I have always been a big fan of Adobe. Those days are gone. For good. Adobe’s Creative Suite turns me nuts by now. Since CS4, Adobe has added a nifty little “feature”: whatever preferences somebody has used for the entire application, these preferences are obviously now stored on a document basis.
In a perfect world, this would be actually quite handy. But in a REAL world it will drive you nuts. Usually you get some art-work from people who are designers, not software specialists. Or you will get them from people that use these documents inside their very special work-flows. Any settings that were fine for them must not necessarily be fine for you for that matter.
In fact, almost every time I open a document that was given to me by a designer or a client, I am stuck with totally idiotic application settings and wonder why the hell damn Photoshop or worse, damn InDesign is behaving so freakishly strange on me today.
Until I find out that my basic application settings again became an easy prey by my predecessor’s own funky set of application settings.
Like my designer. I worship his work. But he uses Photoshop entirely different than anybody I really know. He is a genius with it but obviously he needs his kind of settings. So I use the crop tool recently to cut out a selection of his art work to send it on to a client. A pull open a rectangle that fits my crop selection and hit enter. WOOM. I am left with not my selection but with a 1x1 pixel small file. WTF!
It took me an hour to find out that the crop tool also has a manual setting where you can “set” a specific width and hight. I have no idea what that is all about because what is the point in using the crop tool to custom fit a selection when the application has a value to override whatever you select?! For precision cropping? Oh come on! You can do better than that.
The sick thing is, you can happen to override such “tool presets” quite easily by mistake. Just select a tool and hit the arrow up button e.g. and where initially no value was present a value of 1 pops up out of thin air. Again WTF!
Or InDesign. I was rearranging pages in a layout. Typical task. But I wanted to keep my left and right pages together of course. Therefore I usually have the “keep spreads together” setting enabled (which results in a bracket around pages numbers, like so: [2-3] instead of 2-3).
That was CS3 apparently because from CS4 on Adobe just switched around the way it works, now you must UNCHECK to disallow new page orders. Many people seem to get that wrong by now because I hardly see the [x-x] brackets any more in files I get. Now move pages - you will go nuts because InDesign realigns your spreads and turns left into right pages and randomly seems to add new empty pages.
I really wonder what goes on in the mind of Adobe and why apparently nobody seems to complain with Adobe. Call their tech guys and they will blame you for the fault.
Well yes OF COURSE it is my own fault you dumbheads but why? Because you keep messing up more and more your applications with every new version that comes out confusing your customers and users into eternity!
Who else is on the verge of an Adobe caused mental breakdown, today?
Okay. Everybody who knows me knows what an early adopter and tech nerd I can sometimes be. Where ever a beta test, I am on the invite list.
