merlin:

Crash Report for “Adobe Fireworks CS4” by Jon Hicks

Poor Jon. If ever there were a man who didn’t need Adobe apps crashing for no good reason, this has to be him. And, although I use Adobe apps a fraction as often as Jon, I can still sympathize. Brother, can I.

I hate bagging on software developers (Jesus, it’s such hard and underappreciated work), but I’m baffled by where Adobe’s Mac BU is heading.

Each release of the Adobe apps I use (and used to so depend on) feels less stable, more bloated, and — easy as this was to overlook for a REALLY long time — increasingly less Mac-like. Or at least less OS X-like. They feel like sketches of OS X applications, drawn from memory.

Kinda reminds me of Microsoft in 1993 or whenever it was they released Word 6. It’s hard to call up a metaphor for how badly those folks ruined one of the most elegant applications I used and truly relied on to do my job at the time. It installed dozens of crufty extensions, looked just awful, and ran with the pluck and elegance of an incontinent grizzly bear with the gout. So I stayed with 5.1 until it died in my arms some time later that decade.

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