Christopher Mackay’s Blog

I’ve had many opportunities over the last few months to speak with the nice folks at Adobe Support. They’re unfailingly polite and helpful.

Maybe they should work on Adobe’s Software Installer team.

I upgraded from Adobe Contribute 4 to Adobe Contribute CS3 yesterday. Not, you know, because I wanted to; but because out of the blue, when trying to administer a Dreamweaver-based web site with Adobe Contribute 4, like always, it suddenly told me I needed a newer version of Contribute. Then it would quit.

I fiddled with it for a bit, then decided to just give in and upgrade. It’s not that much money.

1. I download it (it’s over 300 MB!): success.
2. I install it: success.
3. It asks for the serial number. I give it the serial number: success.
4. It asks for the serial number of the version I’m upgrading from. I give it the serial number: rejection. WHAT?!? I’ve copied the serial number from the email Adobe sent me in 2006, when I bought version 4…
5. I copy the serial number from version 3, bought from Macromedia (in 2003, if memory serves): rejection. This is ridiculous.
6. I call Adobe, and 10 minutes later they walk me through a procedure that gets it to work.

This is the same thing I went through with Photoshop CS3, and twice with Dreamweaver CS3.

It used to be that you could rely on an installer to find your previous version on your hard drive, and it could figure everything out from there. Not any more.

It used to be that you could COPY AND PASTE the serial numbers from their own email and expect that to be recognized (it worked when I needed it originally, after all). Not any more.

Will Adobe ever figure this shit out? Seems unlikely.

Quoting Ben Charny from money.cnn.com:

Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos…

You know, confusing hardware (flash memory) with software (Adobe Flash) like this is the kind of mistake one might expect minimum-waged electronics sales staff to make — not someone writing tech columns for Dow Jones Newswires that get picked up by money.cnn.com…

(Via Daring Fireball, of course.)

bynkii.com: “This is, without doubt, the shittiest installer I have ever dealt with.”

…in which John C. Welch uses the word ‘fuck’ as punctuation.

Someone at Adobe has been listening. The Adobe Reader 8.1 updater was really straightforward. Well done!

Steve Jobs’ announcement at All Things D that YouTube would be supported on AppleTV has lead to comments by Apple’s David Moody at iLounge.com:

Moody said that YouTube will soon be encoding videos in the H.264 streaming-efficient compression format preferred by Apple TV, and that all new videos submitted to YouTube as of the mid-June launch of the AppleTV update will be playable by the device. From then until fall, YouTube will be encoding its entire back-catalog in H.264 format, adding videos in chunks until everything is accessible to Apple TV users.

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Not only do Adobe’s recent installers suck from a usability perspective (see John Welch’s piece on the Adobe Reader 8 installer), they’re now a security risk. This is completely unacceptable.

• Adobe Security bulletin

Move along.

There’s nothing to see here.

This writing’s been on the wall since Adobe announced their acquisition of Macromedia. Never used FreeHand, myself, but I never met anyone who liked it. I have met people who loved it, though.

Summary: Dreameaver 9.0.0.3481

If you skipped Macromedia Dreamweaver 8, have an Intel Mac or Photoshop CS3, then this might be worth upgrading to. Otherwise, the ugly new icon is the most noticeable new feature. They want you to open your wallet far too wide for this upgrade, if you ask me.

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There seems to be a theme today…

What is it with Adobe.com? I tell it to remember me as a registered user, and it never does. It’s not as if cookies aren’t set — it shows “welcome, ” and then my account ID. It knows me. But if I click on “Your Account”, it asks me to sign in. How stupid is that? It wastes my time, every time. They’re important, and I’m not. Not a great way to treat customers.

Normally, the way these things work, is that once you log-in to a site, you can close the window and come back later without having to log in again — as long as you don’t quit the browser. Not with Adobe.com. It forgets every time.

And what’s up with those horrid drop-down menus? Are they trying to trigger an epileptic seizure?

Of course, this is how it works in Safari on Mac OS X. No doubt it works just fine in Firefox, or IE7, or IE6, or some other browser I don’t use (when not testing web sites). But Adobe ships their products for Mac OS X, and their web site should work in the default web browser for Mac OS X. Period. It’s not as if their site navigation is some minor feature on their site…

That’s enough ranting for today. Stay tuned for a look at my experience with Dreamweaver CS3 (aka DW9).

Well, I got my order through. Took Adobe four hours. Not so cool, really.

Downloaded the software. Took nearly an hour, but that’s not unexpected. (It was 1.5 GB…)

Then I installed the Dreamweaver CS3 updrade (from Studio 8/Dreamweaver 8). It took quite a while to install.

Then it asked for my CS3 serial number. No problem.

Then it asked for my upgrade-qualifying Dreamweaver serial number — because it couldn’t find one at the default location. Well, DW8 is sitting right there, /Applications/Macromedia Dreamweaver 8/Dreamweaver 8, big as life and twice as ugly.

So I fish my DW8 serial number out of my records. It won’t accept it.

I launch DW8, type the number on the “about” screen (which matches the one in my records) by hand. No dice.

I go to Adobe.com, log in, lookup my old Macromedia order info. Copy the DW8 serial number. Paste it into DW CS3’s field. Still no joy.

All three numbers match. This is too much.

After 10 minutes listening to the worst muzak ever, Hershey comes on the line. She’s very friendly. I walk her through my issue. A few minutes later she gives me a generic DW8 serial number, and bingo! It works. Thank you, Hershey.

And thank you, Adobe, for making me feel like a sucker for paying for my software.