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Adobe Installer- A Reason To Be Pissed?

Huntn

Huntn

macrumors Penryn
Original poster
May 5, 2008
24,834
27,907
The Misty Mountains
Caution: If you have installed a demo application from Adobe, be careful. Don't uninstall by tossing the applicable program folder. You may regret it.

I used to have high regard for Adobe Products that is until I ran into the BS installer problem with Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac. I originally installed the demo version of the program on my MacBookPro running MaxOSX 10.5. Then I purchased this software directly from Adobe but the demo would not accept the serial number that came with it. Keep in mind that the demo download had ZERO warnings on it about uninstalling the demo and the requirement to use the uninstaller that came with the demo. In addition this demo download was quite large, and I did not want to keep it on my Mac's hardrive so it was tossed.

And being a Mac user it should have been perfectly safe to toss the PSE v6 Mac demo application folder along with the preference file to uninstall this program. After all this is not friggn Windows is it?

When I called Customer Support (who btw appears to be entirely based overseas with foreign speakers), I was shocked to discover the only way to get rid of this demo and allow a reinstall was to run a CS3Clean program that wipes out all of the Adobe Products on my computer??? Not only that but I could not get signed on to Adobe.com to download this software, so I was dead in the water.

Invisible files and scripts that can't be navigated to and simple tossed? The icing on the cake is when tech support started talking to me about "the registery". (As far as I know the MacOS does not have a registry). Anyway, I have not seen this kind of BS since Norton Utilities on my PC. I reemphasize, this is a Mac we are talking about, not Windows. I have no idea what Adobe's software engineering motives are, if it is anti-piracy, or saving money, but it certainly not customer convenience. Macs have always stood for ease and convenience. When Adobe makes uninstalling a program a customer headache, they have screwed up by bringing the Mac down into the land of Windows, a very sad day indeed. I now have more incentive to consider competing products to Adobe.

As it stands, I have invested in a program I can't install. Eventually I'll get this stupid cleaner file downloaded and have to reinstall my Adobe software. I'm pissed. Is this fair or am I just over reacting? :(
 
Hmm ya,that sucks.


It is probably the "activate,deactivate" angle that Adobe use for their software now thats causing the problem,not a large fan of it myself.
 
Adobe jumped the shark a long time ago unfortunately. Many many years ago. It's sad because they used to make great products.
 
I'm with OP, Adobe have lost it. I had long suspected it with the plunge of Acrobat Reader, but confirmed it with the installation of PS3.

I have a tendency to keep the Application folder with only the Apple apps and everything else in a separate directory, but there was no way to select directory for installation and when I tried to move the app post-installation it wouldn't start. (It might have been fixed since then, but I found a separate fix before that.)
 
I am also with the OP. The other big thing against Adobe with PSE6 is that they expect you to install and run it as administrator. I do not do that with any program. Fortunatly it is possible to run it via a non-admin account if you re-set some file permissions. If I can do that manually why can their installer not do it!?
 
I think that the CS3 and CS4 updates have very much turned all Adobe programs into PC apps running on a Mac. The whole installer is a serious mess. They have also gotten ridiculously expensive. Adobe needs some competition...fast.
 
Evoken said:
I think that the CS3 and CS4 updates have very much turned all Adobe programs into PC apps running on a Mac. ....
Click to expand...
This is just part of the real problem. Adobe went bad decades ago. If it didn't have a stranglehold on certain essential products, then its practices would put Adobe out of business long ago. The OP woke-up yesterday morning and discovered what some of us have been dealing with since 1990.
 
May I suggest another program such as Acorn designed specifically for the Mac? The rant describing your perils only confirms the reason that many are choosing to switch from Windows to OSX. PSE was designed for Windows, and much like MS Office or any similar program, they simply don't perform on OSX like those designed specifically for the platform. Not to the mention the fact that PSE is extremely bloated. Elements is like 4 or 500 meg while Acorn is maybe 50 or 60 (can't remember off the top of my head and am at work so I cannot check) and they do basically the same thing. Of course this won't help you now since you already purchased PSE, but in the future do a bit more research on your options.
 
MisterMe said:
This is just part of the real problem. Adobe went bad decades ago. If it didn't have a stranglehold on certain essential products, then its practices would put Adobe out of business long ago.
Click to expand...

