While I agree that your experience is frustrating, this is one isolated incident. Adobe has been making quality products that I've personally been using for the past 10 years.
One isolated incident? Please... Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows? I don't have anything against Adobe, I haven't ever spent a dime on their software, so who am I to complain, however:
Just about the only reason I need to reboot my Mac is whenever I watch flash video (southparkstudios.com) and forget to close it before I shut the lid down. When laptop wakes up, it's frozen and I can't kill the browser.
Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound, but it also crashes regularly and generally looks and feels completely fucked up: wrong font rendering, steals focus and mouse clicks form the browser, etc. Ughh..
Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world.
And finally, their ridiculous Flash implementation burns my lap, I'm not kidding - whenever I visit a heavily flash-infected site, my MBP gets burning hot even for small video inserts on ESPN. BTW it also greatly reduces my battery time. Adobe software is probably the only reason why surfing the web on a 5 year old PC is a very unpleasant experience.
They are one of these old, big fat monopolies the world would be better without, but we have no choice.
Suggesting switching to GIMP isn't an argument. All our designers use Photoshop and nobody needs conversion headaches, Adobe owns the industry, it's called the vendor lock-in.
>Have you ever seen Adobe's PDF reader on Windows?
Is that really serious? OK so Adobe9 doesn't work on Vista, you can't rollback to 8 and Adobe's site won't let you download 8 if you are on Vista.
But that's not really serious for the majority of PDF users who are happy to fiddle with the registry to fix things but aren't capable of installing Foxit.
I've experienced the same performance issues with the Flash plugin on OS X. I use the iStat menus to keep a tab on my CPU usage, RAM usage and system temperature. Browsing the web takes very little CPU, and there are spikes in CPU usage only when I open a new page and the browser tries to render it. Just reading a webpage takes no CPU, as expected. Temperature remains in the range of 35 to 45 degrees Celsius.
Enter Flash. CPU usage oscillates rapidly between 0% and 30%, sometimes even going upto 70%. The temperature rises to 70 degrees Celsius.
This problem is not just Mac-related. I've experienced high CPU usage even on my Linux PC. IMHO, Flash is pure evil.
"Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world."
I guess you hate apt and yum too? Gee, having a list of programs that are installed is really lame.
Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg.
Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish.
Yep. Add to that, the acrobat installer, silently without notice or any option to avoid it, installs Adobe AIR without your consent.
I take this as a sign of a company entering a stage of decline. Successful companies on the rise do not need to use subterfuge to get deployment of their products. When a company starts to become hostile to its own customers you can tell the rot has set in. These days it is nearly impossible to download simple software without getting crapware along side it (Sun is another prime offender, and even Flash tries to shove toolbars down your throat.).
Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound
I walked a friend through the installation of Ubuntu on his laptop last week. The single sticking point we had was Flash's poor interaction with the sound system. That one issue took longer than the entire rest of the setup process.
"Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world."
I guess you hate apt and yum too? Gee, having a list of programs that are installed is really lame.
Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg.
Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish.
Lame? Mounting a DMG is no different from unpacking an archive, but unlike self-extracting executables this operation is 100% safe since no code gets to run. This is much better than "Are you fucking insane to run this?!" scary dialog boxes that Windows throws at you when you click on a downloaded .exe. Do you know how many people actually do get scared and delete your precious app instead?
Second, inside of a .dmg you normally find an application bundle that you simply copy into your Applications folder. What can possibly be simpler than copying a file?
I agree, I think this is kind of ridiculous. I installed many of their CS4 products (non-trial) a few weeks ago. I did not notice anything out of the ordinary or feel that it was an overwhelming process.
The majority of those files actually have nothing to do with Flash--they're the help system, and it's frustrated me too that someone at Adobe thinks that every single help page for every single product should have its own static HTML file that sits on my hard drive. It's completely stupid.
Check out http://www.dearadobe.com for more constructive criticism (which I may have initially found through Hacker News, but I don't really remember).
This is not how it has always been. The quality of Adobe products has gone down over the last few versions. CS4 is the worst.
Photoshop has an incredible number of bugs. So many that it is almost unusable. It occasionally crashes while trying to save a file, which is the worst user experience infraction possible.
I hope they fix this crap. It's getting more bloated every revision, and their UI is becoming more and more bizarre with each revision (why did they hack OS X to put window resizers on all four sides? It just makes it impossible to click behind Photoshop).
