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 pe…
Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
21–30 of 37 posts
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dec…
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…
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?
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#23Some 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…
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#24Some 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…
The last time Adobe let their desktop publishing app slow down on development, QuarkXPress ate their lunch and they had to invent InDesign to compete again. Adobe Pagemaker used to be a serious competitor. (Of course, it also used to be Aldus Pagemaker).
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.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dec…
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…
Kinda like what happened to Microsoft with Office 2007?
MS still did it. And Office 2007 is better for it.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. Kinda like what happened to Microsoft with Office 2007? MS still did it. And Office 2007 is better for it.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#27When 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 wi…
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.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#28When 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 wi…
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 year…
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.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#30Up 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 pe…