Seriously, this is important. If you are a client with a web site or just someone who is interested in to being a good web citizen read this.

I recently took a trial spin of Adobe’s CS4 suite and it’s looking like some of my favorite tools are in jeopardy of becoming less polished and annoying. As nice as every Creative Suite upgrade can be, the quality has dropped off of each release since the whole suite became a unified product. It’s not that they’re aren’t some nice things to embrace with each update either, plus the software clearly required a lot of hard work from lots of talented people, but someone at the top is letting this stuff out prematurely – which isn’t something I would’ve complained about as much in the past.

Adobe needs to make money and grow, but now it would seem to be at the expense of a lot of seriously bad bugs, mostly with how the UI works (or doesn’t work). Some of these bugs are the result of Apple’s growing pains and Adobe’s huge legacy source code, others are just little reminders that the honeymoon may be over as money overshadows quality in software development.

Seriously, I could’ve waited a few months for CS4. It’s not like we’re switching from Intel to another architecture and we need it to run natively right now. If anything the CS3 suite could’ve used a 0.5 clean-up that ideally would have better hooks for a lot of the changes in CS4. But hey, it was time get more revenue and it all has to ship on schedule, finished or not. I almost worked at Adobe once, in tech support, a job I would’ve probably loved. Now I’d be embarrassed to field the kinds of questions that must be coming in.

CS4 has some painfully embarrassing glitches that slide past QC, or perhaps nobody cares because they know we’ll all buy it and say “it’s the best yet” anyway. It’s easy to think that but if you poke around online you’ll see that lots of folks at Adobe do care, it’s just that the suite is too big to revise radically on a tight schedule.

Things starting sliding years ago when Adobe started adding graphical icons with links in palettes (I know how to go to adobe.com, thank-you-very-much), then they came out with the precursor to Bridge (which I never used), then Bridge itself, which was useful but didn’t do contact sheets efficiently which sort of made no sense given that this is a major tool for graphics professionals. And via the slow launching and crash-prone Bridge Adobe tried to be your stock photo source (again) as well as your collaboration center and design portal.

The Adobe Bridge Home service has been discontinued in order to focus resources on other efforts.

Most of these extracurricular services were dropped recently to “focus resources on other efforts”. Amen. Thank you recession for weeding out the crap. However, now we have Adobe TV and Adobe Drive which are installed via the controversial Creative Suite installer regardless of choice.

Here we go again. Too much, too fast, at the cost of losing ground with the core audience. This seems to be a consistent problem with success, especially with software.

Adobe has taken it on themselves to create their own UI and it’s a hit and miss to the point that my workflow stutters more than ever. With great power comes great responsibility – Adobe you need to polish this UI more before you drop it on people who weren’t asking for it. At least nobody I know asked for it, both power user or otherwise. Except for Flash I don’t think anyone was asking for you to buy Macromedia and adopt their awkward Flash interfaces either.

C’mon, you can do better than this.

There, I said it. Sorry John.

I don’t know if it’s because the entire set of software products have the same release date (except, oddly, Acrobat). If so, it’s a focus thing as too many resources are being shoehorned into the same development schedule – roughly every two years we get a new Creative Suite when a lot of nagging glitches are left un-patched in the original. CS4, more than ever, needs some polish and probably more than the usual one or two patches that will come out in it’s lifespan.

I mentioned above that Apple’s growing pains are part of Adobe’s struggles, and they are. But one thing that sounds right is that Apple claims that their next OS revision, Snow Leopard, is a refinement release, one that isn’t about new features but is about cleaning up and getting all the kinks worked out before doing another huge revision. Kudos to that, but we all know that this isn’t a popular way to make money. I don’t think it’s as bad as it seems though – most folks bought Tiger or Leopard and claimed not to notice the differences and that’s because many of them are under-the-hood, where only the geekiest of us look. The new features are already overlooked anyway.

And in the end some of us just want to get our work done without having palettes, licensing and traditional UI conventions breaking.

I’ve sort of felt that there is some risk of implosion with the Creative Suite as many buy it and maybe use 1/3rd of it, just like another suite that has been sliding in popularity. Adobe is trying to clean things up and I know it’s because of Apple’s Intel move and Microsoft’s Vista problems as well as the smattering of video card issues as CS4 uses those, but they’ve let too much slide this time. My confidence is greatly reduced.

These problems are long term chinks in the Creative Suite and Adobe brand. Here’s to hoping they can pull it together soon.

Mr. Gates is dead on in his critique. The sad thing is that his comments were made in 2003 and my personal experience is that these usability issues have not actually been fixed.

Seriously.

Here’s a great example coming from my personal experience:

Microsoft bought a small company called iView Multimedia and re-branded their core product iView as Expression Media and added it to a larger suite of similar products. The transition to Microsoft was completed over a period of six months – at the end of that time iView’s web presence was frozen and pointed to the new Microsoft product page. Additionally new user and support forums were set up.

Expression Media itself then went through a series of patches and updates most of which were nearly impossible to find if you didn’t frequent the support forums (Do most users have time to “live” in a forum? I think not.). Then they added Expression Media to the Microsoft AutoUpdate program which made keeping up with the frequent bug fixes a dream come true. I was like “yay!”.

Time passed and Microsoft revamped the software to version 2.0, a paid update. No announcement was made via email (I was on the iView list for such things, what happened to that?). Getting the software to try out for 30 days or purchase required clicking through several pages of links just to download something – I almost gave up.

At this same time it turned out that the Expression Media team released a “post” service pack update to Expression Media 1.x that fixed some awkward bugs. This is a nice gesture considering the paid update superseding the prior version. Again, I was like “yay!”.