I think Adobe realizes this and going forward is going to have to make some changes. They are in the midst of transitioning from a desktop software company to a platform provider (Flash Platform, PDF and Flex) and are still integrating the wide range of apps that they have purchased over the years.
Unfortunately, at this point, it would be hard for them to justify completely rewriting their core apps and possibly miss future releases (e.g. CS5) which is a major part of their earnings. At some point, their new online apps and Eclipse-based products will mature and they will slowly begin to fix (or trim) things on the desktop side. Hopefully, this comes sooner rather than later.
I have always had a serious problem with Adobe's UI style in Adobe app I have ever tried. Corel graphics applications seem so much intuitive that I feel they give a measurable increase in productivity. Too bad they are generally not accepted for professional work.
Yeah, I started out with Corel Draw! 3. What an app! I loved it. Pitty the Mac versions were crashy beyond insanity. I would have re-switched otherwise.
GIMP vs. Photoshop isn't just about features. It's about polish.
I don't think I'll be able to convince you of this, but proprietary apps are usually more polished than the open source counterparts. I'm talking about every sense of the word polish: usability, reasonable bug levels, compatibility, etc.
It's not that open source is bad. It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do (real usability testing, compatibility, etc.).
It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do
You say this like it's a fact. Could you cite a source?
(I like your "compatibility" argument. The other day, we received some Word documents that crashed MS Word. OO.org opened them just fine, and the version exported from OO.org didn't crash Word anymore. Clearly Word is more polished, which is why it segfaults on invalid input.)
That's the work of paid _designers_. Graphic designers, user interface designers, interaction designers. How much respect get those people in open source project land? How much art school students know what the heck "open source" even means?
Well if they weren't they'd already be dead & you'd only know of the open source version. It usually takes a different business model (eg opera), or microsoft to prop up an inferior proprietary product. And opera's pretty much dead.
The problem is that 90% of the features is not good enough much of the time. I am not a designer but I know enough about design to know that getting the last pixel right is often 90% of expertise. It is a different world from software.
Why not? Software should be made for the user. Any image editing software that punishes you for never having used it has a problem. It also means that there's a market for an easy image editor that effectively lets users do what they want to do. (That's Aviary's goal, largely.)
That's what Photoshop Elements is for. The idea Photoshop does not have a well-designed UI because the learning curve is steep is ridiculous. The "user" that Photoshop is made for is the professional designer or photographer. There's plenty of room for lower-end consumer products, but there's nothing wrong with the Photoshop UI.
Ah, ok. Dear Programmers, pleeeazee write me a Photoshop 5.0, a Quark XPress 3 and a Freehand 4 Clone in your spare-time without financial compensation. Thanks.
Fair enough. Ok here is the most important stuff, sorted by program category.
Photoshop 5
This is a standard in forms of UI. What sequences of movements are necessary to get results. Like DJing or vim. The Gimp is absolutely horrible in that regard and completely ignores what the absolute majority of professional graphic designers are used to.
Font handling under X in general is pretty weak.
Color management has to work.
Vector Grafx
Inkscape is pretty good. But in some ways not good enough. It crashes to often with heavier files. But ok. I actually use it but would like to have Freehand back, UI again. Inkscape would be nice as native Mac App, yes, for UI reasons. UI is pretty important because it drives workflow, speed, productivity.
Quark 3
Was a classic. Everything about it was done right. Again, main thing the UI. Font inspector. Main window resizing. How to create new pages, how to link Texts. It was dam fast, with hundreds of pages open and links to database full of graphics. Doing a magazine in real production time with any of the OSS alternatives? Bad idea.
Cool, open source runs the web. Why? I guess one reason is that LAMP & Co are actually better performers than their commercial counterparts? Well, open source production software for the content creation industries as it exists today, sucks.
That might be true, but that's not what your comment communicated, to me anyway. To me, your comment communicated (rather snidely) that it's ridiculous to think that a bunch of programmers could create open source versions of the apps you listed in their spare time without financial compensation. All I was pointing out is that a lot of other software sectors have made the same mistake, and I don't see anything about content creation software that makes it immune to the same forces.
He does have a point, although he's been so busy being a jerk that he hasn't communicated it particularly effectively.
Software like Apache, Perl, Postgres, and so on all make the lives of software developers easier. When I spend time working on a project like that, it brings something I'm being paid to do closer to completion, or makes future paid work more lucrative. (I can charge the same amount, but it won't take me as long, etc.)
