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On First Installing Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6
April 2nd, 2008 by jens

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.



54 Responses  
  • Gus Mueller writes:
    April 3rd, 200812:00 AMat

    Well thank goodness Acorn is The Clash :)

  • Leo writes:
    April 3rd, 200812:06 AMat

    Oh yes, Adobe’s installer is pure evil.

    Though, it’s a lot better than the CS2 installer. That used a special process which involved first installing Adobe Help Center, then launching it during the install process so we would have up to 4 bouncing Adobe apps at the same time while installing.

  • Jan Erik Moström : Adobe Elements installer writes:
    April 3rd, 200812:13 AMat

    […] software. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from yourblog. […]

  • Paul Mison writes:
    April 3rd, 20082:55 AMat

    Ah, Adobe Updater, how I love it.

    Firstly, there’s the way that it can’t upgrade Acrobat from 7.0.1 to 7.0.8 without going through 7.0.5 and 7.0.7 first. (Why not all the way from 2 through 7? I have no idea.)

    Secondly, I like keeping my apps and system apps separate, so I install things into ~/Applications/. Sometimes things don’t let you do that, so I move them later. Almost everything is written well enough for this to work. Unfortunately, one of the things that isn’t is Adobe Updater. Try invoking it from anywhere other than /Applications/Utilities and watch it fall on its back and waggle its legs uselessly.

    At least, that’s what I remember from the last time I had them installed. My new machine is free of Photoshop, for now, and I’m using Preview not Acrobat to view PDFs. Funny, that.

  • aglee (LJ) writes:
    April 3rd, 20084:33 AMat

    I decided a long time ago that Adobe’s installers can’t be explained by stupidity or incompetence — it *has* to be malice. Somebody thinks it’s real freakin’ funny to push Mac users’ buttons, and the best way to do that is to make us go through the worst possible user experience, making it just a little stupider at each point when we think we’ve reached the end of the stupidity, in order to get to a piece of software we want.

    I defy anyone to offer a better explanation. Seriously.

  • Jess writes:
    April 3rd, 20086:33 AMat

    I’m amused that your review (which isn’t too ranty for me, btw) sent me off to get the latest Acorn, which I’d forgotten about.

  • Michael Tsai - Blog - Photoshop Elements 6 writes:
    April 3rd, 20087:01 AMat

    […] Jens Alfke: 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. […]

  • jmissig (LJ) writes:
    April 3rd, 20087:40 AMat

    And heaven forbid you want to use the Adobe Updater as a non-admin user. I can’t even give it admin user credentials and have it work. I have to actually log in as an admin user and run it. It has an error dialog to inform me of this.

  • Jens Alfke writes:
    April 3rd, 20088:08 AMat

    @Gus — Glad I got the metaphor right! Just make sure Acorn 4.0 doesn’t turn into “Sandinista!”, OK?

  • Marc Charbonneau writes:
    April 3rd, 20089:09 AMat

    My own worst experience was an Adobe installer was trying to install Photoshop CS3 onto a case sensitive filesystem. To make it short, you simply can’t. An entire evening wasted re-installing OS X and restoring my files, just because Photoshop developers didn’t want to worry about capitalization when loading framework bundles from the disk. Awesome!

  • Gil Domingo writes:
    April 3rd, 20089:57 AMat

    My god Jens, you nailed it. I can’t believe what Adobe has done with the installer. I’m going to give Acorn a try.

  • Eric Peacock writes:
    April 3rd, 200812:03 PMat

    Well, Adobe farmed out the CS3 installer to Blue Flavor:

    Blue Flavor Adobe Installer PR page

    It’s “cross-platform” which probably explains some of it’s less optimal practices. Personally I’ve had more problems installing, repairing or re-installing CS3 than any previous Adobe product or suite. As the network admin at a creative company it has been a bit like voodoo as it has inexplicably broken on a whole department of clean OS X installs.

    I can’t comment if the Windows side is any better or not but I can’t believe that it would be.

    The first time you launch the Setup on a mounted disc it copies an installer package to your drive, then runs that installer. Beyond that I’m not sure why it has to launch so many additional processes.

    Also, the Flash updates of late have taken as long as 45 minutes to fully run. You think they’ve locked up but no, you just have to wait.

