How not to install your product
Posted by marshall Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:54:00 GMT
Yesterday I had the misfortune of having to install Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Super Duper Web Ultimate Premium Extreme Edition...or something like that). It's not that I didn't want the products; it's that Adobe has crafted perhaps the worst out-of-the-box experience I have dealt with.
I was going to write up a whole article detailing its failures, but it turns out that Adobe is inflicting the same horrible system upon users of Photoshop Elements as well, and Jens Alfke has posted an excellent write-up of it here:
It doesn't cover some of the further annoyances, like how Adobe Help Viewer gets installed in /Applications even if you tell it to install somewhere else, and how multiple folders get created inside /Applications/Utilities even though you told it to install somewhere else, and how every single application in CS3 is put into a separate folder full of files like "JSBridge.bundle" and "libjflashgen.jnilib" (including apps you didn't know you were installing and couldn't turn off)...but some of those may be CS3-specific, I'm not sure.
From the comments on that page, it appears that the installer is the product of Blue Flavor, whose PR page for the installer goes on about how the installer is web standards compliant and AJAX-enabled.
What the...?!
It's a freaking installer! We're not talking about the latest Web 2.0 my-second-social-face app here. We're talking about a way of distributing software that already has a standard framework with a standard user experience on both Mac OS X and Windows.
And this is what happens whenever developers try to take shortcuts when creating cross-platform applications: their product sucks on all platforms. It's generally worse for the Mac, whose users have higher expectations, but it's bad for both.
This is why one of the best things I've heard recently is that Adobe's going to have to rewrite Photoshop CS5 in Cocoa to get 64-bit support. By dropping 64-bit support for Carbon, Apple has forced Adobe to finally update Photoshop to a modern codebase, instead of maintaining the lousy OS9-based UI it's been limping along with for years.
This wouldn't necessarily give me as much hope (if anyone can screw up a Cocoa-based UI, it'll be Adobe) if I didn't keep hearing positive things about Lightroom. It's Cocoa-based, and apparently it feels much more at home on Mac OS X than other Adobe products -- right down to the installer. I'm at least encouraged by the feature tour on Adobe's site: the dialogs actually use Aqua group boxes (the sunken style introduced in Panther), which, when compared with CS3, is a major accomplishment for Adobe. Hopefully the improved quality of Lightroom will become the norm rather than the exception.
(And no, I'm not saying that Carbon cannot be used to produce great apps. It's just that virtually all of the apps that I've used that feel out-of-place on Mac OS X are from developers who are depending on Carbon to keep around old UI code written for a completely different operating system. The developers who really "get" Mac OS X are all using Cocoa. Plus Cocoa provides a base set of "free" functionality that, because it takes extra work, rarely shows up in Carbon apps.)
