On First Installing Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6
I’ve been waiting eagerly for my pre-ordered copy of Photoshop Elements 6 to arrive. The previous version I had was 2.0(!) which had been balky for a long time and totally lost the will to live (or launch) when I installed Leopard two years ago. Acorn and Pixelmator are nice apps, but they just don’t do everything I need an image editor to do — I don’t mean the “pro” features, rather the labor-saving conveniences that let even teh dummiez like me cut out backgrounds and correct colors and so forth.
Anyway, for a high-profile, award-winning app from one of the biggest software companies out there, the out-of-the-box experience for the new Elements is crappy. Really, it’s the worst I’ve seen in ages. So I had to write this post to complain about it, of course. And it got longer than I expected it to. And rantier.
Really, I’m still happy I got a new version of Photoshop Elements, one that actually launches. I’m sure once I start using it I’ll appreciate all of its amazing features. It’s just that everything outside the features is so clunky.
Is it really so hard to make a good user experience? Most of it seems pretty obvious to me, but then why do so many big companies get it wrong? And in particular, why do they get it wrong when tiny one- or ten-person outfits regularly come out with beautiful apps that show that you don’t need huge teams or lots of money to get it right?
“Mystery Case Files: Adobe”, or: “Where’s The Installer?”
First things first: After inserting the disc, I had no idea how to start the installation. I can’t remember the last time that’s happened.
The big, obvious application icon at the top of the window was really just a design element of the folder’s background picture, so it didn’t do anything when I clicked or dragged it. Haha! Funny! [Not that I was really expecting to find the actual app — because Important Products from Major Developers always come with installers to show how Important they are. Nor was there an installer package, of course — Extremely Important Products wouldn’t deign to use Apple’s installer, they always come with their own.] But I couldn’t even find any Adobe installer app.
The other “Adobe Photoshop Elements 6” icon turned out to be a disguised folder. Its contents were a list view showing “Bootstrapper.dmg”, two folders named “payloads” and “resources”, and a “Setup” folder with the same custom icon. As a programmer (and Mac user) I could tell from the names that this was clearly No User Serviceable Parts Inside territory, like the inside of a bundle or something, so I quickly closed the window.
I did see a ReadMe file, but it wasn’t any help. It told me to restart after installing, but not actually, y’know, how to install.
Even the tiny little printed documentation booklet didn’t describe the installation process.
But as Holmes said, when you’ve eliminated every possibility, the remaining impossibility must be the truth. So I went back into that weird folder and double-clicked “Setup”. Of course, that turned out to be the installer.
But not quite the installer; more like the warm-up act. It got me in the installin’ mood by asking me to give it root privileges, then launched some other process with an identical Dock icon, which put up a progress bar. An installer so slow, it has to put up a progress bar while it launches! Finally after about 15 seconds, both icons vanished from the Dock, and I started to get nervous. Had the installer crashed? No, after a few more seconds to build tension, the real installer came up.
The Installer
OK, it’s an installer. A third-party installer. It’s hard to get too worked up about an installer, one way or the other, but it’s annoying when it insists on installing over 2 gigabytes of stuff on my disk (most of which seems to be clip-art) without any choice to skip the inessentials. Nor would it even tell me ahead of time what it was installing, besides the ominously-named “system components”. I’m installing a glorified paint program. What kind of system extensions does it need to install?
The installation of course took a long time. The installer helpfully displayed two identical progress bars, one above the other. Really! One of them tracked the installation progress, the other the progress of Disc 1. But of course there was only one disc. [See, this is what companies need a Steve Jobs for: to look at this during development and point out the obvious, that it looks stupid to have two identical progress bars, and bully the development team into taking a few hours to hide one of them when numberOfDiscs==1.]
OK, the installer finally quit. It didn’t tell me to restart the computer. And why should it? It’s just installing a glorified paint program, right? Well, the ReadMe file that I’d peeked at in the beginning told me I’d have to restart after installing. So I decided to follow its advice rather than have something unspecified go wrong later on.
First Launch
It certainly launched faster than the old version! That’s nice.
Then it covered my whole screen with a gray backdrop. And filled about 75% of the backdrop with toolbars and palettes, leaving a little bit of room in the middle for a document window. It reminded me of an old mid-’90s Macworld parody of what the next version of Microsoft Word would look like, an entire screenful of toolbars.
There’s a preference to not cover the entire screen with gray, fortunately. It punches out a hole in that gap between the palettes and toolbars. It still looks pretty silly: the user interface has crossed over some kind of line, where it’s no longer the application using up a lot of your desktop with its UI, it’s now the application owning your screen, granting you a bit of room to peek through and see those other, lesser applications that you won’t be needing anymore.
Oh well, the gray UI looks fairly nice, if completely nonstandard (it’s not even anything like Apple’s pro apps’ own nonstandard gray UI.)
Who Will Update The Updaters?
Just now I launched Elements again, and got an alert that there’s an update to the Adobe Updater, and do I want to download it? Somehow the idea of a separate updater, that needs to update itself, made me laugh. Is there an Adobe Updater Updater that puts up that alert and updates the updater? And what if the Updater Updater needs an update? (I can start to see where that 2 gigabytes went, now.)
The Updater, of course, consumes 99.5% of one CPU during the entire download process, putting my MacBook Pro’s fans into wind-tunnel mode. Apparently whoever wrote this thing had no idea how to use CFReadStream and used it in the most inefficient way possible (sit in a tight loop calling CFReadStreamBytesAvailable as fast as you can.)
Big Conclusions
- Installers suck.
