Adobe gets an e-earful, and listens
The Dear Adobe site lets people vent about Adobe products and vote about the gripes.
(Credit: Dear Adobe)A lot of people use Adobe Systems software, and apparently a lot of them feel the need to vent.
Web designer Erik Frick created the Dear Adobe site where users can enter gripes and vote for or against others' gripes. "It started from a conversation between Adam (Meisel) and myself complaining about Photoshop. Both of us being Web design nerds, we figured, 'Why not create a forum for people to vent? Who knows, maybe Adobe will listen,'" he said Tuesday on the site's inaugural blog posting.
Sure enough. Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack said the site generated more than 30 e-mails within Adobe in the first two days, and Nack himself responded to a few gripes at the site.
"Just because it would be unprofessional of me or others to rant about this or that aspect of the company in public, don't for a second think it's not happening behind closed doors," Nack said, acknowledging complaints about Creative Suite 3's installation and update software.
Frick created a top 50 gripes list. It's possible the results are skewed to early gripes, since it appears the site presents random gripes for readers to vote on and early gripes have had more exposure. Even so, it's still illuminating to see a mass venting of the spleen: some want Adobe to slow down and cut the bloat, others to speed up with new features. One gets sympathy for Adobe as well as for its customers.
On the overall list:
Gripe 126: "Lens flare is played. Let it go."
Gripe 675: "Linux users luvs u. We can has Adobe applications and a currents Flash versions? Kthanxbai."
Gripe 6: "You kindly turn off the highlight on text when choosing a color for it, but not when choosing a different weight. Would you kindly do this, or kindly jump off a cliff? "
Gripe 366: "please don't copy Microsoft's naming and bundling conventions. I want CS3 not CS3 pro, CS3 pro advantage, CS3 pro plus, CS3 no frills, CS3 pro max, CS3 pro extra pro max... "
(Credit:
Dear Adobe)
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
And sadly most gripes are so true.
Aside from my desktop I have a 5.4 pound MacBook which runs Windows XP and I have an HP 2133 Mini note, also running XP. I wanted to be able to take screen shots, and text, do some photo editing and in general have some graphic capability. But I'm not going to buy two more licenses of Photoshop for that. I bought two licenses of Corel PaintShop Pro for $79 each. That's almost 1/10th the cost of Photoshop.
There is also a free PDF print driver out there, and quite a few good PDF apps that are far cheaper than Acrobat Pro. Microsoft added Save as PDF to Office 2007 as well. More and more I have to look for alternatives to Adobe because of their high prices.
Let's take pure value. Office Standard is $399 for the full version. That's 1/3rd of Adobe CS collection prices. And what are we really getting that is so much better than what we had in version 6.5 of Photoshop? Version 7 is pretty much a solid release. I only buy newer ones because I am forced into it for the sake of compatibility.
Acrobat has become such a huge app. We're trying to make smaller computers more portable and last longer with smaller batteries. More and more people are buying laptops and soon more will own laptops than desktops. It's time to make software that keeps this fact in mind.
- by limefan913 August 31, 2008 1:34 PM PDT
- Try being a Linux user. I have to constantly restart Firefox in Linux because Flash blows, and Gnash isn't a mature enough replacement yet, though it tries.
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