I don't have the same incentives to make a Photoshop clone, though, because my interaction with graphics manipulation usually consists of an email like "here are the graphics" from the graphics department. I don't care if Photoshop doesn't work, it's not my problem.
That said, I do edit my photos with Gimp, and I think it works great. So again, there is no incentive for me to improve it, I think it's fine already.
I don't see anything about content creation software that makes it immune to the same forces
I don't either, but empirically you have to concede that open source hasn't succeeded in the content creation domain. The closest thing is OpenOffice, and that's the least creative end of the spectrum, just one step away from databases and other back-end software.
If I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's because programmers don't understand the domain. You can't create good graphic design software without graphic designers on the team.
> ... and I don't see anything about content creation software that makes it immune to the same forces.
I'm a graphic & user interaction designer. About 4 years ago, I volunteered to help fix Drupal's UI problems. Everybody was like "Yay! UI help!"
I started by offering a new theme and giving feedback on the arcanity of the calendar API.
Result: no changes were ever made. None of it ever went anywhere, because the weenies prefered to argue on the mailing list about every single point rather than concede that somewhere, something might need to be better.
I gave up. I never volunteered for OSS again. It's not worth it.
Most users don't care for fixing it - they just want something that works. Most users are not programmers either, and those that are probably have other issues making them busy.
So the ability to fix broken is not really a benefit for most users. It's an enabler for those that can.
As for not working well, that can be said equally well for both Open Source and proprietary software. Equally, I can pick examples of software that works well from both types.
The biggest benefit for most users is that Open Source is free (as in beer). Firefox only hit the mainstream because it's free and was rock solid. Opera was for a long time rock solid but not free and that didn't help it, did it?
If not one person on the Earth cares about solving the problem, it is probably not that important. (Uh oh, here comes a rant about global warming and overfishing.)
Imagine a pipe in your new house sprung a leak. You contact the builder, but they don't answer your calls. Dammit, you need it fixed now!
So you go into the phone book and hire the first plumber you see. He comes over, fixes the pipe. Sweet!
Except now, two months later, the builder [i]does[/i] answer your call. And when you tell him you got the pipe fixed by someone else, he slaps a lawsuit on you, saying you're not allowed to disassemble or reverse engineer your house.
I think the biggest benefit for users is that you are free to do what you want with the software. You can get plug ins, pop it on LiveCDs, share it with friends, anything. Yes, "freedom" may not be a great piece for marketing, but when it comes to a users true benefits, freedom is the best thing Open Source has to offer.
I know I'm walking into a field of landmines in replying to this, but I'll try to tread carefully:
The plumber/pipe metaphor is better suited to consulting & custom corporate apps. For wide-release software (like Adobe's software) it's in the company's best interest to fix bugs and keep the user happy.
And I think pierrefar made a good point. The only reason I use Firefox is that it's a higher quality than IE and Opera. This might be a result of the openness of the software, but the openness of Firefox wasn't the deciding factor when I started to use it.
Most "user" open source software sucks a hell of a lot. I am currently having a running battle with xcircuit.
This program is supposed to draw circuit diagrams, yet it saves it in PS format! It manages to fuck everything up. The user interface and everything about the program is unbelievably bad.
Most open source software without a large market share is like that. It is unfortunately the OS mentality.
And don't even get me started on the entanglement of all the software packages. If I download a program to install on Windows it install. For linux the program depends on 120 other packages (a type of incestuous package relationship)
So far my experience with xcircuit makes it more or less comparable with gschem. I really like the fact that its save file is PostScript. (It doesn't lose anything when you save in that format!) The UI is really not discoverable at all, but in my experience the same thing is true of QCad, AutoCAD, and other software that does similar things, whether free or proprietary. There's a good xcircuit tutorial, and the non-obvious UI is actually pretty quick to use once you get used to it.
What schematic capture program do you really like, and what is its UI like?
I agree with this article 100%. My latest installs have been on windows and it's the same story. In order to download a product you need to do the following:
Reminds me of the trouble a large number of users had trying to install CS3 on Vista. The installer wouldn't initialise properly, and of course it didn't print any meaningful errors. Eventually I found a fix for this on someone's blog which suggested changing one of the environment variables.
After searching the Adobe forums and finding many users with the same problem, it seemed pretty obvious that Adobe just didn't know what the solution was.