I agree. I've been looking for and considering alternatives but something like Photoshop is very hard to beat and InDesign just runs circles around Quark or any other app I have found. They need some strong competition.

An app that I recently ditched is Dreamweaver. That application has become too slow, bloated and complicated and once you learn to code XHTML/CSS most of it sort of becomes redundant. It is also, as with all Adobe apps, way too expensive. After expending some time with Coda I decided to buy a license and drop DW for good. I have no regrets so far and actually find working on Coda much more productive and intuitive than on DW.

Adobe will eventually be hit by the same OpenSource storm that is hitting Microsoft now (Office vs OpenOffice, Linux vs Windows). Where I work they are currently moving all computers (about 100) from Office to OpenOffice and the reason behind this is the drive to cut down costs which the recent economic collapse has triggered on a worldview scale. This will haunt Adobe be it by users sticking to the versions they have and not upgrading or opting for a cheaper alternative.
 
jackerin said:
I'm with OP, Adobe have lost it. I had long suspected it with the plunge of Acrobat Reader, but confirmed it with the installation of PS3.

I have a tendency to keep the Application folder with only the Apple apps and everything else in a separate directory, but there was no way to select directory for installation and when I tried to move the app post-installation it wouldn't start. (It might have been fixed since then, but I found a separate fix before that.)
Click to expand...

Now that you mention it. That's what my problem with acrobat was. I could not even use preview after I uninstalled reader. The only reason I don't have that problem now is I had to totally wipe my drive (for other reasons) otherwise I might still be unable to look at a PDF.
 
MisterMe said:
The OP woke-up yesterday morning and discovered what some of us have been dealing with since 1990.
Click to expand...

You are correct sir, first time I've been slapped in the face by my Mac. ;) I've got a PC and I'm familiar with needing uninstallers to get an application's thousand scattered files off your hard drive. I know that moving a application on a PC can cause big trouble. I also know that it's software developers who decide how to package their wares and if they want to emulate their god aweful Windows approach on the Mac, I guess there is nothing stopping them from doing it. :(
 
Evoken said:
Adobe will eventually be hit by the same OpenSource storm that is hitting Microsoft now (Office vs OpenOffice, Linux vs Windows). Where I work they are currently moving all computers (about 100) from Office to OpenOffice and the reason behind this is the drive to cut down costs which the recent economic collapse has triggered on a worldview scale. This will haunt Adobe be it by users sticking to the versions they have and not upgrading or opting for a cheaper alternative.
Click to expand...

The sooner the better. I've been using Graphic Converter for years, not that it can match Photoshop, but its easy to use. And I'm open to open source software (Graphic Converter is not open source) if it is a decent product.
 
jackerin said:
I'm with OP, Adobe have lost it. I had long suspected it with the plunge of Acrobat Reader, but confirmed it with the installation of PS3.
Click to expand...

Is it fair to say this is due to a company who's become Windows centric? Or does it have to do with somehow protecting your software?
 
Their code practices are Windows centric, but I think that is owing to the assumption that the Mac was dead circa 1997. Adobe were fast to adopt OS X (you know, versus Quark for example), but have until now stuck in Carbon — which presumably means there's still a whole bunch of legacy code stuck firmly in their products and that they probably write most of their code to be platform neutral through some sort of Carbon/Win32 abstraction layer (the two are very similar in many respects for historical reasons). While they're clearly much better at that than some of the half-witted "Mac ports" of software on the 'net (see Carrara, Inkscape, GIMP, etc, or older versions of recent reformees OpenOffice and Firefox), it sounds like they're doing some extremely hacky stuff to emulate registry-type functionality internally.

I'll second what others have said. Though there are no applications that fully match Adobe's suite, stuff like Acorn and Pixelmator perform 99% of the functions that Photoshop is used for by non-professionals and are proper honest-to-God Mac applications (albeit with a fugly big-bordered black window look on Pixelmator, I don't know why). Sadly there's nothing usable in the Illustrator or InDesign categories.

I think the general rule of avoid any software that comes with an installer is worth following.
 
Thomas Harte said:
Their code practices are Windows centric, but I think that is owing to the assumption that the Mac was dead circa 1997. Adobe were fast to adopt OS X (you know, versus Quark for example), but have until now stuck in Carbon — which presumably means there's still a whole bunch of legacy code stuck firmly in their products and that they probably write most of their code to be platform neutral through some sort of Carbon/Win32 abstraction layer (the two are very similar in many respects for historical reasons). ...

