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Filed under: Design, Productivity, Adobe

Dear Adobe: What the hell happened to you?


Adobe has slowly been adding to that chip on many people's shoulders for some time now, and lately they seem to be upping their game. Certainly, comments from their CEO like "our customer is not typically price sensitive" don't help matters, but it seems that even the very software their company is so well known for is beginning to suffer from poor, nay - dreadful - design and management.

Take this rant from Gus Mueller of Flying Meat software on how much trouble it is to simply update Adobe Reader. Gus had to download a disk image containing an installer package which does nothing but download the actual installer application - ironic, especially since you would be hard pressed to find a browser these days that doesn't have its own download manager, sometimes even with bleeding-edge features like pausing and resuming downloads. But the fun doesn't stop there, as Mac developers Rogue Amoeba noted on their own blog last September: for some reason that we're sure would elude even The Oracle herself, Adobe Reader needed to launch an updater upon first run that needed to download updates for itself before checking on any updates for Adobe Reader...

Shouldn't all this software already be at their latest latest versions? Do we really need to download something that downloads something that downloads something just to check if it has to download something? Who manages this software, and what did they do with our dear friend, sensibility?

Please Adobe - this needs to stop.

Filed under: Business, Developer, Macintosh

How to become an independent programmer in 1,068 days

Flying Meat, Inc.'s Sales Chart

Gus Mueller is sole proprietor of Flying Meat, Inc., which makes the Mac apps VoodooPad and FlySketch, and he's written a nice essay called "How to become an independent programmer in just 1,068 days." It's part how-to and part history of his little company. When he started selling VoodooPad his goal was to be able to afford a 23" Cinema display, and 1,068 days later he was an independent. He concludes his chart-filled essay by condensing just about every small business guides into two sentences: "Just plan, set realistic goals, meet those goals, diversify, save up, add four cups of patience, and have fun. And most importantly: work your ass off."

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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