Adobe CS4: Mac Fans Irked by Lousy Installation Tools
It’s no secret that designers and creative types tend to gravitate toward the Mac — OS X is noted for its ease-of-use and that it “just works.” It’s also well known that Adobe makes most of the applications designers know and love, so why does Adobe’s Creative Suite installer undermine the Mac’s ease-of-use with the single worst application installer on the platform?
The Adobe Creative Suite 4 application installer does of course get the job done, but it’s awkward, confusing and gets your Adobe experience on the Mac off to a bad start. We think, given the price of CS4 ($2500 for the full Master Collection), the installer is a disgrace.
Why didn’t we mention all this in our review? Well, the truth is all of Adobe’s installers have always been incredibly awkward and I’m afraid we simply got used to backwardness of it all.
Designer and blogger Pierre Igot, however, has decided to call Adobe out.
He recently posted a scathing critique of Adobe’s CS4 installer that highlights some of the more glaringly obvious shortcomings. Igot’s piece is well worth a read, but here are a few of the problems he mentions:
- The CD doesn’t auto-open a window. Normally we applaud apps that don’t auto anything, but in this case, as Igot points out, that’s about all you ever want a CD to do (or in this case a DVD). This one is minor, but it does set the tone of user-unfriendliness.
- Once you open the DVD in a window you see an icon that looks like nothing recognizable (i.e. it’s not a folder, it’s not an app, it bears no resemblance to anything a Mac user would have seen before). If you assume, as most of us do, that you need to click on it to do anything you’ll discover it’s a folder.
- Once you open that folder you’ll see a list of stuff you don’t care about and absolutely nothing that says what you might reasonable expect, like “Install” or “click to install.”
- The installer is called Setup.app. Think about it from a usability standpoint, are you “setting up” CS4 or are you installing it? Worse, as Igot points out, the setup.app “has the exact same icon as the thing that you’ve just clicked on, which was a folder.” That doesn’t make much sense.
- Once you finally make your way through that maze and decide to try clicking the Setup.app thing, the installer will ask you to close any open browsers. Why? Nowhere in the list of applications to install does Adobe indicated that there’s a browser plugin (Flash Player is the likely culprit here, but Adobe doesn’t specifically mention the Flash plugin anywhere in the list of apps to install, which means either it isn’t being installed, or you have no option to stop it from being installed, neither of which are user-friendly choices).
- Igot’s final gripe is that the Adobe installer litters the Finder sidebar with mounted volumes related to installing the various apps. In this case, the problem would appear to Mac OS X 10.4, we didn’t experience this on Leopard.
- My own addition to Igot’s list would that you can’t easily install all the Adobe apps in a single folder.
Now maybe some of this strikes you as nitpicking, and indeed, were CS4 a free, or even shareware, application we’d probably overlook it. But it isn’t. The full CS4 suite costs $2500; that’s more than a new Macbook Pro.
Surely you deserve a good installer for the single most expensive piece of software on your Mac? And just to preemptively kill the “it’s a complex app” argument, it’s worth pointing out that Mathematica (another expensive and very complex app) is a drag-and-drop install.
John Nack, Principal Product Manager of Adobe Photoshop, has posted a note on his blog saying that he is aware of Igot’s post and is “going to work with the installer folks to create a response.”
We’ll be sure to update this post when Nack’s response is live, but judging from the comments on the initial acknowledgment, Igot isn’t the only one having problems with Adobe’s installer.
Be sure to let us know what you think of the Adobe CS4 installer.
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