I'll second what others have said. Though there are no applications that fully match Adobe's suite, .... Sadly there's nothing usable in the Illustrator or InDesign categories.

I think the general rule of avoid any software that comes with an installer is worth following.
Click to expand...
As I stated in an earlier post, Adobe's problems began back in the System 6 days. They probably began with font-regularization. Back then, Adobe was notorious for removing character features from its versions of popular fonts to make them cheaper and to speed-up PostScript.

The first manifestation of Adobe obtuseness that most Mac users saw, however, was the dispute between Apple and Adobe over Type 1 font hinting. Apple asked Adobe to make Type 1 font hinting friendlier to low-resolution devices like laser printers and computer monitors. Adobe flipped-off Apple with the statement that it served professional typesetters. Apple then developed TrueType. It then entered into a partnership with Microsoft to make the technology cross-platform. Adobe countered with Adobe Type Manager.

The Font Wars were on. One of the benefits of the Font Wars was that Adobe stopped its aggressive font-regularization. Adobe went to IBM which incorporated Type 1 as the native OS/2 vector font format, and to NeXT which used Display PostScript as the graphics engine in NeXTstep. Apple and Adobe soon kissed and made up--sort of. However, because TrueType had become so closely associated with Windows, Adobe lost the Font Wars.

Adobe lost the Font Wars so thoroughly that we no longer think of Adobe as the PostScript company or the font company. To the issue of coding: Adobe codes Photoshop Express in the cross-platform Qt frameworks which I presume targets Carbon on the Mac side. However, the code and target frameworks do not speak to the larger issue. One issue is that the Mac port of each new PSE version is usually released significantly later than the Windows version, if ever. The larger issue is software design. With each new version, the Adobe apps I use including PSE look and behave more like Windows apps and less like Mac apps.
 
MisterMe said:
With each new version, the Adobe apps I use including PSE look and behave more like Windows apps and less like Mac apps.
Click to expand...

Yep, even their installers are named "Setup" on the Mac now. In CS4 now the apps are contained within an application frame, just like Windows and applications that run under X11. Microsoft's Office for the mac is far more mac like than Adobe apps now. Phew.
 
Evoken said:
... Microsoft's Office for the mac is far more mac like than Adobe apps now. Phew.
Click to expand...
I don't know about the antitrust implications but with each passing day I feel more strongly than the day before that Apple should purchase Adobe.
 
MisterMe said:
I don't know about the antitrust implications but with each passing day I feel more strongly than the day before that Apple should purchase Adobe.
Click to expand...

I doubt Apple is interested in that actually. Apple does not seems to be too exited with Adobe. Take Flash for example, they do not use it at all on their website (as far as I've seen) and did not seem to worry much about it being left out of the iPhone.

They also have a solid group of apps already in Final Cut Studio that competes with Adobe's Production Suite. They also have Aperture which competes with Lightroom. As they are now, I don't see Adobe's apps as Mac sellers. They are too platform neutral for that and take no real advantages of Mac specific features. They are not even nominated for Apple Design Awards in any category.

I think the best thing is probably for Apple to do what Microsoft is doing. Produce a competing set of apps (specially against Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc) in order to challenge Adobe's stronghold and force it to compete and lower it's prices.

I also don't think Apple would like to hurt it's loyal smaller developers, who are making real and exiting Mac apps (Panic, MacRabbit, Macromates, etc). For the market it is perhaps better if Apple supports these developers instead of buying a big company like Adobe. We already see the results of Adobe buying Macromedia and they are just not good.
 
Huntn said:
Having to remove all of a companies software from your computer (via a script) to remove a demo is a standard all Mac software companies should aspire to? Thanks for the input. :)
Click to expand...

deal with it or write your own programs. suck it up and deal with it. next issue'!
 
"There is an update for Adobe Updater" killed me.

I use Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Photoshop regularly. Very sluggish apps at times (mainly because of Carbon and inefficient coding). I'm hoping come with CS5, which will hopefully be coded in Cocoa and also be 64-bit will swing things around for the Mac and give us a responsive and reliable creative suite package.
 
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