The Adobe Updater Is My New Favorite App…
TO HATE.
Those who use the newest of Adobe’s Creative Suites on old hardware (a 1Ghz PowerBook G4 for me) can sympathize I am sure.
My laptop is getting old, yes I know. But Adobe, your updater application slows my computer down more than Photoshop and Illustrator do! Now, I am kind of used to slow these days, so I normally wouldn’t complain too much if it weren’t for the craziness I witnessed this afternoon after rebooting from the latest system updates from Apple.
I was never happy with Adobe Updater, so I normally tell it to go away when it does come up. Given that, I had an update to install — Acrobat 8.1 Update. Fine, I just restarted, so I’ll let it go through before I start back on my work.
Maybe not a good idea.
Steps to update Acrobat 8 Professional
- Hit update on the Adobe Updater. (My CPU and HD will now be pegged for the install, Okay I am used to that.)
Waiting about 10-15 minutes…
- The install is seemingly 90% completed or so. Now a dialog comes up that says some items need “repaired”. Items like the Safari PDF Plugin, eww, no thanks — too slow. So I uncheck that and let it go to town “repairing the PDF Printer”.
Woops, I see a dialog that says “Wait For App Shutdown Title” — “Please click OK when other apps have stopped” with both
CancelandOKbuttons. What? Wait a moment, wait for what app to stop? The updater? Because that’s the only app really running in the Dock. Confused, I clickOK.It returns. I click
OK, again… I see a pattern emerging here.
After a few bouts of click madness just for fun, I click
Cancel. I have no idea what that means. The dialog doesn’t read well obviously.Cancelcould mean destroy the computer immediately for all I know.But then it works. Five minutes later, I am greeted with this screen:
- Looking at Acrobat’s information in Finder it is indeed updated to
8.1.0.
Utterly slow, confusing and just plain bad Adobe, for-shame.
UPDATE: Looks like Gus Mueller loves the updater too. Thanks for the links Daniel.
More Adobe weirdness from Gus Mueller: here and here
Yeah, not one of our better implementations. I think we’re working on making it better but it’s ingrained into so many products. I’ll email this around internally for you.
=Ryan rstewart@adobe.com
Wow, not sure how you found my little blog out of nowhere Ryan.
Working with lots of products is an issue I am sure. Lets hope that dialog boxes like that don’t make there way into any product in the future
Thanks for paying some attention to the small people.
I agree, Sam! Everytime I open an Adobe app and see that little update icon appear, I brace myself for a bunch of dialogs and the inevitable closing of unrelated applications.
To Adobe’s credit, it gets better with each release. Remember the old “Adobe Online” stuff in Photoshop 6 and 7?
made a punk song about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBkKBeVX9js
Phillip: Awesome videos! Keep up the great work, I love the Flash developer in a tree protest video!