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 3rd, 2008 at 1:36 PM
Heh, just spent the last two days installing CS3 for different clients and the experience is pretty much the same, except CS3 Master edition weighs in at WTF inducing 16GB.
Post install there are a whole series of updates to run, some of which don’t actually work and instead stall the process requiring you to start again taking care to disable them, Amazingly this is still way better than the early CS3 installers that prompted you for an admin password a dozen times meaning you had to baby-sit the broken up process for the 3hrs it took it’s sweet time to drip onto the computer.
The personal computer, as implemented on all platforms today needs a damn long enema.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:47 PM
Contrary to what you thought, I fealt that the PSE installer is very good. It was the only one to automatically unmount the volume after a clean install.
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:13 PM
Adobe’s installers have never been well designed, but it’s the process of updating a piece of Adobe software that really gets me (for example, Acrobat). First of all, the software updates window is inexplicably gigantic - it measures about 800 x 500 (practically filling a 1024 x 768 display!), yet there’s huge swathes of empty space. Part of the problem is that there are two lists of updates - one of available updates, and a second of selected ones. You select the update you want, click the Add button, and it gets added to the list of selected updates. You could achieve the exact same functionality with a simple checkbox, eliminating the need for a second list.
Second of all is the update process itself. I currently have Acrobat 7.0.0 Professional installed. The software update window lists the 7.0.9, 7.0.5, 7.0.7, and 7.0.8 updates in that order, which is completely illogical. There’s also a bit of confusion caused by the fact that if I select just the 7.0.9 update and click Add, all four updates get added to the “selected updates” list. This is because they’re reliant on each other - 7.0.9 requires 7.0.8, which requires 7.0.7, which requires 7.0.5.
Surely there is a better way to do this!
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:26 PM
Can anyone help me?? I must be doing something wrong! I’ve installed my Adobe Elements 6 and uninstalled I don’t know how many times - but it just won’t launch!!I click on the shortcut (or open from programs) spinny thing does it’s spinny thing for a minute then nothing …Any help would be VERY much apprieciated
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:14 PM
@Laura — Sorry, but it sounds like you’re talking about the Windows version, and I know almost nothing about Windows.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:50 PM
My beef with the updater is that it won’t work with FileVault. Apparently the downloaded disk images use hardcoded paths to the /Users folder, and the FileVault disk image isn’t mounted there. Freaking idiots!
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:58 PM
Hilarious post, and not too ranty at all! Ever since my copy of Fireworks refused to start, due to license issues, I have stopped using Adobe programs. Why torture youself? Pixelmator is far better. It works in every way you’d expect really, and will only get better.
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:01 PM
[…] Hilarious post about someone trying to install the new Photoshop Elements. And so true… it’s a sad state with Adobe apps. […]
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:03 PM
The Adobe installer is pretty nuts; I just went through the same upgrade recently. The exasperating thing about PE, in some ways, is that there really isn’t anything else that does what it does at its price level. I am impressed by Acorn and Pixelmator and Iris and would like one of them to be my “go to” app for web graphics creation and photo editing, but they’re not there yet. (Although I see increasingly little reason to go with the full-blown Photoshop over Elements combined with GraphicConverter, unless you’re working extensively with 16/32-bit images or need CMYK color modes.)
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:41 PM
I shared all those emotions when I installed Elements 6 last night, but I was prepared by an introductory experience…
I purchased the downloadable version. Guess what? There’s a custom download manager too. The download link did nothing in Firefox (3 beta5), but opened the java download manager in Safari.
It was about as intuitive and user friendly as the installer. With the 1.27GB download I had to open the detail popup to see the information (progress bar, kb downloaded, speed and est time) that most downloaders would put in the main screen.
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:11 PM
The first sting I do after I acquire a new version of an Adobe app is hunt down a crack. Even though I own a license I just don’t want to use software that while you’re in the middle of nowhere decides that your license needs authentication and that you need to be online.
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:17 PM
@Frazer
I, too, got to experience the Adobe Download Manager Java applet last night after buying CS3. Adding to my confusion as to the actual purpose of forcing users to experience that garbage was the fact that they only use it for the Read Me and the installer DMG downloads. The optional extras (fonts and such) downloaded normally.
