I have a perverse talent for pushing technology until it breaks. Currently Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 have both stopped acknowledging the space-bar, shift-key and option-key constraints. Working with these applications without those tools is like trying to tie your shoes in ski mittens. Other users are having this problem too, but Adobe’s forums are filled with apologists and sycophants. Anyone who questions their design decisions or reports an issue tends to be castigated and shouted down, in some cases even by one particularly loathsome Adobe employee. Here are links to two threads about the problems I’m having, though neither offers a solution (require registration):
My current solution workaround? Photoshop 6 in Classic. Ugh.
I’ve been using Photoshop since version 2.0, and I even have a copy of 1.7.3 on floppy (the whole thing fit on one single floppy disk) I’m not using it much at all anymore, because with each version it gets a little more frustrating and less and less fun. Adobe needs competition.
This is one of the things which worries me about OS X; legacy applications. After researching my current problem and writing this out, I started to want to install Photoshop 4 again. Of all the versions I’ve used, I think that was the closest to perfect. It was before the nightmare of color profiles, and had a clean, fast and logical workflow which seemed to be a perfect extension of the ideas in Photoshop 3. But back to OS X. When we finally lose Classic, which seems like it will happen in the near future, our options are cut off. Photoshop 4 and thousands of other programs won’t be options anymore, even though their still a completely viable applications. Hopefully the same spirit which keeps dragging old technology forward will keep things running into the future.
I was planning on slamming Adobe’s nearly unusable although visually pleasing web site some other time, but it just started to flow. Due to a lousy information architecture, finding information on their site takes forever. Just getting into their forums to browse was a convoluted mess of clicks and pages. One page said I could browse without logging in, but then connected me to the login page. Repeatedly. But the site’s problems don’t end with the unreadable content it displays. The pages themselves are a non-standard mess. They’re still not using DOCTYPE declarations. Their HTML is a disaster. Their CSS is a disaster. Adobe seems to have a phenomenally poor understanding of and lack of respect for the web, it’s amazing they can still sell web tools. Or maybe that’s why most people I know don’t rely Adobe tools when building sites.
The situation of purchasing fonts from Adobe is equally frustrating, and barely seems to work. (no surprise, it’s a web service) Several different attempts have ended up in calls to font sales support because their system either doesn’t download the file, downloads an html file instead of the fonts or eventually sends a corrupted archive. In the end they ended up emailing the files. Keep in mind that all of this trouble is to legitimize the use of a font I already have a copy of. It’s no wonder there’s software piracy…
