Merlin Mann on Adobe's products

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...

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.

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

Actually, installing or upgrading Firefox extensions does require restarting Firefox. Mozilla has realized for a long time that this is not optimal and have a new project called Jet Pack that will give programmers a lot of control, and be a lot easier to write for, but won't require a restart. It's still in early development, though. https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/

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.)