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Updated: Adobe CS5 Updater freezes Snow Leopard menu bar

After coming across this issue just the other day, it happened again. I opened my MacBook Pro running the newly installed CS5 and the Adobe Application Manager program had just run another update. It seems as though when a new update is found, a process within the status notification icon on the Snow Leopard menu bar freezes the rest of the icons on the bar. While logging out of the user or restarting still fixes this, it is not a permanent solution. Read past the break to see how to turn off the Adobe Application Manager menu bar notification icon.… Read more

Adobe issues Photoshop CS4 patch, urges users to update

Adobe's Photoshop Creative Suite 4 image-editing software has critical vulnerabilities that could let  hackers take control of Macs with the suite installed. Graham Cluley, a security researcher, said the security risk lies in infected ASL, ABR, and GRD files that can cause you to surrender control of your Mac to a remote hacker.… Read more

Microsoft Office 2010 Web apps revealed

One of the biggest new additions to Microsoft Office 2010 (review) is the ability to use Web apps to access your work anywhere. Though they're not as feature-rich as their counterparts in the desktop version, we think many will find them useful for edits, changes, and even sketching out ideas while away from the office.

Microsoft made Web versions of the most used apps in the office suite including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. All offer enough basic features to work on the go, and you can always transfer a document back to your desktop for further tweaks when … Read more

Photoshop CS5 applications crashing on quitting

Adobe recently released its latest CS5 productivity suite for the Mac, and a few people have been experiencing a problem where applications (particularly Photoshop) seem to be crashing when they are quit. The program will otherwise run just fine.… Read more

Microsoft Office 2010 reviewed

The bottom line: Microsoft Office 2010 is a worthy upgrade for businesses and individual users who need professional-level productivity apps, but it will take some time to get acclimated with the reworked interface. Users looking for bare-bones, dead-simple office software should stick with Google's and other online offerings or continue using older Office versions they have already mastered.

The world has changed plenty since Microsoft introduced Office 2007. In that time, Google has become a major player, with its suite of online tools, and even Apple has made inroads with its iWork office suite, though admittedly within a smaller … Read more

Cash cow out of the barn: Adobe shipping CS5

The official debut was two weeks ago, and now Adobe Systems is actually delivering its Creative Suite 5 software to customers.

The CS5 software spans a broad range of uses--image editing in Photoshop and Photoshop Extended, video editing in Premiere Pro, Flash application creation in Flash Pro, Web page design in Dreamweaver, and more. New to the suite is Flash Catalyst, geared to let designers without much programming experience convert application mock-ups created in Illustrator or Photoshop into working Flash applications.

Adobe sells these programs alone or packages them up into suites tailored for various market segments. At the … Read more

BirdHerd lets you share your Twitter account (invites)

Ever tried to share a Twitter account with someone else? Probably not, but there are a growing number of businesses that do it on a daily basis. And until Twitter's own "contributors" service is available to the general public, there's room for companies that have come up with solutions that don't require sharing your log-in or e-mail credentials with others.

BirdHerd, which is opening up to a large group of beta testers Wednesday, does just that. As an account owner, you simply give BirdHerd the OK through OAuth to send out messages to your account. … Read more

Random rumblings about Adobe CS5

You've had months now of teasers and gee-whiz video demos of new features and technologies that Adobe Systems is planning to debut in Creative Suite 5, and there'll be boatloads of people telling you about them over the next 30 days before it ships (here's our summary of Photoshop's new features). But for some of us, the things that Adobe hasn't fixed, and which don't merit viral videos, remain sources of immense frustration.

At the top of my list are the complete lack of upgrade and migration tools. Unlike most applications, Adobe doesn't even provide the option to simply upgrade an existing installation. I know a lot of people need to keep multiple versions of the apps on their systems--I'm one of them--but there are a lot of people who don't, and Adobe's responsible for an amazing amount of hard disk clutter. Furthermore, transferring your settings, presets, Dreamweaver Snippets, Bridge Favorites, and so on is a major pain.

In Photoshop, for example, you have to remember to export styles, Actions, tool presets and other settings before you can manually import them into the newer version, or even into a different installation of the same version. With customization pervading every aspect of the applications, doing this individually for each type of tool is tedious at best. And some things, such as Photoshop's New Document presets and Bridge's Favorites can't be transferred at all as far as I can tell. I expect more from a product that costs almost $700; at the price of the Master Collection, with the concomitant increase in the number of settings you'll want to transfer, well, I'd be pretty annoyed. (We won't really know if the company has fixed the poorly designed updater until the suite's been out for a bit.)

I stress this because there's still time for Adobe to--at the very least--write some scripts to handle settings migration before the product ships. My last communication from them on the subject said that migration tools plans were still "in flux," and I urge everyone who's considering the upgrade to put some pressure on the company to do something about it.… Read more

Are Microsoft Office and OpenOffice irrelevant?

Boy Genius Report has posted screenshots of the new Microsoft Office 11 for Mac, suggesting that it looks "absolutely delicious."

Do you care?

I don't mean that in any anti-Microsoft fashion. I'm just asking, "Do you still care about an office productivity suite?" I mean, in the traditional sense of that product category?

I don't, and I'm not exactly sure when my concern for Microsoft Office (or OpenOffice, for that matter) dissipated. At some point in the last few years, e-mail became my office productivity suite, with a sip here and there … Read more