Edit: found the relevant paragraph in the below mentioned Adobe blog:
"In CS3, there were some serious problems that customers faced and the time it took to resolve those issues in customer support made the initial experience with CS3 painful for some customers."
I've been using Photoshop since version 3 (first version with layers) but I don't think it's had a "must have" feature since version 7. However, I think that's just a trait of very mature software. Been using Flash since it was called FutureSplash. I develop on Flash CS3 almost daily
Is Adobe software frustrating? Yes, at times. Is it incompetent? No, I wouldn't say so.
And this line:
>> Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product.
The response from Adobe can be summed up pretty concisely: their products have reached such complexity and bloat that they can't do much about it. (Given the management's hunger for regular releases and spending as little as possible on development.) I used to work for a company which was in the exact same state, and among other things I was in charge of creating the installers, so I've seen this exact phenomenon up close and personal. Smart engineers were leaving the company left and right.
He mentions wanting an open source solution for developing on Chumby. I have used Sprouts [http://www.projectsprouts.org/] for some Chumby projects and I have been very happy with it. It doesn't have a drag and drop UI like Flash (it's more for hackers than for average users) but it is easy to work with and to setup.
wow, what a lot of whining. Just because you have a slow old mac you can't really complain too much about this. And doing the math on 2/3 1000 at a typical flash programmer hourly of say $100, that means it took you over six hours of time... Something I find very hard to believe. I would suggest upgrading to an Intel Mac.
In general Adobe products are some of the most functional, feature rich and reliable on the market. Photoshop is an amazing piece of software. Saying it has 'ugliest, least intuitive, inconsistent UI’ is just plain wrong. Adapting to the differences in UI's between products and operating systems has never been much of a challenge; it is a complex piece of software, but then so is gcc, but I also don't complain about that. Complex problems require sophisticated and complex solutions. Not everything can be Mickey Mouse.
So it took him 2 hours to install so I guess he consults at about $300 an hour.. then he complains that it's too expensive?
This “free trial” download experience does not encourage me to shell out the $995 Adobe wants for the product. (Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product.)
If you can buy a key tool for merely three hours of your labor, it's cheap. It's equivalent to someone on minimum wage buying a DVD or something..
I'm surprised at the number of Adobe supporters in this thread; it's Stockholm syndrome-esque.
For those who like the UI: Sure, it's better than the GiMP. But it's still awful. http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ has been on HN before. It's a compendium of more-or-less small things that are just howlingly wrong.
For those suggesting the installers aren't awful, Bynkii has spent plenty of time destroying that idea (and, yes, he swears):
So, Adobe software "shamefully, frustratingly incompetent"? Seems spot-on to me. The most frustrating and depressing thing is that it wasn't always this way. This is the firm that gave us Postscript, Photoshop, usable digital typography, Illustrator, PDFs and arguably played a large role in the birth of DTP, FFS. How have they become this marketing-encumbered hell-shop, trying to ram Flash everywhere and stamping all over their heritage?
Part of the reason for both Adobe's awfulness and for it's loyal following is that it has been the most faithful "paper emulator" of any major software company. Their software emulates all the awful pen-and-paper techniques that real artist used before there were computers.
PDF is like having a real piece of paper jammed awkwardly inside the cover of your laptop and trying to push it around a track ball. And so forth.
The thing is those folks who knew the paper-pencil techniques has generally been those who had no use for learning anything about computers, including how to use efficiently or whether there were alternatives. So Adobe's paper emulation has massive, undeserved loyalty built into it.
(with apologies to The Three Laws of Thermodynamics)
1. Software written by someone else is bad software
aka. You can't get ahead.
2. Software written by me more than six weeks ago is bad software.
aka. You can't even break even.
3. Its been at least two months since I have written software of any significance.
aka. You are behind before you start.
The bottom line is that software universally sucks. The reason we keep trying to make and use it, its far better than what it replaces. Maybe, if we try real hard, we will finally get it right. If history is any guide, don't hold your breath.
Computers are the tools of the devil. ...
Everything I've learned about computers at MIT I've boiled down into three principles:
Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, he can make it work.
Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't.
PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.
At least the Unix wizard can pretend he is going to make it work. All he needs to do is pipe this into that and write just one more filter. Then he can ....
