Or, How I become afraid of future software releases from Adobe.
I recently took a trial spin of Adobe’s CS4 suite and it’s looking like some of my favorite tools are in jeopardy of becoming less polished and annoying. As nice as every Creative Suite upgrade can be, the quality has dropped off of each release since the whole suite became a unified product. It’s not that they’re aren’t some nice things to embrace with each update either, plus the software clearly required a lot of hard work from lots of talented people, but someone at the top is letting this stuff out prematurely – which isn’t something I would’ve complained about as much in the past.
Adobe needs to make money and grow, but now it would seem to be at the expense of a lot of seriously bad bugs, mostly with how the UI works (or doesn’t work). Some of these bugs are the result of Apple’s growing pains and Adobe’s huge legacy source code, others are just little reminders that the honeymoon may be over as money overshadows quality in software development.
Seriously, I could’ve waited a few months for CS4. It’s not like we’re switching from Intel to another architecture and we need it to run natively right now. If anything the CS3 suite could’ve used a 0.5 clean-up that ideally would have better hooks for a lot of the changes in CS4. But hey, it was time get more revenue and it all has to ship on schedule, finished or not. I almost worked at Adobe once, in tech support, a job I would’ve probably loved. Now I’d be embarrassed to field the kinds of questions that must be coming in.
CS4 has some painfully embarrassing glitches that slide past QC, or perhaps nobody cares because they know we’ll all buy it and say “it’s the best yet” anyway. It’s easy to think that but if you poke around online you’ll see that lots of folks at Adobe do care, it’s just that the suite is too big to revise radically on a tight schedule.
Things starting sliding years ago when Adobe started adding graphical icons with links in palettes (I know how to go to adobe.com, thank-you-very-much), then they came out with the precursor to Bridge (which I never used), then Bridge itself, which was useful but didn’t do contact sheets efficiently which sort of made no sense given that this is a major tool for graphics professionals. And via the slow launching and crash-prone Bridge Adobe tried to be your stock photo source (again) as well as your collaboration center and design portal.
The Adobe Bridge Home service has been discontinued in order to focus resources on other efforts.
Most of these extracurricular services were dropped recently to “focus resources on other efforts”. Amen. Thank you recession for weeding out the crap. However, now we have Adobe TV and Adobe Drive which are installed via the controversial Creative Suite installer regardless of choice.
Here we go again. Too much, too fast, at the cost of losing ground with the core audience. This seems to be a consistent problem with success, especially with software.
Adobe has taken it on themselves to create their own UI and it’s a hit and miss to the point that my workflow stutters more than ever. With great power comes great responsibility – Adobe you need to polish this UI more before you drop it on people who weren’t asking for it. At least nobody I know asked for it, both power user or otherwise. Except for Flash I don’t think anyone was asking for you to buy Macromedia and adopt their awkward Flash interfaces either.
C’mon, you can do better than this.
There, I said it. Sorry John.
I don’t know if it’s because the entire set of software products have the same release date (except, oddly, Acrobat). If so, it’s a focus thing as too many resources are being shoehorned into the same development schedule – roughly every two years we get a new Creative Suite when a lot of nagging glitches are left un-patched in the original. CS4, more than ever, needs some polish and probably more than the usual one or two patches that will come out in it’s lifespan.
I mentioned above that Apple’s growing pains are part of Adobe’s struggles, and they are. But one thing that sounds right is that Apple claims that their next OS revision, Snow Leopard, is a refinement release, one that isn’t about new features but is about cleaning up and getting all the kinks worked out before doing another huge revision. Kudos to that, but we all know that this isn’t a popular way to make money. I don’t think it’s as bad as it seems though – most folks bought Tiger or Leopard and claimed not to notice the differences and that’s because many of them are under-the-hood, where only the geekiest of us look. The new features are already overlooked anyway.
And in the end some of us just want to get our work done without having palettes, licensing and traditional UI conventions breaking.
I’ve sort of felt that there is some risk of implosion with the Creative Suite as many buy it and maybe use 1/3rd of it, just like another suite that has been sliding in popularity. Adobe is trying to clean things up and I know it’s because of Apple’s Intel move and Microsoft’s Vista problems as well as the smattering of video card issues as CS4 uses those, but they’ve let too much slide this time. My confidence is greatly reduced.
These problems are long term chinks in the Creative Suite and Adobe brand. Here’s to hoping they can pull it together soon.
