Dear Adobe:

[theweaselking]

You do things in a way that nobody else in the world does them.

This is, notably, *not* because you are smarter than everyone else in the world, or because your way is *better* than everyone else's. In fact, it's generally a fair bet that your way is not only "worse than standard", but all the way into "actively bad".

Also: I am evidently smarter than your extremely stupid program.

No Love,
John

Comments

[kierthos.livejournal.com]

Dare I ask what it's doing that you don't like?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I was having serious problems with registering AcroPDF.dll because Acrobat Standard didn't want to change something Acrobat Reader had done, and Reader didn't have permission to change it's own Registry entries, and the installer locked *Administrator* out of those registry entries, and the error message was "Error", not telling me *what* the error was or where.

And that's this morning. Previous hilarity has included Adobe's tendency to refuse to let you *download and save* program updates, insisting on a live connection to the server to get the 300MB update file - regardless of the fact that you've got 6 machines with Photoshop on 'em and you'd rather download once and then install 6 times locally. And there's Adobe's ass-backwards policy on downloading of, well, *anything* within a month of a new edition release. And there's their shit-poor license management.

And, really, Adobe Reader is a PDF reader. It's 90+MB, takes nearly 10 seconds to load on a modern machine (Dog help you if you're running old hardware) and it's chock full of lousy programming and security vulnerabilities.

Oh, and *no Adobe product EVER* uninstalls cleanly.

I hate everything about the company, really.

[mhoye.livejournal.com]

Haven't we had this discussion. Don't use Acrobat Reader. Seriously.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm quite aware. It's simply the gold standard by which incredibly bad Adobe products are measured.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Are there no alternative PDF readers on Windows? On Mac OS, for instance, I see no reason why anyone would ever use Acrobat Reader when the built-in Preview application is so much better.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

There are a ton of alternatives. Foxit is my personal favourite.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Yep, Foxit is what I use. It's not perfect, but it's far less imperfect that Adobe Reader.

[anktastic.livejournal.com]

And lets not forget that the newest versions of Reader include random software shit noone wants.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

They've started doing that with the Flash plugin, too.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

(Oh, and: Solution was to uninstall Reader, uninstall Standard, uninstall FLASH, reboot, kill the OLE objects and delete the Adobe folders from Program Files, reboot, run a registry cleaner repeatedly until nothing that said "Adobe" was in there, reboot, and reinstall Acrobat Standard. And it still gave me an oh-so-helpful "installation error" in a popup box that popped *under* the installer, while the installer had a progress bar and a progress meter and a "please touch nothing" box, but that it still stopped the installation until I clicked OK on the error. And it didn't log the error anywhere for me to get more details. And this is apparently a well-known behaviour of Acrobat 9. But the fucking DLL finally fucking registered so we can finally do the fucking OLE automation that's been stopping this particular dev from completing a project for a week.)

(Edited to correct the last sentence: The lack of OLE automation is the problem, not the presence of OLE automation.)

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

The husband of my sister-in-law works for them as a programmer (I think). He's an assclown who believes he is both smarter than everyone else in the world and that his way is better than everyone else's, so your problems do not come as a surprise to me.

[kowh.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. Adobe. Where if you want a form of the Flash installer that can be automatically distributed to multiple PCs[1], you have to sign up for a full fledged Flash redistribution account designed for companies that want to distribute/sell products that include Flash.

Yes, this is for a product freely redistributable in it's non-automatable form, why do you ask?

1: You know, because there's yet another hole and everyone at work has Flash installed because they need it for their daily work[2]

2: By which they really mean Youtube.