Adobe releases lengthy list of Apple Lion woes | Hacker News Reader

Adobe releases lengthy list of Apple Lion woes

theregister.co.uk

28 pointszachinglis23 comments

Even if the headline was accurate instead of hyperbolic, my response would be something along the lines of "because no one's a fairer and more impartial judge of Apple software than Adobe." That list of incompatibilities is something I think Adobe should be ashamed of: it is essentially a "List Of Areas Where We Don't Have Our Shit Together." Apple's cut-off dates for legacy versions are pretty aggressive, true, but with the notable exception of the XServe (and how many people do you know running Creative Studio on an XServe?) they're also aggressive about announcing them ahead of time.

This is basically another data point in the pattern of Adobe not being a very good development house, along with all the points about "please exhibit good design taste in your design applications."

Then there's this: "Adobe also notes that one of Lion's marquee features, the System Preference that allows you to have Lion restore an app's windows just as they were when you quit that app, doesn't work at all in Adobe products. "This feature requires new code in order to work properly," they note. "Adobe will research adding this functionality for inclusion in future versions of our products.""

That's not a "woe," that's "repeating Apple's documentation of the feature."

In case you want to skip The Register's hyperbole: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/905/cpsid_90508.html

God what an awful site (the Register, that is).

The article makes it seems as though Adobe is publicly whining about all of these problems as though it is Apple's fault, when in reality they've simply categorizing all of the incompatibilities and inconsistencies in a very responsible way.

Adobe was publicly whining about at least one problem, and had to issue a retraction. http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/07/correction-regard...

Hyperbole: I've seen worse.[1]

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/21/apple-declares-war-on-adob...

I think it's worth keeping in mind that even Microsoft as of Office 2011 has excised all the PowerPC cruft from Office. Adobe has no excuse other than laziness. The fact that people defend them and attack Apple over this floors me. How long would it have taken to get all the PowerPC code out of CS if Apple didn't have such aggressive cut offs?

I also love that people think Apple needs Adobe more than Adobe needs Apple. Take another look at the revenue for each company and the percentage of Photoshop users on OS X and THEN try saying that with a straight face.

The PowerPC cruft you refer to is Photoshop droplets no longer working.

Now I'm sure they're important for some people, but they're one tiny feature in a massive set of applications. And the functionality is still there, you just have to trigger the actions from inside Photoshop instead of creating a droplet.

...or upgrade to their latest release and "Drag your old droplets onto the Photoshop application icon. An updated version of the droplet is created in the same folder as the old one."

Apple long ago told developers to move away from Carbon and move over to Cocoa. Adobe, as usual, just ignored the directive.

Now I think most of Adobe's problems are in fact due to using a custom version of the PowerPlant C++ framework developed back in the System 7 days.

Apple barely even needs OS X. The lights are turned on by the iPhone division.

Apple will always need a development environment for iOS, separate from iOS that 3rd party devs are comfortable with. This is why OS X will always exist in some incarnation.

I would say that OS X keeps the lights on, iOS lines the coffers. Apple could easily stay afloat and be posting great quarters with only OS X, they just wouldn't be rolling in extra cash like they are now.

Well, to be fair, does any version of Office before 2011 have the PowerPC code removed? If not it isn't a fair comparison to expect all Adobe products before CS5 to be the same as the latest version of Office.

But I suppose Lion will provide Adobe with a new marketing strategy with CS6. "Update now so all your Adobe software will work with OS X Lion!"

I consider most of this bickering kind of silly. To move forward you sometimes have to make OS changes that break legacy apps. To move forward you sometimes have to drop support for legacy apps. Both Apple and Adobe created this list of issues and I bet there are other applications out there with similar problems. Well, maybe not as many. It's just you're not hearing about them because of the silly fight between Apple and Adobe. It's like dealing with children who dislike each other and the fanboys are acting like the mob of children that eggs them on.

Granted, there's little excuse for CS5 versions of Adobe software to fail badly when there was time to prepare. But Adobe traditionally sells major patches as point releases or new versions. Full price for CS5.5? Really?

