Adobe Illustrator and InDesign Not Working Properly with macOS High Sierra

[varunsanthanam]

Or, you know, as professionals, perhaps we don't rush ahead and update to the latest operating system version on day one, and then there's no problem? What's so essential in High Sierra that it requires any of us to be guinea pigs for Adobe or Apple? There are plenty of rubes willing to play that game. Let them suffer the consequences.

Honestly, I really question how many of you use your Macs primarily to make money. Because if you did, you wouldn't go anywhere near an OS update until you were certain there were no potential compatibility problems, whether within the OS itself, or within essential third party tools.

Assume all software, always, is buggy. Plan accordingly. Creation a validation process for your essential tools and regression test your most common and necessary combinations before committing to changing your workflow. There's zero excuse for behaving like a consumer when your ability to generate revenue is on the line.

I use my Mac primarily for work (to make money). Pretty much everything else I do is relegated to an iPad / iPhone / Apple TV, as I typically find my Mac more tedious for those kinds of tasks. As such, I'd like to politely disagree with you:

1) While upgrading to a major release instantly isn't always the best idea, particularly if you need the machine for work, holding off for more a short period of time is equally bad. I'm a software engineer, and the number of vulnerabilities that are created / found / patched with every release is alone a reason to upgrade. Take a look at the OOD firmware issue with 10.12. Firmware is very low level, and thus isn't protected by complex security like software that exists higher up in the stack. You'll want that protection fast, professional / and casual users alike.

2) For company like Adobe to not have their flagship applications ready on release day is embarrassing. I fully agree that you should thoroughly vet every tool you need to function before upgrading, but large companies with detailed & complex processes dev - stage - test - release pipline already in place have no excuse for this. Microsoft shipped an update to the Office suite that supported 10.13 several weeks ago. Even apps I use by medium sized companies (Slack), to apps I use by small and obscure developers (Bartender, DaisyDisk), already support 10.13 at least in some capacity, and already have for sometime.

I fully agree with you that you should verify your important tools before you upgrade, but acting like anyone who installed a completely finished and released piece of software is a guinea pig is ridiculous. Mac OS 10.13 isn't a beta. If you're a large company and you know that at least 5-10% of the install base is going to be running this release in a short order and you aren't ready, despite the API diffs having been available for months, you've failed in an incredibly public and humiliating way. Anyone who works in the software industry professionally can tell you: Adobe has demonstrated an embarrassing amount of egregious incompetence... but what's new... it's Adobe.


EDIT: NOT TO MENTION THAT ADOBE SELLS ITS SOFTWARE AS A SUBSCRIPTION, PART OF WHICH INCLUDES REGULAR AND AND ON-TIME UPDATES. WHAT EXACTLY AM I PAYING FOR, THEN?

High Sierra wasn't announced overnight. Don't give Adobe a pass on this one.

 

[jonathanbruce]

Look, I get that. The desire to embrace the "new shiny" and validate Apple's marketing push is strong within me, too. There are a few new things in High Sierra I'd like to play with, or figure out how they work, or at least get up to speed on. But then I take a step back, and ask myself: What's most important? My business, or my curiosity? Business wins, every time.

Because this isn't just about Adobe, this is about the mess of poor documentation and the stupid secrecy Apple is is obsessed with now allowing for clear roadmaps of how they intend to evolve their own software. You can't expect others to plan effectively around Apple's changes when Apple doesn't provide a coherent, stable roadmap. They're as capricious with their development practices as the companies we love to hate. They're busy pointing fingers at each other, and we all lose.

Remind me again why we need a brand new OS release every 12 months.

I completely agree with you ..
Maybe every 2 years instead ? Since some companies take longer to sort out their own "issues".

 

[anthorumor]

For any individual users, Affinity deserves your attention.
Only wish they charged once for cross-platform PC and Mac usage.
And move to Final Cut Pro.
Not sure what the inDesign alternatives are, but I'm sure there's something better than Pages.

 

[eyeless]

Would be interesting to hear from Macrumours in which ways that Word, Excel & PowerPoint 2011 are "incompatible" with High Sierra.

As to Adobe who makes resellers pay more than their end customers whom they call to take over from the resellers, one would wish there was some serious competition out there to the unintuitive & slow but for many indispensable programs Indesign, Illustrator & Photoshop. Big companies are slow to fix anything.

 

[varunsanthanam]

Look, I get that. The desire to embrace the "new shiny" and validate Apple's marketing push is strong within me, too. There are a few new things in High Sierra I'd like to play with, or figure out how they work, or at least get up to speed on. But then I take a step back, and ask myself: What's most important? My business, or my curiosity? Business wins, every time.