By that time both he are you are lost in a blur of keystrokes and flashing characters on the display. As you leave the computer room, you can hear him muttering: "Oh, damn. I am in the wrong shell. I have to do it this other way...tap...tap...tap...."
The truth is, it doesn't really work there either. You are simply tired of waiting and are willing to accept almost anything to stop the annoying tapping noise and the endless muttering.
Hey, it keeps us off the streets so it isn't all bad.
Over time, the Adobe softwares got significantly slower and the features amount did not followed. We have pretty much the same old features than photoshop 6, but much much slower. I was running Photoshop 5 on a Celeron 300mhz when i began learning it. I will not upgrade from cs3 to cs4 anytime soon.
What always suprised me of INSTALLER applications (More specifically windows) is that those are compressed .EXE files that get uncompressed to your TEMP folder as another archive, that then gets decompressed again (and again... )... InstallShield is prime suspect.
Then again, EULA (And please, get a pet - cat or dog to sign them) stuff coming from Microsoft needs always to be an .EXE - why - well because you need some kind of dialog to sign off the EULA (even a .doc file might come as EXE).
I just hate installer programs... And Adobe screwing up on the Mac where this could be avoided by using plain-old DMG files - is just stoopid.
as the UI of popular products bloats over time, a market opportunity opens up for the people that the app originally served: people who just wanted a simple_____.
Mint.com is a perfect example of filling the vacuum left by accounting programs like quickbooks becoming too complicated for the average person.
I haven't used Photoshop in years, so I can't really comment. But I was a fan of Illustrator for a long time, and Lightroom is probably one of the best UIs ever. The thing is that when you get proficient in their apps you get really productive, so I can see why professionals go for their products.
Lightroom is an extraodinary case -- the entire UI was written from scratch, mostly in Lua, by a new team at Adobe. It wasn't bought from some other shithead company like most of their products. The only code that's shared with other apps is the image processing engine.
I have no issues with Adobe software. Granted I haven't tried CS4 and Adobe Acrobat had a period where it got constantly worse before Adobe got their act together.
Still it seems to me that mostly there's only the Mac crowd which is complaining here. Something I find amusing since they typically market the Mac as a machine ideal for creative work.
...and insult added to injury: if you ever try to re-install your (purchased, legitimate) copies of Adobe products you're faced with a very 'unpleasant' (I wanted to use an other word) activation process, referring you back to files on CDs that are simply not there, rejecting perfectly fine serial numbers and randomly quitting the installation process.
Reinstallation tip: call the Adobe support desk and explain your situation, they can somehow reset the activation process. This call will cost you an hour or more but believe me, reinstalling will cost you 2-3 hours if you try it yourself.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadJust about the only reason I need to reboot my Mac is whenever I watch flash video (southparkstudios.com) and forget to close it before I shut the lid down. When laptop wakes up, it's frozen and I can't kill the browser.
Buggy flash from Adobe is probably #1 reason stopping adoption of Linux right now. Not only it's slow, has numerous issues with sound, but it also crashes regularly and generally looks and feels completely fucked up: wrong font rendering, steals focus and mouse clicks form the browser, etc. Ughh..
Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world.
And finally, their ridiculous Flash implementation burns my lap, I'm not kidding - whenever I visit a heavily flash-infected site, my MBP gets burning hot even for small video inserts on ESPN. BTW it also greatly reduces my battery time. Adobe software is probably the only reason why surfing the web on a 5 year old PC is a very unpleasant experience.
They are one of these old, big fat monopolies the world would be better without, but we have no choice.
Suggesting switching to GIMP isn't an argument. All our designers use Photoshop and nobody needs conversion headaches, Adobe owns the industry, it's called the vendor lock-in.
Enter Flash. CPU usage oscillates rapidly between 0% and 30%, sometimes even going upto 70%. The temperature rises to 70 degrees Celsius.
This problem is not just Mac-related. I've experienced high CPU usage even on my Linux PC. IMHO, Flash is pure evil.
I guess you hate apt and yum too? Gee, having a list of programs that are installed is really lame.
Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg.
Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish.
I don't know about flash - I disable it by default. Disabling it gets rid of both annoying moving advertisements and crap plugins...
I take this as a sign of a company entering a stage of decline. Successful companies on the rise do not need to use subterfuge to get deployment of their products. When a company starts to become hostile to its own customers you can tell the rot has set in. These days it is nearly impossible to download simple software without getting crapware along side it (Sun is another prime offender, and even Flash tries to shove toolbars down your throat.).
