This is why I hate you, Adobe
Dear Adobe,
I’m usually not one to complain1 but I’ve reached my limit. The time has come for me to draw a line in the sand, make my final stand, and, well… continue using your Creative Suite. If that sounds conflicted, confused and cynical, it’s because it is. I am. As a graphic designer slash web guy operating under the current reign of Apple, Google and Adobe, my choices and options for quality tools are indecently limited. Here’s the good news: the tools I do have are all great. Things have progressed so amazingly fast in the past couple decades, and the capabilities of our software have multiplied so rapidly that I feel like a complete jackass complaining about how my quartz rendered real-time 3D true-perspective shadowmapped anti-aliased-on-the-fly-[insert crazy shit]-whatever doesn’t work exactly how I want it to2. But I have no one else to turn to. You killed Paint. You decimated PaintShop. You put Corel out to sleep on the porch. You mocked Quark mercilessly (and maybe you still do - I donno, who cares). Nothing else is left. Adobe, you make the best applications for the job, and you bought out the rest. For the most part I‘m cool with that. I love PhotoShop. I love Illustrator, and InDesign, and I really love Bridge. I love you, Adobe, and that is why I hate you.
The Devil’s in the Detai1s
Some people say that God is in the details, some people say it‘s the Devil. It really doesn’t matter which in this case, though, because you don’t care about details. Maybe you’re just too busy keeping your employees happy, and maybe they’re too busy keeping their families happy, and maybe when it all is said and done Adobe is too busy just being good. I understand that [you think] you have to crap out a major release each year and convince people like me that I need to buy it — because if you don’t you might end up less rich, and that would mean you’d have to fire some of your happy employees. And I also understand that new features generate more sales than minor bug fixes. I understand that the business men and women run your business, and I’m beginning to understand that you really don’t give a crap about your customers or the quality of your products3.
But here’s what I don’t understand:
Crappy Adobe UI: Illustrator CS5
I don’t see any excuse for this kind of piss poor attention to detail. Adobe Illustrator first shipped on January 1987. It’s 23 years old!4 (Sure, I had some rough spots myself at that age, but software ages faster than dogs. Since the lifespan of a software app is only 1 year5, Illustrator is approx. 1,610 human years old.) What really sucks is that I know you can do better. Adobe Bridge was not released until April 2005. Check out the same type of panel in bridge:
Decent Adobe UI - Bridge CS5
Sure, a white fringed png might seem like a minor trifle to you, but I spend a lot of time looking at things while zoomed in 1,000 times their actual size to make sure my work is pixel perfect6. I’ve been doing this for a long time7 and can’t tell you how annoying it is that you don’t fix these things8. I’d be a lot more forgiving if there was only one or two glitches but there's not. We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds and maybe even hundreds of tiny little irritations. Some of them are so amazingly inept that they’re actually fun to browse through in a sick and twisted way9.
BitterSuite Ending
I have one request that if implemented would increase the quality of your product tenfold. The best part about it is that this idea would cost precisely 0 dollars. I’m sure you get disgruntled designers writing you and complaining about things in your forums all the time, and that there are appropriate channels for ideas and bugs that make ignoring them easier for you, which is why I’m writing this here:
Would you please remove the word suite from your products?
Here‘s some free advice: Call your next version Adobe: Creative. The word creative doesn’t imply cohesion, integration, compatibility, consistency, or quality of any sort. The fact is that you don’t have a suite, you have a myriad of independently developed products that bear only the word Adobe in common. Keyboard shortcuts vary nonsensically between apps. Basic tools that function the same have different icons. Basic functions, like how an image is zoomed or otherwise interacted with are bafflingly inconsistent.
The most basic element of your array of apps — the user interface — is critically wounded. The following is from Illustrator CS5 and the controls create the ugly mess pictured first in this post:
Again, Bridge handles things with a bit more urbanity:
In fact, the elements of you so called 'suite' are so disparate that I wonder if there are grounds for a classaction suit based on false representation. I wonder…
If you let the guys building Lightroom or Bridge run the Creative Suite show, then I probably wouldn’t be so pickled. But you aren’t. You’re letting Joe the New Feature Dude drive, and quite frankly, he sucks.
Sincerely,
Me
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1. Yes I am.
2. Everything is amazing and nobody's happy
4. I didn’t actually know that offhand, I asked W.
5. Your annual releases prove that.
6. Thanks for the super annoying pixel grid that I’ve had to disable about 300 times now, by the way.
7. No, not quite 1,610 years. Maybe 20 though.
8. It’s almost as annoying as the fact that with the release of CS5 you’ve changed the scroll behavior for no good reason with no real improvement in Photoshop. WTF. Now I have to remember to zoom different.