Because this isn't just about Adobe, this is about the mess of poor documentation and the stupid secrecy Apple is is obsessed with now allowing for clear roadmaps of how they intend to evolve their own software. You can't expect others to plan effectively around Apple's changes when Apple doesn't provide a coherent, stable roadmap. They're as capricious with their development practices as the companies we love to hate. They're busy pointing fingers at each other, and we all lose.

Remind me again why we need a brand new OS release every 12 months.

Apple has many problems, but poor documentation is not one of them. Deprecations are marked sometimes as much as years in advanced, at least 2-3 releases ahead of time. Behavioral changes are pretty specific. Apple has been on a clear cycle with macOS for some time now. The thing is, how often they re-brand doesn't really matter. The actual pace at which the OS is changing hasn't increased or decreased in quite some time. APFS was in beta for an entire year before it was made a part of High Sierra, for example.

 

[GeneralChang]

Adobe has demonstrated an embarrassing amount of egregious incompetence... but what's new... it's Adobe.


EDIT: NOT TO MENTION THAT ADOBE SELLS ITS SOFTWARE AS A SUBSCRIPTION, PART OF WHICH INCLUDES REGULAR AND AND ON-TIME UPDATES. WHAT EXACTLY AM I PAYING FOR, THEN?

High Sierra wasn't announced overnight. Don't give Adobe a pass on this one.

Amen. Half of CC's updates introduce more bugs than they fix, and the cloud services are horrifyingly unreliable. It's by far the least rewarding and most frustrating subscription program I've ever been a part of.

 

[jonathanbruce]

For any individual users, Affinity deserves your attention.
Only wish they charged once for cross-platform PC and Mac usage.
And move to Final Cut Pro.
Not sure what the inDesign alternatives are, but I'm sure there's something better than Pages.

I'm happy now I've migrated away from Premiere Pro. Using Avid Media Composer and Davinci Resolve 14

 

[GeneralChang]

For any individual users, Affinity deserves your attention.
Only wish they charged once for cross-platform PC and Mac usage.
And move to Final Cut Pro.
Not sure what the inDesign alternatives are, but I'm sure there's something better than Pages.

There are few good InDesign alternatives, but most professions that rely on InDesign are pushing that content to other formats beyond print, meaning that what you're left with is specialized document design and somewhat rare usage. And it's easier to deal with InDesign in small doses.

 

[jonathanbruce]

Amen. Half of CC's updates introduce more bugs than they fix, and the cloud services are horrifyingly unreliable. It's by far the least rewarding and most frustrating subscription program I've ever been a part of.

And that's the reason why I'm so pissed off for my £50+ subscription a month

 

[GeneralChang]

And that's the reason why I'm so pissed off for my £50+ subscription a month

My work pays for mine, so I use it. I've told them on a few occasions that they're wasting their money, but the folks in charge of those decisions have never used it and they're perfectly happy to burn cash in favor of the "industry standard" applications.

 

[BornAgainMac]

Good.... Good. Let the hate flow thru you. Gives you focus, makes you stronger.

 

[Mathias Denichi]

Anyone recommend a good alternative to Indesign ?

A glue stick and scissors.

 

[cateye]

I use my Mac primarily for work (to make money). Pretty much everything else I do is relegated to an iPad / iPhone / Apple TV, as I typically find my Mac more tedious for those kinds of tasks. As such, I'd like to politely disagree with you.

I appreciate the thoughtful response; thank you for being even-handed with me. You make some intelligent points, to which I don't necessarily have a counterpoint. My frustration comes from the way in which neither Apple nor Adobe seem organized around serving the needs of their customers in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Repeating one of my earlier comments, I still am not sure why we need major architectural changes in MacOS on a strict, every-12-months schedule. Security updates: Absolutely. ASAP, as soon as those problems can be solved, they should be pushed out. And by necessity, some of the changes that security updates require are going to break other things, which will cause problems up and down the chain. A fact of life, unfortunately.

On the other hand, you're right, I am giving Adobe a bit of a pass here. I disagree with the assertion that "there was a beta program, they should've fixed this already" since betas are often moving targets, and things that are broken in one beta may suddenly work fine in the next beta. It's hard for any developer to target against conditions apparent in any one beta. But that doesn't give Adobe a pass from being proactive in announcing: Hey, APFS represents a sea-change in how MacOS interfaces with mass storage. This change has the potential to cause problems in the following pieces of Adobe software, and you should be mindful of this when it's released. Forewarned is forearmed, and we'd all be better off for it. Purely from a "don't engender ill-will" standpoint, I'm baffled whenever a company like Adobe isn't proactive like this.

 

[J InTech82]

Developer's have 3 months to test and get the software ready and its never enough that when its ready for prime time they have issues what do they do for 3 months when its in beta?!?

