Thursday, July 6. 2006The screaming child of software
Some young children constantly demand attention, and will do incredibly annoying things until you stop and listen to them. Then they complain constantly until they get what they want. I imagine being a parent is a frustrating experience at times, but ultimately the most rewarding thing you can do. Dealing with Adobe Acrobat is exactly like that, except it never grows up, makes you proud or leaves home. The only reward is that hopefully someday, I might not need it. Last monday I updated Acrobat, because I accidentally clicked a PDF link. My desktop was hijacked, and basically Adobe decided that it wanted to install the Yahoo! toolbar, update its updater, and update itself. Then, upon rebooting, it all happened again. The second time I took some screenshots
I am sure the likes of Dave C will come in and say "Well Des, you'd complain if they didn't provide the updates", but its not really the amount of them that bothers me. Ubuntu for example has far more updates than this in a given week. It's about who is in control. I choose to update Windows, I choose to update Ubuntu. Adobe chooses to update itself, and force a reboot, and barely has the courtesy to inform me. I am sure that throughout the varioius usability blogs out there (37signals, Creating Passionate Users etc) there are many usability rules they are breaking here, each with its own fancy name such as Subjective Well Being, Client Controlled Flow, Customer Dictated Interactions etc. It's all pomposity. What they mean is "Your user isn't your bitch, so don't treat them that way". For as long as I am editing PDFs however, I am Adobes bitch. Funnily enough as I type this sentence on a different computer, Its just reminded me again. UpdateMartoo over at Reddit made a very good point that I totally forgot to mention...
Another good line from LiquidPenguin @ Digg...
Michael over at HighTech Product Management has advanced this discussion further, prompting a reply from an Adobe employee, which is great to see. Michael came up with a great quote also...
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What I'd really like to know is: what the hell is that creepy half-human half-plant thing to the right of your comment?
Hi Paco,
I have no idea what that is. Maybe its their effort to reach out to much ignored plantman market. Hybrids need PDFs too! Seriously though, when I took the screenshot, it was the image on the side, not a clue what it's got to do with anything. Cheers for reading, Des
The "creepy" thing is a shot out of a movie called MirrorMask. It's a giant monster queen head forming out of the raw black evil and persuing the heroine (which you can see tiny on the left side there).
What it has to do with Adobe, I couldn't say. But the movie was pretty spectacular.
Aha, so it's not necessarily one of Adobes regular customers
 Cheers for that Darren.
I'm glad someone else has finally noticed how thoroughly obnoxious Adobe has become with its Acrobat products!
I'm a tech writer so I need to generate PDFs. I use Acrobat 5 to do that because it does everything I need it do. Unfortunately, I need to test view the PDFs in "Free" Acrobat Reader 7. And here's where Adobe's obnoxiousness kicks in. Reader 7 overwrote my file associations in such a way that I couldn't simply use the Windows' file associations tool to reset them. Instead, I needed to (a) remove the PDF-to-Reader 7 file asociations, then (b) reinstall Acrobat 5 and the 5.5 update to same. As if that wasn't enough of a problem, Acrobat Reader periodically tries to force feed me "important" updates to itself. Each update, in turn, roughly shoves my existing configuration aside, obliging me to repeat steps "a" and "b" above. The thing is, I've been using OpenOffice 2.0's Export as PDF feature. It works far more quickly than Acrobat and doesn't seem to need to modify my Windows registry to provide the functionality. The bottom line is that it's obvious that Adobe, by obnoxiously configuring its software in an effort to boost sales of its overly-expensive Acrobat products, is encouraging me to look for Adobe-free methods of generating and viewing PDFs. Adobe, are you listening?
Thanks for reading Riley.
When I read stories like yours I realise that I am only really at the tip of the iceberg here. Luckily I don't have to deal with different settings/configurations/pdf variations etc. If only there were decent free software for performing simple edits on PDFs, I don't think I'd ever install the thing in the first place. But I think Adobe have patented the shit of the PDF format, so it's probably hard to do anything bar read them, unless you get a kick out of courtrooms. Des
For a few months now, I've been using a thing called Foxit Reader. It's a drop-in replacement for Adobe Reader, which has quite a few advantages: it's smaller, so it starts up much faster, and best of all, it's not a screaming, spoiled child.
Just download from http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php - it's a single file. Me, I saved the .exe into c:\Program Files, so I'd know where it was. Then run it once, and it'll take the .pdf file association. Then you can delete Adobe altogether. Plus, that way, you can make it so that if you accidentally click a PDF link in your web browser, it can just download in the background and then open *in a separate application*, instead of hijacking your browser while Adobe loads. I've always hated that. For those of you who have to create PDFs, I see that the same company also has things that claim to write 'em as well as reading 'em. No, I have nothing to do with the company. I just stumbled across the software and am very happy with it.
Hi Kai,
Thanks for that link and your comment, I'll check it out tomorrow in work and let you all know what I think. To be clear, what I need to be able to do is add and edit comments left on PDF files, for document revision. Incidentally foxit have one of the ugliest websites I've seen in a while Des
Well you could also try pdfMachine ( www.pdfmachine.com ). It's not free, but it does allow you to add and change comments, and I personally think it's easier to use. It certainly doesn't have an obnoxious updating system.
