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Adobe Provides Worst Technical Support Ever on Overpriced Software
Adobe behaves inexcusably in what they jokingly call "support" and should call "interference and obfuscation."
This afternoon for the first time in some time, I tried to run Photoshop Elements 6. On launch, it gave me an error message that said my licensing had stopped working for this product and I needed to restart my machine. That made no sense but I did it anyway. Re-launch. Same issue. So I go to my Adobe account, find that app, redownload it, uninstall the original and re-install fro the new DMG file.
Launch. Same issue.
At 3:45 p.m., after an hour of fiddling, I finally called their support line. After going through all the ACD steps, I was asked to request a callback which would stake place between an hour and three minutes and an hour and 22 minutes.. I waited until 5:40 and tried again. This time I was told the wait time would be 31-42 minutes and was placed on hold with no option of a callback (which is just as well, obviously).
While I was on hold, I did some rummaging around their support forums and found that this kind of issue can be fixed with an app they have called something like LicenseRepari. I downloaded the app and followed the instructions (which included -- are you ready for this user-friendly idea? -- launching Terminal and running a Python program!). No matter what I tried, the Python app refused to run or give me any feedback.
At 6:30 I didn't have a response so I hung up and went home, thinking this is the worst support for an overpriced (i.e., Adobe) product I've EVER experienced.
Two hours after my original call, I got a callback but by then I was no longer in my office. Still, I tried to see if the support person could help. After arguing with me about what should work, he asked me what OS I was running. I told him Mac OS X 10.7.2. He says, "Photoshop Elements 6 doesn't work with Lion."
So Adobe gives me an absolutely bogus error message, sends me down a two-hour rabbit hole chasing a solution that wouldn't have worked in the first place, and then provide garbage support as an added bonus.
I'm done. I will never buy another Adobe product and I'm going to start now searching for replacements for the crap I already own from them. They've bilked me out of thousands of dollars over the years but this ends it.
Firefox to Crowd Adobe From the Other Side With HTML5 PDF Renderer
As HTML5 continues to make inroads into proprietary technology bases like Adobe Flash, along comes Firefox and announces it has a low-profile HTML5 project under way to render the PDF format files that normally require Adobe's free Acrobat Reader. I'm not sure that's as big a deal as Computerworld made it sound, particularly given the fact that they didn't even acknowledge that Safari has had this capability for a long time. Instead, they gave Chrome credit for the feature which is built into Apple's WebKit, on which Chrome relies. We Mac guys can't get no respect!
But the Firefox project is important from the perspective that it doesn't use an API into the PDF document format to render the content but rather relies exclusively on HTML5 and JavaScript to do the job. At the very least, this is a great proof-of-concept project. Ultimately, it could dent Adobe's Acrobat franchise a bit but it will probably be several years before it can displace the free reader that has become so ubiquitous people don't even think twice before downloading it when asked.
Business Catalyst Not Quite the Powerhouse I'd Thought
A while back I was singing the praises quite loudly and publicly for a product called Business Catalyst. This nicely engineered tool designed to allow Web designers to develop the business interactions necessary to building business solutions without programming had started as a smallish product from a tiny startup in Australia but two years ago was purchased by Adobe Systems.
I'm not a big fan of Adobe, after watching how they screwed up firs GoLive then Dreamweaver in successive acquisitions of great products that languished or deteriorated under their confused leadership. But I was pretty impressed with what it seemed they had done with Business Catalyst.
Now, a few months and hundreds of hours of experience later, I'm a bit jaded. I still think Business Catalyst is a great tool, don't get me wrong. But it isn't quite what it's cracked up to be. The biggest gaping hole I've found so far is in the app's claim that it allows the creation of "Web Apps" entirely within its programmerless framework. That would be the Holy Grail for many of us. Alas, when Adobe says BC can build "Web Apps" what it really means is that it can build ultra-simple, single-table database interfaces which, will eminently useful, are well short of the expectations of anyone who has built any Web apps in other more technologically sophisticated platforms and frameworks.
I'm less annoyed by the lack of capability than I am by the disingenuousness of their use of the term Web App. One wag who is either with the company or an unabashed defender of All Things Adobe said this was allowable because "Nobody can really define the term 'Web App' anyway." I think the Wikipedia article on the subject offers some useful insights, including the notion that a Web app shouldn't subject its users to frequent page reloads because of a server query, and the support for such desktop-app functionality as drag-and-drop, to name two. The so-called "Web apps" you can build in BC don't meet either of those simple criteria, let alone the more exacting expectations that I'm sure most if not all users would impose on an experience labeled a "Web app" as opposed to a "Web site."
At the end of the day if you are faced with building a Web app in the sense everyone but Adobe uses the phrase, BC won't be of any use. You might as well use conventional HTML5 and/or HTML/CSS/JavaScript with a dash of PHP or Python.