- Custom 3rd-party installers that make your Dock bounce a lot suck harder.
- If this is the “lite”, for-dummies, cheap-n-cheerful version of Photoshop, I can’t imagine how huge the real version must be. I mean, if MacPaint was “Rock Around The Clock”, and the first version of Photoshop was, say, “Please Please Me”, then this is Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans. If so, that makes Acorn and Pixelmator something like “The Clash” and “Pink Flag”, respectively; not really a threat to the hegemony yet, but if future versions can mature into “London Calling” and “154”, it’ll be time to kick out the jams.
April 4th, 2008 at 3:22 AM
What’s in the “English” folder? I seem to have a vague memory that you could launch the PE5 installer from there…
April 4th, 2008 at 6:38 AM
Actually, I’ve seen many apps that use the Apple installer also support uninstallation. Typically, it’s the same package. When you launch the installer package, there is an option in there to select “uninstall”.
And some (like CHUD) include a separate uninstaller as well.
The need for an uninstaller does not force you to use a third-party installer.
April 4th, 2008 at 8:22 AM
Shamino: I’ve seen many installers that go out of their way to look exactly like the Apple installer but are actually third party. I suspect that is where you seen an “Uninstall” option. Apple’s installer has no such option and no way to integrate a third party unintall option into its UI.
I assure you, building anything beyond the simplest installer with Apple’s package maker will have any sane person wringing their hands in agony for many reasons beyond the lack of uninstall. The Adobe CS2 installers were Apple installers and arguably far worse than the CS3 installers. I’m not going to make any excuses for the problems in the CS3 installer (which Elements uses), but at the end of the day Apple’s installer is a hinderance more than a help for any non-trivial installation task.
And again, whenever possible, the best solution is to architect your applications to be drag-and-drop whenever possible. And that does not mean having a trojan horse installer inside what masquerades as a drag-and-drop application. (think Acrobat)
April 4th, 2008 at 10:46 AM
Not quite but you can get this insane alert message. Maybe that’s the one you got.
April 5th, 2008 at 6:56 PM
It took a long time to find your post, but thank goodness I did. Your description is exactly what I was thinking when I put in the disc.
The booklet says put the disc in and follow the instructions. Well there are no instructions to follow. at least until you dig around like you did.
This is got to win the Stupidest Install Process of 2008 award. It’s really astonishing that Adobe has put such a piece of you-know-what experience up for sale.
Now I wish I’d read this before buying it, I could have saved the money.
April 7th, 2008 at 10:09 AM
For the record, all Blue Flavor did on the installer was front-end design and HTML. We didn’t build it.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:32 PM
The Adobe Updater is a clear example of how NOT to handle updates in modern computing.
Frankly, I don’t understand if Adobe is trying to shoot itself in the foot or they are really, purposely trying to annoy the Mac community.
April 10th, 2008 at 8:24 AM
Either options requires coordination and intentionality that may simply be lacking.
The updater (and installer for that matter) is fundamentally the same experience on Windows, so the Mac community isn’t being singled out. While shooting ones own foot happens frequently enough in the real world, and certain situations can conspire to make it inevitable, claiming it is deliberate is usually going too far.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:24 PM
While I do agree that the installer deserves the price for the stupidest piece of software that I encountered, I don’t agree with the fact that the Gimp can replace PSE. I’ve been using the Gimp for over a year and still can’t get the hang of it… I waited until PSE 6 was available and got it. Still coping with other strange idea’s like the missing ‘layer mask’, stuff that is in other menu’s than in CS 3… (and I’m not a Pro user just use it very occasionally at work). Why can’t Adobe be consistent between Pro and Consumer appz…
April 12th, 2008 at 7:22 AM
Can someone please explain to a newbie how to create a “new layer mask”. I downloaded a file that includes “Layer Mask.atn and Layer Mask.png” and followed directions to put them in the effects folder, but it doesn’t seem to work. HELP…please.
barb
April 13th, 2008 at 5:28 AM
More trouble with PSE 6 for Mac …
I’ve been trying to launch the installer to deinstall PSE 6. Before I get to the option to remove PSE, I get a JavaScript Alert saying that ‘critical errors were found in setup: - incompatible payloads already installed.’ Then the alert tells me to look into the Setup log file for details. Well, I can’t find a Setup log file anywhere on my hard disk. And I cannot go on with the deinstallation. Catch 22 …
Anyone any suggestions, how I should proceed?
Thx and kind regards
Friedrich
April 13th, 2008 at 8:35 AM
C’mon folks, it should be obvious that this isn’t a support forum for Photoshop Elements! And I’m hardly what you’d call an expert user.
I’m turning off comments now, as this thread seems to have reached its useful limit.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:45 AM
Friedrich: the uninstaller is not an option on the installer, but accessed via an alias which is in an Adobe folder in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder. This location is not mentioned in the Read Me, although it tells you that you must use the Uninstall, and not just drag and drop to remove. It took me an hour on the phone to Adobe support to find this out. (I needed to remove a US demo version before it would accept my serial number for the Japan-bought version).
Incidentally, another amusing Adobe thing is that you can buy the English version online in Japan, but only if you can read Japanese. You can’t buy online from any other country (automated re-direct to Japan).
And although the interface is ugly, it’s more than three times faster than PSE4 on my first generation CoreDuo Mac Mini. It’s saving me huge amounts of time.
The real annoying thing is that if you hide the palettes, the whole thing reappears each time you open a new photo! Really!
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:45 PM
Jens, Don’t know if you have time to read comments. Just want to say a big THANK YOU for the guidance on installation. I also enjoyed the rant! Best wishes.