No, I'm not an employee of theirs
Thanks for that SpaceKnarf, I'll check it out. PDF Machine has 2 versions, one is free, one is 50 dollars. The difference is the free one puts on watermarks when you use advanced features of the product.
I'm delighted to say that there's a growing number of non-Adobe alternatives for working with and viewing PDFs.
Try searching the Web for "PDF". Many tools, while not free, are very cost effective, especially when compared to Adobe's increasingly bloated and over-priced PDF "solutions."
Indeed sir. I would say switch to Linux, but the alternatives there are even worse.
Well to be fair Sam, there is no PDF editor on Linux, there are however several very good document viewers. The best of which, in my opinion, is Evince.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince/
"... I am sure the likes of Dave C will come in and say "Well Des, you'd complain if they didn't provide the updates", ..."
Dunno where you got that idea man, this update business sounds like b****x to me, especially the rebooting end of it. OS's updating themselves is one thing, but user apps would want to be a lot more discrete about it. On the one hand, it's good to see apps automatically patching themselves, on the other hand, if they f**k the user experience around in the process, they kinda missed the point.
While Adobe is a pain in the behind, you an always manage your updates by pressing Ctrl+K and editing your preferences.
round of applause
Well said Dez! I totally agree and judging by the level of interest this post has generated I'm not alone! There is simply no way that an appliation to read and write PDFs should need your computer to reboot to update itself. I could understand there might be a need to re-start Adobe but anything beyond that is just insanity. Lets look agian at one of your favourite examples of software that knows how to treat the user right, FireFox. It updates it self. When it does so it promots you politely and if you tell it to get stuffed it will. If you don't tell it to get stuffed it will do it's thing in the background while you do your thing and when it's finished it will ask you to restart FireFox. No multiple reboots no shit and FF needs updating MUCH more because it is a network app and hence needs to be patched quick if there is a vulnerability discovered! Adobe is nothing more or less than bloat-ware. Generally on the Mac you don't need a PDF viewer because you have Preview and the nice "save as PDF" option in the print dialogue so you can turn anything you can print into a PDF with just purly the OS as it comes out of the box. Preview also lets you see comments in PDF (not sure about editing them) but saddly I did have to polute my Mac with Acrobat at one stage to read a DRM protected PDF file once. I read the file and then prompty put Adobe in the bin! In summary ... Adobe suck!
It gets better... I downloaded Foxit, and it seems to do what I want, without locking the computer up with endless load times. So I went to uninstall reader (no uninstall option in the Adobe folder, of course), and got a completely blank error message, followed by a "critical error, installation failed" error message. And Acrobat is till there.
I'm going to wrench its bleeding evil heart from the depths of my computer, and never install the monster again.
I have to say, I am not entirely surprised. I had a hard time getting Adobe to relinquish its hold on my web browser when I was using firefox, so it doesn't shock me to find out it is difficult to un-install.
Thanks for your comment chazkim Des
A friend tipped me off to Foxit reader a few weeks ago and I installed it (fully expecting to be unimpressed). I was very impressed but left Adobe on my computer just in case. Then I had a similar Acrobat-holds-computer-hostage experience and that was the last straw. I am happy to report that I have been Adobe-free for about a week now, and it is sooooo nice.
BTW: Foxit has some different versions that you can use to edit PDFs and such. (and yes, theirs has to be one of the most hideously tacky sites I've seen in a while - great software though)
Thanks for your comment Jacob, by all Accounts FoxIt definitely seems to be prett y good, and a "stress free replacement for Acrobat".
I'll install it soon, and if it works, I'll recommend it here.
Get Reader 5.0 from oldversion.com. Snappy and same features. (Except spacebar won't scroll pages)
(You'll have to uninstall the existing installation. I remember having to delete Acrobat 7\ from Program Files too.)
While we're whinging I'll just add that installing Acrobat 7 on the Mac managed to completely knacker the display of PDF documents within the Safari browser (until I found the solution and deleted it out of the plugins).
It's a shame because in terms of what it can do, it's a fantastic piece of software, they just seem to have managed to make it incredibly annoying to users. (I presume the reboot is actually for the Yahoo toolbar to get it into IE??). I hope that Macromedia has a good effect on them - Flash has resulted in as many crimes as PDF but the Flash player has always been a cool project - kept it small and doesn't bother the user unless a site actually requires update.
Soooo how the fuck do I get it off my computer? Add/Delete did what is was supposed to do, but the Adobe folder is still there with protected .dll files and other non-touchable stuff. I'm about to explode having spent several hours trying to get the damn package off my computer (Windows XP Pro) w/SP2.
TrickyDick, they have information on the adobe website on how to do that manually.
It should be similar to this: http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/327675.html |
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It starts off so innocently, a polite request
Oh, a couple more updates, thats strange. Hey at least they're professional
Cool! Windows is getting on this as well
About 4 minutes later, the rage starts. You can't be fucking serious, another reboot?
After Reboot, Adobe starts itself up (Why not? it's not like I should have a say in this) Guess what it's doing?
Now this is taking the absolute piss...
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Congratulations to Adobe, who seem to be listening to what people are saying about their products. My post "The Screaming Child of Software" attracted a lot of attention; clearly I wasn't the only one annoyed with the Acrobat update process. Last week
Tracked: Jul 31, 10:45