Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
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Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#2Oh, 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.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#3When 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.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#4If 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.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#5Oh, 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.
They could take a firefox approach. I think it's already somewhat built that way. Give everybody the functionality that everyone uses, and provide a way to easily (without restarting anything) add extensions for more functionality.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#6When 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
#7Oh, 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.
Yeah, disappointing article -- big old piece of software A sucks in the ways that big old pieces of software tend to.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#8Oh, 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.
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.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#9If 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.
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.
Re: Merlin Mann on Adobe's products
#10Reasonable 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)!