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:20 PM
Adobe’s Software Updater isn’t any better: http://watchingapple.com/2008/03/software-updaters-affect-your-brand/
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:28 PM
Well, I was going to buy CS3, but decided not to when Adobe would not sell it to me without a $500 ‘tech support’ contract here in Australia.
Was starting to thin, ‘well I will just spend $70 and get elements’. Thanks for reminding me not to do it! I am sure the time spent fighting with Elements will more than make up for the gimp learning curve.
Doug
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:10 PM
I got CS3 Premium about a year and a half ago for a MacBook Pro. It installed ok - just a loooong time.
The first few times it asked to update, I said ok. This screwed things up so badly that I had to completely uninstall it. I then reinstalled it and since then have refused to do ANY updates. I may have slightly reduced functionality, but at least things work.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:01 PM
Jon writes: In OS X, however, a dedicated uninstaller is just weird. It violates expectations, since most applications do not have (or need) dedicated uninstallers.
If an application needs an installer, it needs an uninstaller. If dragging the application to the trash actually did correctly revert the system to the pre-installed case, then the application probably didn’t need an installer in the first place. (Lightroom doesn’t have or need an uninstaller because it didn’t actually need an installer…why it has one is beyond me…)
Why would an application need an installer? There are plenty of reasons, both reasonable and not-so-much. The most common is that some things need to go in special places, usually off in /Library/…, and there are perfectly legitimate reasons to need to do that. But if you do that, you MUST provide an uninstaller.
Apple has been big in promoting drag and drop application installs/uninstalls to third party developers, and I applaud that. I also applaud third party developers who architect their applications to work that way. It is a vastly better user (and sysadmin!) experience than any sort of installer could hope to provide.
HOWEVER, when was the last time you saw a drag-and-drop install application from Apple? Ya, right, I haven’t seen one either. And their installers do scatter things all over your system, and then run scripts to muck around some more. Good luck reverting your system to the pre-install state.
The utter and complete lack of uninstall infrastructure is one reason some third party vendors don’t use Apple’s installer.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:35 PM
to Jens:
Thank you for so much for this. If someone with your level of understanding finds these experiences maddening, it reassures me, because I am usually in the dark when dealing with installers. About two weeks ago I installed the most recent version of InDesign on a brand new MacBook. In the process, two icons that looked the same seem to be involved in some weird pogoing (mabuhay gardens) in the dock. I thought I must have done something very wrong. And at the end of it all, when I ran the application, Help Viewer wouldn’t come up. An error message suggested reinstalling.
Perhaps I did make a mistake, but as a result of reading your post, I can at least see that I shouldn’t jump to that conclusion on the basis of weird things happening on the screen.
I hope you will do more of these pieces.
Roger Purves
April 4th, 2008 at 12:21 AM
Same story here:
I looked at all the other competitors as my PSE 2.0 did not longer work on Leopard ( came with a wacom tablet ).
ALL of them could not let me draw fast circles with my tablet - all i got were more or less n-sided figures, but no circle.
So I finally got up and bought PSE 6.0 online on Tuesday. After having problems to download it ( their servers were down ) and it has an ugly Java downloader I tried to install it as well.
Case sensitive filesystem - so no luck. Btw. did I tell you that it doesn’t exactly state that case sensitive is not supported ? Well I found out through the global wastedump named internet.
So after 4 phone calls I was able to give it back on Wednesday ( adobe phone support ended 5.pm. on Tuesday ).
Photoshop - no more. I will either use something else or have to write my own FAST one.
Patrick aka Jolly
P.S. - Can anyone check if PSE 6.0 let’s you draw fast circles with a brush ?
—-
author of
ScreenRecycler
JollysFastVNC
SmartSleep
April 4th, 2008 at 12:29 AM
Lets see,
BBEdit
Google Earth
Yojimbo
LaunchBar
GoodWay
GraphicConverter
Mailsmith
NetNewsWire
Spamsieve
WorldClock Deluxe
…
…
Doug
April 4th, 2008 at 12:31 AM
Sorry, missed this key tidbit!
> from Apple?