The thing is, even with the auto update checking feature in Expression Media 1.x this SP1 patch never showed up. I found out about it by accident while I was reviewing user feedback on the 2.0 release. Again, most users in the target market aren’t going to be able to find an important patch even though a built-in update checker exists. To this is misleading with an end result of a bad customer experience.

I would appendix the above that prior to Microsoft buying iView Multimedia it was a breeze to hit the product web site and get to downloading. When the acquisition was announced the usual justifications were made, my favorite being that the team would benefit from the large resources that Microsoft offered as far as testing and development. These resources did little to help the user get to the product, much less keep it updated.

After watching an internal Microsoft promotion video about the acquuisition (warning Silverlight plug-in required to view), I began to feel that the iView team was a fish out of water within the Microsoft culture. Some of that is because Expression Media is still a cross-platform application as iView was, but it’s not handled by the (infamous?) Macintosh Business Unit as the Mac version of Office is. Basically this is not normal for Microsoft and clearly they don’t entirely know how to present it.

In summary, a small focused company gets acquired and is buried in an existing complex system where getting patches or even basic product information is far more work than the average Internet user would expect. How does Microsoft expect to maximize sales of the Expression Media product when it continues to clutter the usability of it’s product information and support the same way it has with Windows? Seriously, even if I didn’t work on interface design for web pages I could see how awkward this is. Reading Mr. Gates email from 2003 only adds concern to these issues.

First, from what I can see this wasn’t being demanded from users and developers, however all software benefits from some cleanup and optimization. Of course new features drive sales which is why you never hear an operating system sold this way. So Apple is breaking a few rules doing this. The price is as yet unannounced and we’re all hoping it’s half the cost of a full OS X update (or even free, which is doubtful).

Even though Snow Leopard is not about new features it actually has some core functions that basically are new features to me – notably Quicktime X, OpenCL, full native Exchange support and lots of improvements to core OS services like multi-core management. There aren’t a lot of details but I suspect after this weeks WWDC is wrapped more will be divulged.

Quicktime X is hopefully a long overdue re-write to what is essentially still a ported Carbon codebase. Honesty I cannot imagine what my work would be like without Quicktime – it’s been a powerful technology that has been overlooked over the years. I especially love old comparisons of Windows Media Player to Quicktime Player that never once even recognize that Quicktime is a set of APIs and the player is not what it’s all about. WMP plays stuff, but you could record and edit a feature with special effects in Quicktime if you knew how. Before OS X, Quicktime languished for a while until the iPod/iTunes boom, but even then the radical new features that Quicktime 3.x had at the time still seem great when compared to subsequent updates. Apple has brought Quicktime into it’s current 7.x incarnation pretty well despite the aging foundation it has, but there is more room to grow here.

Mostly I applaud an honest acknowledgement that the next revision is all about polishing and optimization. This will pay off in the long term and Apple seems to know it. It will also give developers a bit more time with the Leopard chapter which is good since many of the new features in Leopard are under the hood and not so evident to a user.

Update:

Gruber over at Daring Fireball seems to agree on the “no new features” not being entirely accurate.

Like one commenter also said, I’ve yet to see anyone with a Zune and nobody I know has bought one.

I live in Seattle and all my Microsoft-employed friends got free Xbox 360s when those shipped, but none of them have a Zune.

There does exist a proposal that purports to be of type a). I’ll call it, for short, “the Slashdot argument”. It says that books, music, films, software and so on ought to be freely distributed to anyone who wants them, simply because they can be freely distributed. What is the writer or musician to do, though, if she can’t earn money from her art? Simple, says the Slashdotter: earn your money playing live (if you’re one of those musicians who plays live),4 or selling T-shirts or merchandise, or providing some other kind of “value-added” service. Many such arguments seem to me to be simple greed disguised in high-falutin’ idealism about how “information wants to be free”. Perhaps it’s not empty pedantry to point out that “information” doesn’t want anything in and for itself. The information in which humans traffic is created by humans. And most information-creating humans need to earn dollars or yuan to survive.

I wish everyone would read this. As an artist and musician I’ve experienced the attitude that my music or art should be free, even before the Internet had taken off. In fact I’ve never had expectations to make a living from it because no matter how good I might get at doing it I rarely ever see anyone willing to pay for it.

Not sure I like the thought of Flickr becoming integrated with Live. If this happens there is a good chance Flickr will go down the toilet. Let’s hope not.

I paid the $5, downloaded the FLAC file option and had never heard the album till after the transaction. I’d only heard a track from Saul on a Ninja Tune compilation and seen one of his videos prior. I was intrigued and $5 is small change compared to most online or offline music purchases.

A little follow-up from Saul is here.

The always great Presentation Zen has good comments on the improved PowerPoint in Bill Gate’s 2008 CES keynote as well as a nice embedded clip of the “Bill Gate’s Last Day” clip with loads of celebrity cameos.

The video is fun and reminiscent of the older Bill Clinton last day from years ago. They went all out on it, plus it’s a bit surprising that all the political figures that appear in it are associated with the Democratic party.

TechCrunch offer their $0.2 that the CES keynote sucked. I’ve seen echoes of this senitment within the user comment on gaming portal Kotaku as well. Finally, John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame summarizes it:

I’ve never understood why Bill Gates and Microsoft have been awarded a perennial slot as the CES keynote. Microsoft is a tremendously successful company, but they’ve never been particularly successful in the field of consumer electronics.

It does seem an odd fit, but we all know that no matter what relevance it does or doesn’t have it’s better to covet that slot than not, and who else has the clout against Microsoft?

John Gruber writes yet another exposing commentary on a overly subjective article at Fast Company (no I will not link to it and increase their ad revenue). Just read John’s take, which is pretty good as usual and continues to prove that people are really uptight about things they don’t understand or like.