"Java Runtime needs to be installed manually, otherwise applications may behave inconsistently"

OS X asks you and automatically downloads it when an app requires java, this happened soon after my first boot up with lion

"Files stored in Library"

"Scrolling behavior opposite of expected"

These are not 'issues', this is by design.

"Rosetta support no longer included with Lion"

This was known way before wide release of Lion, no reason for Adobe to be unprepared for it.

OS X asks to install the JRE for certain programs like Eclipse or Minecraft but when I tried to do it with Netbeans I had no luck. I imagine there are other programs that do not work correctly.

Cyberduck worked flawlessly.

  >"Files stored in Library"
  >"Scrolling behavior opposite of expected"
  >These are not 'issues', this is by design.

I would imagine that their support people have gotten questions about both of these, and they are here mainly to say "this is by design in 10.7".

  >"Rosetta support no longer included with Lion"
  >This was known way before wide release of Lion,
  >no reason for Adobe to be unprepared for it.

Do you have any evidence that Adobe was unprepared for it? The article talks about CS2 or earlier versions of Adobe products. CS3, which is Intel-native, was released in 2007. Again, I would imagine this is here because they have had customers complaining that their old versions do not run on the new OS.

The real story here is: "How long will it take Adobe to bring their products up to speed".

Not that I'm saying they wont, and it's good that they're proactively documenting the incompatibilities between their products and Lion

That said, based on Adobe's history with Apple and OS X, and the fact that Adobe has used Flash support in iOS as a pro Adobe/Anti Apple PR tool, it's reasonable to expect them to drag their feet with this stuff.

Should I start a list of my Adobe software woes?

I mean, seriously -- even the frickin' keyboard shortcuts don't work in AIR "apps". And don't even get me started on the whole "updater" thing.

Pixelmator works well on Lion:

"Ready for OS X Lion Wednesday, 20 July 2011. Posted by Saulius.

I’m very happy to let you know that while working extremely intensively on Pixelmator 2.0—codenamed Chameleon—we still managed to improve the currently available version’s compatibility with OS X Lion. Pixelmator 1.6.6 adds fixes and improvements that will help the app run smoothly on OS X Lion.

Lion is a must-have upgrade of Mac OS X. Believe me, we spent a lot of time using it, and everyone at the Pixelmator Team absolutely loves the OS X Lion.

To easily update to Pixelmator 1.6.6, simply use your Mac App Store app. For non-Mac App Store users, it is highly recommended to transition to the Mac App Store at this time. However, if not ready to transition yet, users can run the Software Update feature in Pixelmator.

High-end support for OS X Lion is coming along for Pixelmator 2.0 Chameleon. With Lion-specific features, the new version is going to totally rock on OS X Lion. If you haven’t yet noticed, we have a sneak preview website for more info about what’s coming in Pixelmator 2.0.

And finally, we thought you might be happy to take a look at the new Smudge Tool in Pixelmator 2.0. Enjoy the video!"

(from http://www.pixelmator.com/weblog/)

Considering the premium price of the Adobe suite, it's fair to expect premium support. Hopefully Adobe will get their software sorted at least as far back as CS4.

So, the complaints seem to break down into two types:

a.) things which broke because they depended on Rosetta (PowerPC emulation), when Apple has been warning for at least three versions that PowerPC emulation will be going away any version now.

b.) things which Lion makes available to apps (new APIs), but which Adobe apps don't yet use -- meaning only that their apps work as they always did, but don't take advantage of new features of Lion.

Depending on the length of Adobe's release cycle, they may not have had enough time to prevent b.) since developer previews of Lion became available earlier this year -- but they can't really claim they didn't see a.) coming.

If I remember correctly, it took forever for Adobe to port to OS X in the first place, and even then, they were running on Carbon for much longer than a lot of other major apps. It sounds like they have a really hard time letting go of legacy code.

I've had so many issues with Adobe on Windows and Apple platforms over the years that I'm not at all surprised at how this played out. I've long abandoned Reader in favor of the FoxIT version for Windows and Apple's Preview. Adobe seems incapable of implementing a competent quality control program.

I have Adobe Flash Builder 4 working on 10.7 just fine, even though the list says it won't work.

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