I walked a friend through the installation of Ubuntu on his laptop last week. The single sticking point we had was Flash's poor interaction with the sound system. That one issue took longer than the entire rest of the setup process.
Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg.
Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish.
(originally posted by user: wizlb)
Second, inside of a .dmg you normally find an application bundle that you simply copy into your Applications folder. What can possibly be simpler than copying a file?
Check out http://www.dearadobe.com for more constructive criticism (which I may have initially found through Hacker News, but I don't really remember).
Photoshop has an incredible number of bugs. So many that it is almost unusable. It occasionally crashes while trying to save a file, which is the worst user experience infraction possible.
I hope they fix this crap. It's getting more bloated every revision, and their UI is becoming more and more bizarre with each revision (why did they hack OS X to put window resizers on all four sides? It just makes it impossible to click behind Photoshop).
Unfortunately, at this point, it would be hard for them to justify completely rewriting their core apps and possibly miss future releases (e.g. CS5) which is a major part of their earnings. At some point, their new online apps and Eclipse-based products will mature and they will slowly begin to fix (or trim) things on the desktop side. Hopefully, this comes sooner rather than later.
Sounds like a great deal.
So instead you pay $900 for something that doesn't work right either, and then you "make fun of me" on a social news site.
Clearly you win!
I don't think I'll be able to convince you of this, but proprietary apps are usually more polished than the open source counterparts. I'm talking about every sense of the word polish: usability, reasonable bug levels, compatibility, etc.
It's not that open source is bad. It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do (real usability testing, compatibility, etc.).
You say this like it's a fact. Could you cite a source?
(I like your "compatibility" argument. The other day, we received some Word documents that crashed MS Word. OO.org opened them just fine, and the version exported from OO.org didn't crash Word anymore. Clearly Word is more polished, which is why it segfaults on invalid input.)
Like a research paper? No, I'm afraid not. All I can provide are similar anecdotes like you provided (except for the opposite argument).
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIMP
That makes it unsuitable for working on anything that's going to be printed.
Well if they weren't they'd already be dead & you'd only know of the open source version. It usually takes a different business model (eg opera), or microsoft to prop up an inferior proprietary product. And opera's pretty much dead.
But that doesn't mean it has to be a proprietary commercial product either. See MySQL, Firefox, SugarCRM, etc.
It's worked fine from day one through to today and I've not had to torture myself with mysterious config file adjustments every time I upgrade my o/s.
The hassle saved has been worth every penny.
Pixelmator's got the sort of interface I wish other image apps had. That's my standard, and it's payware.
I'm going to blame myself for being ignorant, though, rather than insisting that the software is the problem. Clearly it's not.
I don't hate Photoshop's UI. (Where was I critical of it?) I dislike the Gimp's user interface very much.
Ah, ok. Dear Programmers, pleeeazee write me a Photoshop 5.0, a Quark XPress 3 and a Freehand 4 Clone in your spare-time without financial compensation. Thanks.
Let the downmods begin!
Photoshop 5 This is a standard in forms of UI. What sequences of movements are necessary to get results. Like DJing or vim. The Gimp is absolutely horrible in that regard and completely ignores what the absolute majority of professional graphic designers are used to.
Font handling under X in general is pretty weak.
Color management has to work.
Vector Grafx
Inkscape is pretty good. But in some ways not good enough. It crashes to often with heavier files. But ok. I actually use it but would like to have Freehand back, UI again. Inkscape would be nice as native Mac App, yes, for UI reasons. UI is pretty important because it drives workflow, speed, productivity.
Quark 3 Was a classic. Everything about it was done right. Again, main thing the UI. Font inspector. Main window resizing. How to create new pages, how to link Texts. It was dam fast, with hundreds of pages open and links to database full of graphics. Doing a magazine in real production time with any of the OSS alternatives? Bad idea.
Open source runs the web. Don't make the mistake of thinking that open source == programmers writing hobby apps in their spare time.
Software like Apache, Perl, Postgres, and so on all make the lives of software developers easier. When I spend time working on a project like that, it brings something I'm being paid to do closer to completion, or makes future paid work more lucrative. (I can charge the same amount, but it won't take me as long, etc.)
I don't have the same incentives to make a Photoshop clone, though, because my interaction with graphics manipulation usually consists of an email like "here are the graphics" from the graphics department. I don't care if Photoshop doesn't work, it's not my problem.
