As the start of another weeks dawns and most of us come face to face with our “income earning” pursuits, I am faced again with Adobe and its suite of software that is a source of Terror, stress and a lack of productivity in our lives. I would attempt to list the stressful situation we face by using Adobe’s suit of products. I do it without any profanity, childish name callings or language of ranting.
- (1) Program launch Time: On average we use Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Premier and After Effects. On average each program takes a full 2 minutes to launch and ready to use, Adobe programs has this habit of pretending to be ready but is not quite ready, just try clicking on say the “File” menu. The biggest offender here is Photoshop with Illustrator a close second. Indesign is no better and constantly reverts to its default settings even with our custom settings saved. This is quite annoying as we cater to an international clientele with different measurement settings, imagine the time wasted with a client in Europe using the metric system and an American with the imperial standards.
- (2) Program False Exit: At least three time a week we are surprise to see an adobe program “Illustrator is the biggest offender” running when it was closed three days ago, we usually has to force quit the offending application.
- (3) Destroying the session: When an adobe program misbehaves and they often do, it brings the entire system down. An example being Dreamweaver and any browser use for previewing. When Dreamweaver slows to a crawl, so does the browser, and any other program you may be running even notepad that draws little system resources. It seems that no matter what’s done after including closing the programs, the session is dead resulting in a complete and time consuming system restart.
- (4) Fonts: As desktop publishers we know better than to copy all of our thousands of fonts to the fonts directory. We use Extensis suitcase to load the font sets kept on an external USB 3 drive, yet every time we launch Photoshop the “Initializing fonts” popup comes up and lingers for up to 5 minutes before anything can be done. Sure we have big sets of fonts loading into suitcase but no more than 150 fonts that we know are clean, most being from Adobe’s own fonts library.
- (5) Sluggishness: Sure this could be blamed on a myriad of things but we’ve seen this sluggish slow behavior primarily with Adobe’s programs, Photoshop sometimes just comes to a halt with the simplest of task like opening a 4mb jpeg. We just can’t put our fingers on it. With 8Gigs of ram with frequently defrag and system maintenance, we just don’t understand why Photoshop would just freeze for 5 minutes as we watch the status bar slowly progresses. It seems as though it’s a big “no, no” to have Dreamweaver and Photoshop running, not to mention Adobe bridge, now that’s another story. Multi-tasking with adobe products seems to be a pipe dream.
Adobe’s programs are a major source of stress in our Multimedia business, I’ve heard the mildest and calmest of people use profanity dozens of times a day as they try to earn a living using Adobe’s programs. Smoke and coffee breaks are a usual sign that an Adobe program is creeping, freezing or has caused the system to be restarted. Adobe must take the time to realize that some of us are real users, earning our living using their products and not some recreational user who downloaded a cracked copy to experiment. We’ve tried everything, from more memory to no web connection and even a system with just the adobe suite of program installed, yet the programs are still problematic to use. Seems everyone is reading from the same outdated diagnostic book with the same old questions like “What anti-virus program are you using” I can’t tell you how annoying it is that after waiting two days for an answer, the question is answered by another question. We wish we could dump adobe’s suit but their monopoly is in full effect, there just isn’t another Photoshop or Dreamweaver out there. The final cut guys on the Mac are frequently laughing at the premier guys on windows 7 and 8. All in all Adobe’s products have great features but there is something wrong with their products, something very, very wrong. On an average week, we loose five and a half hours of non-productivity due to Adobe’s programs, that’s 27 hours a month, 324 hours a year or 13 days a year, now that’s real money in any lauguage..