireworks. I personally would wish that Illustrator’s pixel preview and pixel rendering be fixed to be more pixel-perfect and Fireworks’ symbol handling be put into Illustrator while its PNG support be placed into all Adobe applications which can open and save PNG files as no other application has as good PNG support as Fireworks does. Aside from creating, saving, and opening PDF files I don’t use them much, so Acrobat is just digital waste to me as well. The largest pile of rotten garbage of that list are the last three. They rode the short bus to make their way into the application suite, even.
Why not buy just the applications I want? Because buying Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign separately cost more than buying the suite of ten applications listed above. Doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.
Installation
Adobe has decided to create their own installer which is neither native nor tries to be. It just needs to go away. To be quite frank on the Mac there shouldn’t be an installer. You should stick the disc in and drag all of the applications you want to your hard drive, but they’re not going to do that because it would make things too easy and it would give end users an easier method of installing just what they want instead of letting the installer run by default, therefore placing numerous amounts of bullshit on your computer. Waiting an hour for the installer to place the files on your computer is a much more efficient method than just taking a few minutes to drag files to your Applications folder, surely.
Adobe does an excellent job with fucking its customers over with its overpriced and bloated bundles and with the abhorrent installer it uses, but those compare nothing to how they fuck over their customers with the “activation” process, a form of DRM Microsoft is famous for using with an intent to deter piracy. Adobe is absolutely retarded for resorting to software activation as all it does is piss off people who just finished paying $1000 for a suite of applications most of which they don’t use and have waited an hour for them to install. What does it do to deter piracy? Well, pirates don’t even need to activate the software. They either crack it or use the same key generator to generate an activation key as they did the suite’s serial number. In other words the answer is: NOTHING. It does nothing but cause hell for customers.
Using the Applications
There are three things that are the foundation for good software:
- Usability
- Stability
- Efficiency
Adobe’s Creative Suite applications have none of the three. Usability comes down to making the application as easy to use as possible and thinking about what aspects of the application is used the most. Merlin Mann in his assessment asked if anyone uses Plastic Wrap as much as Unsharp Mask. They have no need of being on equivalent menu levels. Attention to detail like that and establishing a sense of structure again should be a top priority.
Adobe’s applications with each release become less and less stable while becoming more and more expensive. It appears to my eyes that Adobe’s applications have much of the same codebase they had when they first released for Mac OS X. It’s like painting a picture. Sooner or later you have to know when to stop as you’ll eventually make it worse by trying to “improve it”. Adobe CS5 is going to be a complete rewrite because it has to be rewritten in Cocoa for Mac OS X to be 64-bit, but end users are increasingly having to fork over hundreds of dollars for upgrades that are mostly bugfixes and stability improvements that should have been addressed with patches to the previous release. Both Adobe CS4 and CS3 were supposed to address all of the previous release’s stability problems. They either have and introduced new ones or haven’t done a thing to improve stability. I’m not going to hold my breath that CS5 is going to be more stable as we’ve been lied to in the past, and personally I’m quite sick of the lying and broken promises.
When a user has to use an application to do his job the efficiency of the application is perhaps the top priority over anything. Several times a day a beachball of death will delay an opening of a menu or any other such mundane task as clicking on a path in Illustrator. My point is here that much of the slowups in Adobe’s applications come from doing tasks that should be quick and don’t require much memory or processing power to accomplish. Adobe seems to focus on tasks which typically take much memory to accomplish (and I think them for that), but it’s time to up the efficiency for mundane tasks as well. Adobe’s applications with each release require more and more memory to function without any viable reason as to why. Adobe CS4’s reason for memory usage increase is in reality mostly its interface. I’d rather have more of my RAM devoted to the task at hand rather than displaying a crufty interface.
I don’t think I need to express just how bad Adobe’s UI conventions are as others have already done it for me, but the jist of my suggestions for a solution to the problem is to use native UI elements as much as possible as it does indeed take less memory to use system UI elements, and keep Flash, Flex, and AIR the fuck away from my applications. I don’t want anything to do with any of those three, and I sure as hell don’t want them anywhere near applications in which I have to rely upon their efficiency as those three are the poster children for bad behavior. Don’t get me started on Flash. I don’t even want to start ranting on it. It’s ridiculous that users have to ask for these three things as they should be the underlining philosophy of any application’s development.
With Lightroom, Adobe has proven that they are capable of producing amazing software again. However, Lightroom’s very existence is based upon competition from Apple’s Aperture. It can’t be downplayed how well-developed Lightroom is, and hopefully the success that came from the development of Lightroom can make its way to the Creative Suite.
The Company
Adobe is a company with a long history of producing exceptional software, and for the longest time what they produced were some of the best software money could buy. What happened? Marketers and micromanagers took over the company. Proof of this lies in the fact that Adobe’s former CEO, Bruce Chizen, was a toy company sales director before becoming one at Microsoft. What does a toy company salesman know about professional graphics software? Nothing. Adobe today is like Apple was in the late ’90’s, a company run by people who knew nothing of what they were selling producing nothing but shit expecting people to pay a premium for it. Why isn’t Adobe on the verge of bankruptcy like Apple was then? Because there’s no professional alternative to Adobe’s software like there was to Apple’s hardware. In 2005 Adobe gobbled up its last viable competitor, Macromedia. Corel still exists, but their software has long been out of the professional range except Painter; unfortunately it suffers from even more severe efficiency problems than Photoshop does.
Adobe today has the best engineers, programmers, and designers at their disposal but they’re not being allowed to produce good software because the people in charge are about as clueless as a eunuch at a condom factory. If they weren’t no one would have a need to gripe about Adobe’s software other than the free software bastards who believe all software should be free. There are free alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator, but none of the alternatives provide the necessities for professionals. I’ll say right out that GIMP is shit, but Inkscape has potential of being excellent although it’ll never be accepted on the Mac when it requires X11 to function.
Talking about professionals, Mac OS X is by a wide margin the preferred operating system for creative professionals, and Adobe is apparently ignoring the platform simply because by sales numbers Windows outsells Mac OS X. The applications are only worthwhile when artwork is being produced with them, and the vast majority of produced professional-looking artwork with those applications come from Mac users. It’s time for them to pay attention to all users of all platforms they sell applications under.
The company seriously needs to communicate with its users more than it has in the past. Today there is only one viable communicator between Adobe and its users: John Nack. There’s dire need for more discussions and interaction between Adobe and its professional customers. Wacom, having a similar user base, has done some excellent community work with their customers. Adobe could and should follow suit. They could do even more by utilizing Twitter, Facebook, and other things to provide a large sense of communication; they would be surprised how more satisfied their customers would be with their software if they were capable of holding conversations with their user base.
Conclusion
Perhaps this long rant will all be moot with CS5, but they have other applications to address such as the Flash plugin which is quite possibly the worst software available for the Macintosh platform. That is horrible software that does affect more people than those who rely upon their professional applications and is the number one cause of browser crashes on any platform. I want Adobe to succeed. I love Adobe and have used their applications since Photoshop 2.0 on a Macintosh Centris 650 in the early ’90’s. Adobe seriously needs to get its act together or some enterprising and ballsy indie developers need to step up and fill the void as a competitor to Adobe; the best thing Adobe could have right now is a viable competitor. Having a competitor has forced Adobe to produce excellent software in the form of Lightroom. Having one for everything else can do the same.