And this is Adobe we’re talking about. I’m almost certain they got the Apple internal developer builds months before the public developer builds were out.

 

[johannnn]

Because this isn't just about Adobe, this is about the mess of poor documentation and the stupid secrecy Apple is is obsessed with now allowing for clear roadmaps of how they intend to evolve their own software.

Apple has been talking about APFS for over a year. And had a beta of High Sierra for a few months. I understand if no stable release has support for it yet, but how can you have NO solution? Not even a beta?

Adobe is a dinosaur in the digital age. Flash is already extinct. The other Adobe programs will follow.

 

[Defthand]

Or, you know, as professionals, perhaps we don't rush ahead and update to the latest operating system version on day one, and then there's no problem? What's so essential in High Sierra that it requires any of us to be guinea pigs for Adobe or Apple? There are plenty of rubes willing to play that game. Let them suffer the consequences.

Honestly, I really question how many of you use your Macs primarily to make money. Because if you did, you wouldn't go anywhere near an OS update until you were certain there were no potential compatibility problems, whether within the OS itself, or within essential third party tools.

Assume all software, always, is buggy. Plan accordingly. Creation a validation process for your essential tools and regression test your most common and necessary combinations before committing to changing your workflow. There's zero excuse for behaving like a consumer when your ability to generate revenue is on the line.

You’re speaking from experience. Third party software prepareness has always been an issue as long as OS updates existed. Products don’t always adopt new OS and hardware abilities, but will address broken ones soon after. And if memory serves me right, some fixes in the past required Apple to reconsider mods that were preventing preexisting abilities in Adobe products. Adobe can test its products with Apple’s new OS and report issues. But sometimes, it’s Apple who has to change its code to prevent a bug.

 

[varunsanthanam]

I appreciate the thoughtful response; thank you for being even-handed with me. You make some intelligent points, to which I don't necessarily have a counterpoint. My frustration comes from the way in which neither Apple nor Adobe seem organized around serving the needs of their customers in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Repeating one of my earlier comments, I still am not sure why we need major architectural changes in MacOS on a strict, every-12-months schedule. Security updates: Absolutely. ASAP, as soon as those problems can be solved, they should be pushed out. And by necessity, some of the changes that security updates require are going to break other things, which will cause problems up and down the chain. A fact of life, unfortunately.

On the other hand, you're right, I am giving Adobe a bit of a pass here. I disagree with the assertion that "there was a beta program, they should've fixed this already" since betas are often moving targets, and things that are broken in one beta may suddenly work fine in the next beta. It's hard for any developer to target against conditions apparent in any one beta. But that doesn't give Adobe a pass from being proactive in announcing: Hey, APFS represents a sea-change in how MacOS interfaces with mass storage. This change has the potential to cause problems in the following pieces of Adobe software, and you should be mindful of this when it's released. Forewarned is forearmed, and we'd all be better off for it. Purely from a "don't engender ill-will" standpoint, I'm baffled whenever a company like Adobe isn't proactive like this.

In principle, you're certainly right. I am not one to believe that "a beta problem solves everything". It doesn't. As such, I tend to look at each release in a vacuum, and then decide who to blame.

1) Because Apple releases macOS every 12 months, it's also significantly reduced the delta between each release. Look at say, Tiger to Leopard, or Snow Leopard to Lion. These were *enormous* releases for developers, that broke tons of things. As a developer for the Apple platform myself, I prefer these shorter, more bite-sized updates

2) APFS is a pretty significant change, true, but it has been in beta for FAR longer than 10.13. Sierra supported APFS too, it just didn't convert drives by default. Apple had a WWDC session for developers about APFS 15+ months ago, and LONG before it shipped out to the public. Additionally, if you've built your apps well, the change APFS shouldn't cause things to complete break. It might screw with your volume recognition, and I know that Adobe doesn't use all the Cocoa APIs like some apple developers, but this kind incompatibility suggests, not only that Adobe didn't test for 10.13, but also that their previous releases weren't very well built in the first place. Barring some notable exceptions, even an app with 0 testing on 10.13 should have these kind of errors. iOS converted to APFS with the 10.3 release, notice that it didn't break everyone's apps.

3) Finally, I want to highlight both the size and scope of Adobe. Companies like them learn about High Sierra long before us normal developers. Apple works with these larger companies to ensure at least baseline compatibility, not for those companies sake, but for the sake of their users and their reputation. Imagine the kind of headline that would ensue if someone upgraded to 10.13 and could no longer open PDFs or Word Documents. As iterated earlier, large companies have *processes* for this. Plans, already in place, to handle issues like this. You're correct that a beta program isn't enough to guarantee every developer's app will work correctly on 10.13, but it's more than enough for company like Adobe to fail this hard on their flagship applications, of which they charge hundreds of dollars for. They even charge a subscription fee, and that fee is supposed to cover regular and on-time updates, precisely for problems like this. What are we all paying for then?