That said, I do edit my photos with Gimp, and I think it works great. So again, there is no incentive for me to improve it, I think it's fine already.
I don't either, but empirically you have to concede that open source hasn't succeeded in the content creation domain. The closest thing is OpenOffice, and that's the least creative end of the spectrum, just one step away from databases and other back-end software.
If I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's because programmers don't understand the domain. You can't create good graphic design software without graphic designers on the team.
I'm a graphic & user interaction designer. About 4 years ago, I volunteered to help fix Drupal's UI problems. Everybody was like "Yay! UI help!"
I started by offering a new theme and giving feedback on the arcanity of the calendar API.
Result: no changes were ever made. None of it ever went anywhere, because the weenies prefered to argue on the mailing list about every single point rather than concede that somewhere, something might need to be better.
I gave up. I never volunteered for OSS again. It's not worth it.
So the ability to fix broken is not really a benefit for most users. It's an enabler for those that can.
As for not working well, that can be said equally well for both Open Source and proprietary software. Equally, I can pick examples of software that works well from both types.
The biggest benefit for most users is that Open Source is free (as in beer). Firefox only hit the mainstream because it's free and was rock solid. Opera was for a long time rock solid but not free and that didn't help it, did it?
These users can pay someone else to fix the software. With proprietary software, that's not an option either.
So you go into the phone book and hire the first plumber you see. He comes over, fixes the pipe. Sweet!
Except now, two months later, the builder [i]does[/i] answer your call. And when you tell him you got the pipe fixed by someone else, he slaps a lawsuit on you, saying you're not allowed to disassemble or reverse engineer your house.
I think the biggest benefit for users is that you are free to do what you want with the software. You can get plug ins, pop it on LiveCDs, share it with friends, anything. Yes, "freedom" may not be a great piece for marketing, but when it comes to a users true benefits, freedom is the best thing Open Source has to offer.
The plumber/pipe metaphor is better suited to consulting & custom corporate apps. For wide-release software (like Adobe's software) it's in the company's best interest to fix bugs and keep the user happy.
And I think pierrefar made a good point. The only reason I use Firefox is that it's a higher quality than IE and Opera. This might be a result of the openness of the software, but the openness of Firefox wasn't the deciding factor when I started to use it.
Of course! That's exactly what I meant. Freedom is not a great marketing fact. Being Free is.
This program is supposed to draw circuit diagrams, yet it saves it in PS format! It manages to fuck everything up. The user interface and everything about the program is unbelievably bad.
Most open source software without a large market share is like that. It is unfortunately the OS mentality.
And don't even get me started on the entanglement of all the software packages. If I download a program to install on Windows it install. For linux the program depends on 120 other packages (a type of incestuous package relationship)
What schematic capture program do you really like, and what is its UI like?
Yes - it creates larger postscript files.
"non-obvious UI is actually pretty quick to use once you get used to it."
For some reason xcircuit adds extra pages without any warning - which forces you to edit the .ps file by hand.
The wires also does not "connect" (i.e. when you move a component).
The best would be Orcad with ps export.
1.)Register for Trial
2.)Download installer Software
3.)Download Product (Freeaking HUGE Arse Files 1GB)
4.)Run installer (starts to uncompress the download - takes forever)
5.)Run real installer (again, takes forever)
6.)Jump through tons on splash screen startup nags
7.)Finally get software to start - my computer with dual core processor now crawls to a hault.
8.)Trial expires, but Adobe "auto updater" still thinks I want updates for my expired trial????
9.)Unistall (get coffee and wait 30 minutes - no joke)
FAIL
After searching the Adobe forums and finding many users with the same problem, it seemed pretty obvious that Adobe just didn't know what the solution was.
Edit: found the relevant paragraph in the below mentioned Adobe blog:
"In CS3, there were some serious problems that customers faced and the time it took to resolve those issues in customer support made the initial experience with CS3 painful for some customers."
Painful? Oh yes...
Is Adobe software frustrating? Yes, at times. Is it incompetent? No, I wouldn't say so.
And this line:
>> Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product.
Well, that's just silly.
http://www.betalogue.com/2008/11/13/adobe-cs4-installer/
...and a response from Adobe:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/12/notes_from_installer_mg...