    I hope they learn from this on the next round…

  • Timo writes:
    April 3rd, 200812:07 PMat

    Fell into the same case-sensitivy-trap with Adobe stuff, as well as.. wait for it… Avid. They know it, but they don’t bother fixing it.

    I also have a bad feeling about that 64bit-issue that CS4 will hit (or: not hit, cause it’ll stay in 32bit Carbon land), and the problems they’ll run into when they port CS5 to Cocoa.

    Also, Elements truly is the dumbed-down version of Photoshop. For example, the code for layer masks is included in Elements, they just omitted the button for ‘new layer mask’. Their product manager guy calls this ‘exposing of features’ - I call ‘bullshit’, that’s just a plain crazy rip-off.

  • rob writes:
    April 3rd, 200812:34 PMat

    time to go GIMP!

  • Jon writes:
    April 3rd, 200812:36 PMat

    Too right, Jens. I re-installed Photoshop CS3 the other day and ran into exactly these issues.

    The worst aspect of the Adobe applications — excepting Lightroom, perhaps — is that uninstalling them from OS X requires the use of the dedicated Adobe uninstaller.

    On Windows, dedicated uninstallers are pretty common.

    In OS X, however, a dedicated uninstaller is just weird. It violates expectations, since most applications do not have (or need) dedicated uninstallers. Further, it hints that Adobe’s installer is installing files where they probably would not normally be installed. So, while the Adobe application may be great, they open and close with a very uncomfortable experience in OS X.

  • Shamino writes:
    April 3rd, 200812:52 PMat

    So, how badly does the installer mess up unrelated parts of MacOS? I seem to remember an installer (might’ve even been from Adobe) that ended up setting the permissions on your entire /Applications folder to world-writable.

    Have you found anything similarly horrific here or does this installer actually do what it’s supposed to do (install Photoshop Elements), despite its slowness?

  • Grover writes:
    April 3rd, 200812:56 PMat

    What kind of system extensions does it need to install?

    I’ll tell you what it needs to install. It installs a app that tries to pop up and import images any time you insert any kind of disk whatsoever. Insert a USB flash drive? PSE pops up. Insert a CD? PSE pops up. Insert a portable hard drive with no images on it whatsoever? All together now…

    You can turn it off, but it’s WILDY annoying for that to be the default behavior.

    If this is the “lite”, for-dummies, cheap-n-cheerful version of Photoshop, I can’t imagine how huge the real version must be.

    See that’s the problem. They didn’t build PSE specifically. They start with Photoshop, and then take things out or tweak it. Most of the things you are describing are identical to the big version of Photoshop.

    Also, there are many words to describe PSE (and Premiere Elements for that matter). Cheerful is not one of them. I’m reminded of Lewis Black ranting about how each day in winter is grayer than the last. Gray on gray with gray accents.

    Don’t get me wrong, PSE is an amazing value. I recommend it all the time. But it’s definitely a bit Frankensteinian both in tone and construction.

  • Drudus writes:
    April 3rd, 20081:13 PMat

    CS3 Design helpfully installs a browser plugin for viewing PDFs in Adobe Reader. Sadly it reports the following…

    AdobePDFViewer cannot find a compatible Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader to view this PDF. Please select one.

    …but you installed it when you installed this crappy plugin.
    Trashing the plugin (Library/Internet Plugins/ - thats right all users get this borkware) allows Preview to go about its business making PDF’s ‘just work’.
    Why the does Adobe think it is ok to break existing functionality without even asking users their preference?

    The updater also has some weird system of mounting disk images that vanish seconds later. Don’t forget to keep watching the update progress either, you will need to authenticate after the download, but before the files get installed, which you agreed to do hours ago.

    Its really third rate of them isn’t it.

    What is wrong with Apple’s installer or even using ‘drag installs’?

  • Duke Felmet writes:
    April 3rd, 20081:21 PMat

    Thanks for turning those fearful memories into laughter!

    What gets me now though is that I have 3 separate Adobe help apps floating around. Help Viewer 1.0, Help Viewer 1.1 and Help Center (for PSE 4, PSE 6 and Acrobat Pro respectively). Seems that these are not only non-standard, they don’t even work with each other.

  • Jon Harris writes:
    April 3rd, 20081:27 PMat

    I laughed, I wept, I groaned. So true, so true.


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