Issues

In my line of business, which is primarily building eye candy, I tend to use Adobe Software a lot. By a lot I mean every day for hours, and I have been doing that for the last 10 years. I think it’s fair to say that Adobe Software in the form of Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign has a fairly substantial influence on my lifestyle. Because of that, I hate Adobe.

My most recent disappointment in Adobe Software was upgrading to CS2. I didn’t really need to, but because Indesign CS2 is NOT backwards compatible with Indesign 2 – and if you don’t buy the Adobe upgrades as a pack then you will have to pay double for the licences. It was ‘upgrading through coercion’.

I am not an entirely bitter and vindictive person, and there was a part of me that was thinking, “Well at least I have all the latest stuff…” and considered the possible joys all this coin I forked out would bring.

A week later I can say unequivocally that there is NO discernible improvement to my work flow. As a matter of fact the upgrade to my Adobe Software has actually had a negative impact on my lifestyle as a designer. This is because Adobe are not even slightly concerned with the lifestyles of their customers – they are only interested in the coin.

Installation.
The installation of the upgrade took 2 hours. I can’t for the life of me work out why it had to take two hours. What’s worse is that the process makes you sit there and punch in your admin password several times to allow it to install – so you can’t just let it install on it’s own. And what if you don’t want to install ‘Adobe Bridge’ or the rank stock photos or lame clip art – you aren’t given an option. Thanks for nothing there Adobe.

Activation.
Of course, like all anti-piracy measures, Adobe’s Activation is really only something that prevents actual customers from getting on with things. Software pirates will still pirate Adobe Software regardless. I had to call Adobe support to get it working. Thanks for nothing there Adobe.

Operation.
So I fire up Photoshop. It takes about 3 times as long to load as my computer takes to boot. I know that the first time it boots takes a long time, then it gets quicker, but after a week, it still takes twice as long as Photoshop 7 used to. So now my computer feels like it has aged about 3 years in one week. Thanks for nothing there Adobe. My previous Photoshop was laden with Actions that I use all the time – Photoshop CS2 got rid of all of them – thanks for nothing there Adobe. Hi-Rez images take 3 times as long to load as they did in Photoshop 7. Thanks for nothing there Adobe. Throughout the interface, Adobe has changed the way some of the fundamental tools work, like layers, text, file name handling for web images – I was happy with how they worked before. All of the new features are things that I NEVER USE. Most of them are merely ‘mashups’ of the functionality that Photoshop was already capable of anyway. Thanks for nothing there Adobe.

Indesign, is the same – it takes like a month to start it up. No new features that I would regularly use – slower and more painful than before. Thanks for nothing there Adobe.

Illustrator. The Live Paint looks like it could be useful occasionally – although I have no immediate uses for it. It doesn’t make up for the performance crash though. Thanks for nothing there Adobe.

The one and only thing I wanted from this upgrade was improved performance. For the last 5 years I have been carrying on about how the Adobe stuff on my computer is the slowest, most resource hungry of all the stuff I run (maybe with the exception of Virtual PC) and here we are 5 years later – and it’s the slowest, most resource hungry and bloated with useless shit for ‘graphics wannabes’ it has ever been. Thanks for nothing there Adobe. I guess because I am an old hand at using Photoshop I can already do the stuff that the new features do. The most significant features that I use and really did improve things for me are:

1. Layers
2. Layer Styles
3. Actions
4. Making Slices and Saving to Web
5. Editable Text

Admittedly, CS2 is a the best suite of desktop publishing applications bar none. However, it’s time of being a leading software innovator are long gone. The company is now a monopoly and are focused on only one thing – money (as opposed to value, reliability, ROI, efficiency, research and development and ergonomics). Adobe CSx will continue to get slower, continue to add useless crap to justify the enormous costs of the upgrades, continue to mess with my workflow and continue to become more expensive, depleting the quality of my lifestyle as it goes.

If there was another decent set of DTP tools I would be looking seriously at them, but the closest thing out there is the Open Source stuff – GIMP and Inkscape. They both run in the truly awful X11 window manager and are therefore completely unusable on any platform other than Linux (sorry guys – but it’s true). They also wreak of boffin programmers not understanding how the ordinary everyday processes of graphics people are (which is probably why those apps only run in X11).

To me, the outlook of Desk Top Publishing is bleak. I don’t see any improvement coming in the next 5 years unless:

1. Apple buy Adobe (which was suggested by Cringely)
2. Someone picks up the Open Source stuff and makes it a viable alternative DTP suite (in the way that Blender is a viable alternative 3D package), rather than just a graphics facility for Linux users.
3. Someone has the balls to develop something new and better (but who?)

All up – CS2 is shit. I probably will have to get the upgrade to CS3 as it will be supposedly running natively on the new Mac Intel chips and therefore it’s performance may improve (CS2 is still ridden with all this legacy OS9 code), but I am not holding my breath. I won’t be surprised if it’s just as shit as CS2.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Bastardry, Computers, Graphics, Personal, Software, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.