The response from Adobe can be summed up pretty concisely: their products have reached such complexity and bloat that they can't do much about it. (Given the management's hunger for regular releases and spending as little as possible on development.) I used to work for a company which was in the exact same state, and among other things I was in charge of creating the installers, so I've seen this exact phenomenon up close and personal. Smart engineers were leaving the company left and right.
That's all I have to say on this subject.
In general Adobe products are some of the most functional, feature rich and reliable on the market. Photoshop is an amazing piece of software. Saying it has 'ugliest, least intuitive, inconsistent UI’ is just plain wrong. Adapting to the differences in UI's between products and operating systems has never been much of a challenge; it is a complex piece of software, but then so is gcc, but I also don't complain about that. Complex problems require sophisticated and complex solutions. Not everything can be Mickey Mouse.
Welcome to the world of programming...
This “free trial” download experience does not encourage me to shell out the $995 Adobe wants for the product. (Hell, at my consulting rate, it’s already cost 2/3 of that to install the damn product.)
If you can buy a key tool for merely three hours of your labor, it's cheap. It's equivalent to someone on minimum wage buying a DVD or something..
For those who like the UI: Sure, it's better than the GiMP. But it's still awful. http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ has been on HN before. It's a compendium of more-or-less small things that are just howlingly wrong.
For those suggesting the installers aren't awful, Bynkii has spent plenty of time destroying that idea (and, yes, he swears):
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/dear_adobe.html (the installer rant that ultimately led to a meeting with Adobe and the installer team starting a blog)
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/why_wont_they_stop.ht... (Why install two out-of-date copies of Opera, Adobe?)
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/02/adobe_takes_back_the_... (Comedy licensing ineptness)
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/11/dont_manage_the_messa... (on John Nack's message-massaging over the installer nightmare)
So, Adobe software "shamefully, frustratingly incompetent"? Seems spot-on to me. The most frustrating and depressing thing is that it wasn't always this way. This is the firm that gave us Postscript, Photoshop, usable digital typography, Illustrator, PDFs and arguably played a large role in the birth of DTP, FFS. How have they become this marketing-encumbered hell-shop, trying to ram Flash everywhere and stamping all over their heritage?
PDF is like having a real piece of paper jammed awkwardly inside the cover of your laptop and trying to push it around a track ball. And so forth.
The thing is those folks who knew the paper-pencil techniques has generally been those who had no use for learning anything about computers, including how to use efficiently or whether there were alternatives. So Adobe's paper emulation has massive, undeserved loyalty built into it.
Also you are right in noting that most of "those folks" had no use for learning anything about computers. But is this necessarily a bad thing?
(with apologies to The Three Laws of Thermodynamics)
1. Software written by someone else is bad software
2. Software written by me more than six weeks ago is bad software. 3. Its been at least two months since I have written software of any significance. The bottom line is that software universally sucks. The reason we keep trying to make and use it, its far better than what it replaces. Maybe, if we try real hard, we will finally get it right. If history is any guide, don't hold your breath.By that time both he are you are lost in a blur of keystrokes and flashing characters on the display. As you leave the computer room, you can hear him muttering: "Oh, damn. I am in the wrong shell. I have to do it this other way...tap...tap...tap...."
The truth is, it doesn't really work there either. You are simply tired of waiting and are willing to accept almost anything to stop the annoying tapping noise and the endless muttering.
Hey, it keeps us off the streets so it isn't all bad.
Then again, EULA (And please, get a pet - cat or dog to sign them) stuff coming from Microsoft needs always to be an .EXE - why - well because you need some kind of dialog to sign off the EULA (even a .doc file might come as EXE).
I just hate installer programs... And Adobe screwing up on the Mac where this could be avoided by using plain-old DMG files - is just stoopid.
(Lots of text here at Hacker News on that year-old plaint...?)
btw, if you're developing for Chumby, there are many options besides Adobe's Creative Suite: http://osflash.org/ http://swftools.org/
jd/adobe
Mint.com is a perfect example of filling the vacuum left by accounting programs like quickbooks becoming too complicated for the average person.
Still it seems to me that mostly there's only the Mac crowd which is complaining here. Something I find amusing since they typically market the Mac as a machine ideal for creative work.
Reinstallation tip: call the Adobe support desk and explain your situation, they can somehow reset the activation process. This call will cost you an hour or more but believe me, reinstalling will cost you 2-3 hours if you try it yourself.
Why are mac people always so freakin arrogant?