Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
kungfugrippe.com
kungfugrippe.com
But Adobe managed to fork $600 out of me for Photoshop CS3. After a few months their RAW converter stopped working demanding CS4 and my new SLR wasn't supported otherwise. So essentially I feel like they fooled me into renting Photoshop for $600 per year.
Needless to say, if I want to run my purchased copy on Windows (I paid for the Mac version), I'll have to pay for it again, the license covers only one OS.
Oh, and the only software that ever manages to crash my computers into must-be-turned-off-and-on state (I have Linux and a Mac) is Flash. Freezing the entire OS is hard, they surely have an engineering muscle to pull that off.
http://blogs.adobe.com/sarthak/Text_Issue.png
I immediately downgraded back to CS3 and only reupgraded 9 months later, when they finally released an update. Unfortunately, I use Fireworks for all my front-end work and it seems buggier than ever in Snow Leopard.
I've experimented with every app that looks like it could be a potential replacement -- most recently Opacity (http://likethought.com/opacity/) -- with none quite hitting the web design niche that it was able to fill. Usually because it's only one or two guys working on it. Why a company like Panic hasn't tried to take advantage of the obvious demand is beyond me.
I just forced myself to learn and use Photoshop (slices in particular) for web artwork.
I think Adobe is in a tough situation. They can not continue to grow by relying on a few software packages and have been pouring resources into Flash in an effort to turn more into a platform company vs. a software company. They just seem to be working against their culture as their strength has always been in graphics/design software. Most of their attempts at developer-oriented software have never panned out. Anyone remember GoLive?
InDesign itself is rock solid, and a pretty impressive piece of work. (Even if they are slowing down on development--I guess there's not all that much to do with it.)
On the UI, yes, it's a kinda half-way house. But most print-oriented designers live in InDesign, so they probably get used to it as their own little world.
That said, everything else about Adobe's suite (updating, serialization, etc.) is just punishingly bad, as Merlin points out.
It does tend to make one despair.
The main problem with Adobe that I can see is that the suits took over once Chuck Geschke and John Warnock left. These guys were consummate engineers, and their products reflected that fact.
And, then, to add insult to injury, Macromedia took over Adobe, and pretty much turned the company into a Flash-only place. I hate Flash and all that it stands for.
Oh well, maybe I'll whine privately at Chuck...
And, in some sense, InDesign is pretty much "complete" as far as what people expect in the print publishing world.
They're now slowly moving into more long-document features, etc, so it can be a replacement for much of the FrameMaker usage out there.
But, in the end, print publishing is slowly dying, so the future there is unclear, anyway.
I think most of the stability problems he points at arose when integrating Fireworks, Flash and Dreamweaver into CS. Basically created a split of differing UI standards and buggy software.
I think the single best point made here is that not everyone uses every single feature in every single app. If they could give us quicker access to our oft-used features I'd likely be happier (and they've started addressing this with the new panels structure, I just want some keyboard functions to toggle them now)!
Additionally, Adobe really doesn't have any pressing need to change. I don't know the specific numbers, but I'm pretty sure GIMP isn't even considered a competitor by them.
Cruft isn't simply a measure of menu volume, and IMO it's not necessarily about removing tools.
It's about failing to maintain an updated, sound, and sane set of affordances for doing the most important or common work with the least friction possible. To me fixing cruft means making decisions about arranging things well and moving anything that would work better (or less intrusively) someplace else. And, yeah. Removing stuff that simply shouldn't be included. That's the kinds of decisions good developers make.
For me, cleaning up PShop would be like making sure that map of Atlanta is in the right part of the garage. Alongside all the other maps that I "actually use." But which I certainly don't "actually use" quite as much as the salt and pepper or the TiVo remote.
Those? I want those right where I can get to them.
Also in fairness, considering the wide variety of different workflows for which Photoshop is used, dtermining what is a sane set of defaults is by no means an easy task, and prioritizing things per a user's most-used isn't really a solved problem; and there is already the option in PS to customize menus, panes, etc.
That being said, I do think Adobe has lost the plot a bit since they aquired Macromedia (though not to say that Acrobat isn't every bit as bad in its own way as Flash) and from what I know of the company I don't really see them turning around any time soon - I just hope for Pixelmator or similar to get to the point where they can actually compete with Photoshop on a broader level, so that Photoshop actually has some serious competition and they have to start improving it significantly. (Though I should note to the best of my knowledge they're doing fairly well with After Effects, still, which afaik doesn't have any significant competitors.)
The installed base issue is giant for anyone. It certainly seems to have tons to do with why so many smart folks at MS end up spinning their wheels on creating anything genuinely new. What's that number people throw around? Something like 26 flavors of Windows devices to support? Eee-yuck. That's a lot of masters to please.
Re Adobe and re Pshop in particular I seem to recall a few years back -- and well after the years I would have counted myself as even "competent" at PShop -- people freaked over changes to a bunch of key commands and menu nav (do I remember that right?).
I way get that. So much. It's (again w/ the kitchen metaphor) like having some joker come in and mess up your pantry and hide your knives and whatnot.
It's just that for me, as an increasingly casual user of these apps (as well as a 1-man show who has total freedom to choose/buy/change/try/dump whenever it suits me), it just feels like things are devolving at a quickening pace. Just at a gut level. These apps are no fun to use. Bloat. That's the word I keep coming back to.
FW and DW feel like Java apps at this point. SO far off the mark on performance, UX, and general polish, that I kinda can't believe Pros still pay retail for them. I guess it's just a line item in the Excel. No idea.
I owe a lot to Adobe and their apps and have for MANY years now. And like I say I love the folks I know there. It just feels like the company has lost any interest or ability in making the sorts of things that OS X power users love shelling out dough for. Great software that you want to tell everybody you love, y'know?
Very much so. And then there's another set of people who freak because of some default key shortcuts (which can, of course, all be changed from the defaults to whatever the hell makes you shiny) which have been in Photoshop since version 2 or so do something that's not the OS X standard. But it would cause more freakouts to change them so...
I've never used/been a fireworks guy, but I don't believe many of the pros are using DW anymore much at all.
"making the sorts of things that OS X power users love shelling out dough for."
See, the thing about that, and in more general terms... I love "native"-feeling OS X apps as much as the next person, or probably more, for most values of "next person". And I'd certainly love for Photoshop to be more native. A couple problems with that, though... the obvious one of the vastly greater effort to do multiple platform stuff with entirely different native guis on each; then there's also the fact that native controls are just inadequate for what power users want out of photoshop. Just as a minor example, the ubiquitous scrubbing on the labels of textboxes to change values; certainly not something you can do with native controls.
In short, I'm not really sure what Adobe could be doing better. (Well, other then making their shit not crash horribly all over the room, though Photoshop is still extremely stable in my experience. I have nothing good to say about Flash or Acrobat in any way, and in fact most of the macromedia imports are generally shit.) Inevitably somebody will challenge their market dominance, and if they don't smarten up and fix PS beforehand, well, changing everything then in a desperate effort to retain their market will only make matters worse for them. Better for users everywhere, one hopes.
Kinda like what happened to Microsoft with Office 2007?
MS still did it. And Office 2007 is better for it.
But Fireworks does have tonns of annoying bugs.
It crashes occasionally after publishing or test-movieing, but far worse is as soon as I start doing anything stage/library/timeline related I'm almost guaranteed at least a few crashes before I'm done.