Still, I want to re-emphasize what I do agree with you on to anyone else who might be reading this post: a 3 month beta program is not enough for you expect every developer in the world to have their apps perfectly ready for a major release. That's an unrealistic assumption. You can, however, expect at least basic compatibility from most apps and pretty good compatibility from large ones.

 

[torana355]

Or, you know, as professionals, perhaps we don't rush ahead and update to the latest operating system version on day one, and then there's no problem? What's so essential in High Sierra that it requires any of us to be guinea pigs for Adobe or Apple? There are plenty of rubes willing to play that game. Let them suffer the consequences.

Honestly, I really question how many of you use your Macs primarily to make money. Because if you did, you wouldn't go anywhere near an OS update until you were certain there were no potential compatibility problems, whether within the OS itself, or within essential third party tools.

Assume all software, always, is buggy. Plan accordingly. Creation a validation process for your essential tools and regression test your most common and necessary combinations before committing to changing your workflow. There's zero excuse for behaving like a consumer when your ability to generate revenue is on the line.

Exactly we are still running 10.10 at work due to compatibility issues with various software we use in Prepress. We don't upgrade until will we know that everything will work. Adobe is not going anywhere anytime soon, that would require a serious alternative for the industry to latch onto.

 

[cateye]

@Shadow%20Mac: Well stated, all of it. I defer to your knowledge, and again appreciate your insight.

All that's left for us at the receiving end now is to see how quickly a patch surfaces for these problems, either in the form of 10.13.1, a CC update push, or both. All will be forgiven if the resolution is speedy (see: the Exchange access bug in iOS 11, and how quickly we got 11.0.1 as a result).

 

[deadoctopi]

Once again Adobe has no excuse. They had access to the High Sierra betas just like any other developer, for months. They could've had all their apps ready to go the day 10.13 was released. But no. Because Adobe.

They can’t hire enough devs for the thousands paying $20 mo or the $60 a month for these apps. God they are just trash for a software company sometimes.

 

[varunsanthanam]

@Shadow%20Mac: Well stated, all of it. I defer to your knowledge, and again appreciate your insight.

All that's left for us at the receiving end now is to see how quickly a patch surfaces for these problems, either in the form of 10.13.1, a CC update push, or both. All will be forgiven if the resolution is speedy (see: the Exchange access bug in iOS 11, and how quickly we got 11.0.1 as a result).

100% correct

The true test of a company is not the mistakes themselves, but rather how quickly and how well they handle it. We shall see. If I were Adobe, I'd working on a release ASAP as well a comping the monthly fees for the affected users.

It's also typical at large companies to do internal testing and warn your peers when necessary. I'd be curious to find out 1) If apple did any such testing and 2) if they discovered any bugs with Adobe CC and gave the company any notice.

 

[Starfyre]

Adobe is recommending Apple users to not upgrade to have better security on their personal devices for the sake of Adobe’s own outdated product?

 

[MH01]

Developer's have 3 months to test and get the software ready and its never enough that when its ready for prime time they have issues what do they do for 3 months when its in beta?!?

That maybe so, though if you depend on these apps, you should not be upgrading to a brand new OS. Always stay and move to a stable version.

 

[Defthand]

Apple has been talking about APFS for over a year. And had a beta of High Sierra for a few months. I understand if no stable release has support for it yet, but how can you have NO solution? Not even a beta?

Adobe is a dinosaur in the digital age. Flash is already extinct. The other Adobe programs will follow.

Awww, c’mon. Adobe is still a consultant and contributor to emerging technologies that aim to replicate the quality of printed media in the purely digital realm. Adobe may be offering half-hearted iOS apps with limited functionality, but it may be that they don’t want their bread-and-butter professional apps to be replaced by $5 commodity apps for novices and hobbyists. Or it may be that iOS hasn’t delivered on it’s “desktop class” potential to support all of the desktop product’s bells and whistles. iOS didn’t allow even file management or drag-n-drop until this week!

 

[witherwings]

Well, already installed High Sierra and I use InDesign, Illustrator and AutoCAD 2017 as my daily basis. Guess I'm screwed then...

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

There are two things that Adobe has that works perfectly, with ZERO flaws--their webstore and their subscription billing system.

They are making money hand-over-fist on rip-off pricing ($15-25 per month for Acrobat? Really?) yet have some of the most unstable software out there. It's always a crap-shoot whenever we update our Macs in the office.