Dear Adobe: What the hell happened to you?

Oddly enough, I don't really agree with this sentiment. Maybe it's because I have tried to "escape" Adobe, only to come back...

I switched to Linux for quite a while and at first I was determined to find everything necessary to continue my job from an Open Source platform. I replaced every program except one -- Photoshop. I tried Gimp, but even with the Photoshop "patch" it was still nearly unusable. I tried Pixel, but for all his work, that program simply isn't stable enough yet. So I switched to Mac, the next furthest thing from Windows I could find.

Then the new Adobe packages came out and I pre-ordered the Web Premium package practically the day they started taking pre-orders. I am quite happy with the products therein, and for what I paid I consider it to be quite a good deal (hint: Education Discounts are where it's at -- $500 for the package compared to $1,600 retail!) As for ripping off Euro customers, well, I can't argue that.

The difference between Adobe's and other products is that they aren't just "good enough", they are the best. If I wanted to deal with just "good enough" I would have stuck with Gimp with its asinine shortcuts and crazy UI or Pixel with its Photoshop-like features but frequent crashes. The fact is, Adobe products are commercial products and they have commercial requirements and prices. If you want to mess around with photos, make family videos, little websites, etc. then you don't need Adobe products. If you do graphic design, etc. for a living, then they are a sound investment.

And honestly, who cares about the updater? I am stuck in Afghanistan on a 96k connection that only works maybe 12 hours out of the day and I don't care that it has to update itself; if you are on a high-speed connection then this is simply a moot point.

As for Corel... well, I have to use that here and if I have to do anything besides set text or create a print template I defer to Photoshop or Illustrator. And who thought "F8" would be a good shortcut for the Text tool? Christ. Then again, I am willing to throw this up to a familiarity thing and not directly come out and say that Photoshop/Illustrator is better than the Corel suite.

Geschke and Warnock were both major assholes, but at least they had a clue when it came to writing decent software.

Photoshop CS3 is the real bummer. So many people have had installation problems (that Adobe insists requires formatting their hard drive to recover from) that the $100 I paid for my upgrade is wasted money. It will probably be a year or more before I can gather the confidence (and updates to my update) to install CS3. Yuck!!!!!!!!

Adobe does do a lot of stuff that I totally hate, but I have to use Lightroom and Photoshop since they are the only programs that do what I need the best.

If Apple would make Aperture about as good as Lightroom and add Lens correction options like Photoshop's, I'd could probably leave both *waits for Aperture 2*

This is the second time in the last month or so that i've been doing valuable work at the last minute on my computer and the whole computer has just stopped working. Not crashed, just unbelievably slow, I couldn't work out why, so I've gone into task manager and Adobe Updater only using 5-6MB is using 90%+ of my single core P4 2.8. I didnt use the programme, never asked it to update then nor did it tell me. I can't even stop it. I cant use end process as it just restarts, If I do a restart it just starts again......It goes on for hoursssssssssssssss. Last time about 4-5 hours!!!! I can defrag a hard drive in less time! What is it doing?? 10-20 minutes at a push I could understand and if it said "a new update is available do you want to install it now" but it doesnt even do that. I am well and truly running out of the letter F.

@ "Adobe's developer tools, like Flex Builder, aren't as bad as the rest of the Creative Suite. We'll see how long that lasts, though."

Thats because Flex Builder is built on Eclipse which is "an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks"

http://www.eclipse.org/

The worst thing about Adobe apps is that there's no linux versions yet. As much as I'm upset with Adobe I would totally pay for linux versions of their apps.

It's not like the PDF standard has changed that much that it needs to download every 4 days! Geesh.

On a network I added this to the KIX script to lobotomize Adobe reader. We have version 8, when 9 comes out I'll update then OK!!???

$shit="c:\Program Files\Common files\Adobe\Updater5\AdobeUpdater.exe"
if exist($shit)
del $shit

Muhahahah. Just delete that exe file on your (windows) C:\ drive and it cannot run. Boo-hoo for Adobe. (morons)