Merlin Mann on Adobe's products

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/199148868/adobe-bricks

by qeek • 17 years ago

67 35 17 years ago

eli• 17 years ago

Oh, 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.

jrwoodruff• 17 years ago

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.

sp332• 17 years ago

Actually, installing or upgrading Firefox extensions does require restarting Firefox. Mozilla has realized for a long time that this is not optimal and have a new project called Jet Pack that will give programmers a lot of control, and be a lot easier to write for, but won't require a restart. It's still in early development, though. https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/

glhaynes• 17 years ago

Yeah, disappointing article -- big old piece of software A sucks in the ways that big old pieces of software tend to.

merlinmann2• 17 years ago

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.

ptomato3• 17 years ago

In fairness to Adobe (and as somebody who has worked briefly for them) even moving things in, say, Photoshop, will result in a monumental outcry from many people who have used it for years and years.

Also in fairness, considering the wide variety of different workflows for which Photoshop is used, dtermining what is a sane set of defaults is by no means an easy task, and prioritizing things per a user's most-used isn't really a solved problem; and there is already the option in PS to customize menus, panes, etc.

That being said, I do think Adobe has lost the plot a bit since they aquired Macromedia (though not to say that Acrobat isn't every bit as bad in its own way as Flash) and from what I know of the company I don't really see them turning around any time soon - I just hope for Pixelmator or similar to get to the point where they can actually compete with Photoshop on a broader level, so that Photoshop actually has some serious competition and they have to start improving it significantly. (Though I should note to the best of my knowledge they're doing fairly well with After Effects, still, which afaik doesn't have any significant competitors.)

adamhowell• 17 years ago

When 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.

callmeed• 17 years ago

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.

johns2• 17 years ago

As far as I'm concerned, as of Fireworks CS4, it's dead to me. FW CS4 is so horribly broken that it's unusable. This is one of the great travesties in software as far as I'm concerned. I love Fireworks 8 but it would be nice if it were modernized.

johns2• 17 years ago

Even after applying the update on Windows, it was still unusable for me (still had ridiculous amounts of bugs related to text).

neovive• 17 years ago

Fireworks has always been my favorite web design tool (since version 1.0), however, I have noticed the changes over the years and up until CS4 it wasn't so bad.

I think Adobe is in a tough situation. They can not continue to grow by relying on a few software packages and have been pouring resources into Flash in an effort to turn more into a platform company vs. a software company. They just seem to be working against their culture as their strength has always been in graphics/design software. Most of their attempts at developer-oriented software have never panned out. Anyone remember GoLive?

ugh• 17 years ago

If 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.

swilliams• 17 years ago

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.

squelch• 17 years ago

Reasonable 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)!

cpr3• 17 years ago

Some of our products are plug-ins for InDesign, and other than occasional PS work, I ignore everything else in the suite.

InDesign itself is rock solid, and a pretty impressive piece of work. (Even if they are slowing down on development--I guess there's not all that much to do with it.)

On the UI, yes, it's a kinda half-way house. But most print-oriented designers live in InDesign, so they probably get used to it as their own little world.

That said, everything else about Adobe's suite (updating, serialization, etc.) is just punishingly bad, as Merlin points out.

It does tend to make one despair.

The main problem with Adobe that I can see is that the suits took over once Chuck Geschke and John Warnock left. These guys were consummate engineers, and their products reflected that fact.

And, then, to add insult to injury, Macromedia took over Adobe, and pretty much turned the company into a Flash-only place. I hate Flash and all that it stands for.

Oh well, maybe I'll whine privately at Chuck...

pyre• 17 years ago

I thought that Adobe bought Macromedia...

derefr• 17 years ago

And Apple bought NeXT. That doesn't mean the NeXTers became the peons :)

cpr3• 17 years ago

That's the point. Adobe post-purchase is effectively continuing Macromedia's focus.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

The last time Adobe let their desktop publishing app slow down on development, QuarkXPress ate their lunch and they had to invent InDesign to compete again. Adobe Pagemaker used to be a serious competitor. (Of course, it also used to be Aldus Pagemaker).

cpr3• 17 years ago

That's true, but now they have no competition.

And, in some sense, InDesign is pretty much "complete" as far as what people expect in the print publishing world.

They're now slowly moving into more long-document features, etc, so it can be a replacement for much of the FrameMaker usage out there.

But, in the end, print publishing is slowly dying, so the future there is unclear, anyway.

old-gregg2• 17 years ago

Up until 2 years ago I never paid for software. Having a MSDN subscription on Windows gave me access to all Microsoft stuff I needed, and on Linux things were always free.

But Adobe managed to fork $600 out of me for Photoshop CS3. After a few months their RAW converter stopped working demanding CS4 and my new SLR wasn't supported otherwise. So essentially I feel like they fooled me into renting Photoshop for $600 per year.

Needless to say, if I want to run my purchased copy on Windows (I paid for the Mac version), I'll have to pay for it again, the license covers only one OS.

Oh, and the only software that ever manages to crash my computers into must-be-turned-off-and-on state (I have Linux and a Mac) is Flash. Freezing the entire OS is hard, they surely have an engineering muscle to pull that off.

icefox• 17 years ago

Photoshop is Adobe's Office that sits there and makes money if they don't change it too much. Meanwhile flash is where all of the resources are going. They have no real incentive to cleanup photoshop, users will continue to buy it.

tedunangst2• 17 years ago

I'd like to hear more about how their RAW converter stopped working.

old-gregg2• 17 years ago

I got a new camera, Adobe said "oops, you have to upgrade to the latest RAW converter to get it to work", I ran the software update, the converter said "oops, you have to upgrade your 1-year old Photoshop".

ikitat• 17 years ago

Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) doesn't support raw files that come from cameras that are released after a new major PS/ACR release. The workaround is to use Adobe's free RAW to digital negative (DNG) converter. You can do this in a batch. Then process DNG files with your old release of ACR.

http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/

albertsun• 17 years ago

I love the term "Groan Pile". There's definitely software that I try as hard as possible to avoid opening and software that I get excited about and look forward to opening. Start-up time usually has a lot to do with it.

jdowdell• 17 years ago

It's much easier to address "What should I do if a 16x16px graphic crashes?" than it is to wade through all the extra text surrounding it....

mooted• 17 years ago

Perhaps i am the only one, but i never experienced even one single crash using Flash CS4 / Fireworks CS4 (mac). I use Flash CS4 everyday. Sometimes a session last for almost a whole week. No crash yet!!

But Fireworks does have tonns of annoying bugs.

gb• 17 years ago

You're incredibly lucky, I usually have to restart Flash a few times a day and actually I spend more time in coding in Eclipse/FDT than using Flash itself.

It crashes occasionally after publishing or test-movieing, but far worse is as soon as I start doing anything stage/library/timeline related I'm almost guaranteed at least a few crashes before I'm done.

Merlin Mann on Adobe's products

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