
Merlin Mann on Adobe's products - qeek
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/199148868/adobe-bricks
======
old-gregg
Up until 2 years ago I never paid for software. Having a MSDN subscription on
Windows gave me access to all Microsoft stuff I needed, and on Linux things
were always free.

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.

~~~
tedunangst
I'd like to hear more about how their RAW converter stopped working.

~~~
old-gregg
I got a new camera, Adobe said "oops, you have to upgrade to the latest RAW
converter to get it to work", I ran the software update, the converter said
"oops, you have to upgrade your 1-year old Photoshop".

~~~
tedunangst
I guess I wonder why you blame Adobe for not supporting your camera's
proprietary format, but are giving a free pass to the camera manufacturer for
not providing software or drivers.

------
adamhowell
When Fireworks CS4 was first released it was easily the buggiest piece of
major software I'd ever tried to use. This bug was just insane:

<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.

~~~
callmeed
I'm actually surprised Adobe has even kept Fireworks alive since buying
Macromedia (I used it for all my front-end work too).

I just forced myself to learn and use Photoshop (slices in particular) for web
artwork.

~~~
johns
As far as I'm concerned, as of Fireworks CS4, it's dead to me. FW CS4 is so
horribly broken that it's unusable. This is one of the great travesties in
software as far as I'm concerned. I _love_ Fireworks 8 but it would be nice if
it were modernized.

------
cpr
Some of our products are plug-ins for InDesign, and other than occasional PS
work, I ignore everything else in the suite.

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...

~~~
pyre
I thought that Adobe bought Macromedia...

~~~
derefr
And Apple bought NeXT. That doesn't mean the NeXTers became the peons :)

------
squelch
Reasonable critique but I think it sidesteps a few things. Indesign and
Photoshop are stable as hell, pretty much always have been.

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)!

------
ugh
If it weren't for Lightroom (truly great with its very own style - not Mac-
like, not Win-like, just plain cool) I would long have despaired. Maybe there
is some hope, but the task would be huge.

~~~
swilliams
I think Lightroom is good because they were able to start from scratch (kinda
like how MM said in the article). The problem with their other flagship apps
is that they have been around for so long that they've accumulated so much
stuff.

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.

------
eli
Oh, c'mon. It's easy to say "strip down all the cruft" ... but people actually
use all of those tools. You'd be pretty unhappy if they removed a feature you
use every day because people thought it made the menu bar look too crowded.

~~~
merlinmann
I also use a map of Atlanta. When I'm in Atlanta. But I don't need to store it
with my salt and pepper or underneath my TiVo remote.

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.

~~~
ptomato
In fairness to Adobe (and as somebody who has worked briefly for them) even
_moving_ things in, say, Photoshop, will result in a monumental outcry from
many people who have used it for years and years.

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.)

~~~
merlinmann
Point VERY well taken. Thanks.

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?

~~~
ptomato
"people freaked over changes to a bunch of key commands and menu nav"

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.

------
albertsun
I love the term "Groan Pile". There's definitely software that I try as hard
as possible to avoid opening and software that I get excited about and look
forward to opening. Start-up time usually has a lot to do with it.

------
mooted
Perhaps i am the only one, but i never experienced even one single crash using
Flash CS4 / Fireworks CS4 (mac). I use Flash CS4 everyday. Sometimes a session
last for almost a whole week. No crash yet!!

But Fireworks does have tonns of annoying bugs.

~~~
gb
You're incredibly lucky, I usually have to restart Flash a few times a day and
actually I spend more time in coding in Eclipse/FDT than using Flash itself.

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.

------
jdowdell
It's much easier to address "What should I do if a 16x16px graphic crashes?"
than it is to wade through all the extra text surrounding it....

