To apps that steal focus

I am jump­ing on the corpse of Adobe Acro­bat Reader Installer.

I was read­ing a PDF doc­u­ment this evening and of a sud­den there comes forth a dia­logue (unin­vited) pro­claim­ing gifts. It was, of course, a ploy to make me down­load Adobe’s crap (I do not feel par­tic­u­larly inven­tive in my invec­tive this evening — “crap” suf­fices to describe such soft­ware for the minute). For which I did not fall.

I duti­fully selected “Adobe Acro­bat Reader 9.0.7.1.6.3.4.4.32.265.5.3.3.5.3.3.whateveritsnotlikeiactuallycareanymorebecauseitstillreadsthesamecrapdoesn’tit.howhardisittomakeadocumentreaderyoudon’tneedtoupdateeverytwoweeks?“
and let it do its thing (being care­ful, as always, not to select any­thing unessen­tial). It cruised along, I started doing some­thing else (hav­ing duti­fully aban­doned what I was reading).

It (very sen­si­bly) down­loads in silence in the back­ground, and doesn’t try and get my atten­tion even when it fin­ishes: it knows that I will pay it atten­tion in due course. Indeed, I do. It begins installing (or, unpack­ing the installer).

Of a sud­den, it decides it would be an oppor­tune moment to steal focus whilst still on a progress bar dia­logue in which the only but­ton is “Can­cel”. Okay. Point one: moronic time to steal focus, no user action is required. Point two: steal­ing focus can mean the user is about to do any man­ner of things in terms of key presses or mouse clicks. Point three: when the only user inter­face ele­ment can­cels the oper­a­tion that’s press­ing this apparently-urgent update to a doc­u­ment reader (yes, it’s a freak­ing doc­u­ment reader — oh, hurry up every­one, let’s all go and patch Notepad. Dan­ger­ous secu­rity flaws! Watch out!), chances are users aren’t going to bother going back.

So, instead, I printed out the Adobe logo onto a sheet of 3-ply toi­let paper and.… okay, per­haps not so lit­eral. Suf­fice to say, I am presently in no hurry to install any more of their garbage. Stronger words could be used.

# by Josh on January 16th, 2007 Tags: ,
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Apple juice

Spent most of this after­noon absolutely rag­ing at an iMac. They’re unsta­ble, buggy, pieces of crap and any pre­tense at sim­plic­ity is entirely unfounded. Sev­eral behav­iours (or lack thereof) are alto­gether ridicu­lous — even Win­dows man­ages to do photo thumb­nail­ing & pre­views bet­ter, and, yes, it’s a PC. Take that and shove it up your “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” com­mer­cials — I can’t use Excel, but I can sure as any­thing see what pho­tos I have on a CD when I throw them in my drive. Sigh.

I was lead to believe that iMovie was a safer bet than Win­dows anything-free, but after this afternoon’s expe­ri­ence, per­haps not. Time to blow $800 on Adobe Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio already, methinks. This end of the year makes me feel like apply­ing for a credit card (for prac­ti­cal rea­sons, not just “silly-season” con­sumerism), but I won’t, yet.

Also had fun this morn­ing send­ing a hun­dred and fifty dol­lars (or there­abouts) worth of lamps up in flames. Well, not quite any­thing so spec­tac­u­lar, but they’re dead now. Even so, still vaguely ahead of the game. If any­one wants to buy a stack of 110V 1,000W GE Par 64 globes… heh. I have a feel­ing this invest­ment may prove prof­itable some­time in the next decade when there is finally spare time enough! Meh! Either way, this morn­ing was good times. And Katy & myself now feel rather more pleased with our ghetto grey-area-legality elec­tri­cian skillz, know­ing that it was the lamps, not our wiring, which sucked. Or, didn’t suck but were totally not designed for cer­tain usage. Or something.

Mind you, I’m no par­tic­u­lar stranger to blow­ing the­atri­cal lights. At ANCON, out of a rig of per­haps twenty par 64’s, three broke on my watch (two on the last day). I’m adamant it’s because the venue’s power sucked, but the site man­ager reck­oned they hadn’t needed replace­ment in over two years. Which makes me think that, given a 2000 hour rat­ing on such things which gives <170 days @ 12 hours a day, they can’t have been using the space too much! Shrug.

I should prob­a­bly just leave the lights alone for a cou­ple of months so that I spend enough time work­ing to afford video things — which would, recur­sively, cause the same prob­lem as the lights, I spose! All good fun.

# by Josh on December 6th, 2006 Tags: , , ,
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Adobe Bridge rocks

It’s just great organ­is­ing soft­ware. I doubt I’d pay for it on its own, but see­ing as it comes with CS there’s noth­ing much wrong with it. At a pinch, it can also be used for slide shows (for weird cor­po­rates like AMP that ship Adobe CS but have held back their MS Office to ’97! Hence, there’s no Pow­er­Point “insert pho­tos” wiz­ard, and on Win 2k there’s no pic­ture and fax viewer that does slideshows.)

# by Josh on April 10th, 2006 Tags: ,
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Printing straight from LyX

I love it when things just work. Print­ing directly from LyX rocks. Adobe’s Acro­bat gets no oppor­tu­nity to butcher things by ‘scal­ing to fit’ (despite the page being designed with gen­er­ous mar­gins, etc.).

# by Josh on April 10th, 2006 Tags: , ,
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eBay piracy

I’m vaguely hunt­ing for a lap­top. Well, okay, a lit­tle more than vaguely – but as they’re reput­edly one of the more-commonly-fraudulent items listed on eBay, use of that ser­vice as a pur­chas­ing vehi­cle is less than certain.

Soft­ware piracy also fea­tures… but, of course, there seems to be lit­tle that can be done to actu­ally report this (if eBay have a “Report vio­la­tion” link, it’s ade­quately hid­den from me). Observe this ques­tion from ear­lier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor and Inde­sign, and MS Office for Mac included:

Me: Does this come with orig­i­nal CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe soft­ware?
Seller: No.

(Yeah, that was full­text of the ques­tion + answer!)

And on another list­ing (I didn’t ask the ques­tion on this one!) adver­tised as includ­ing iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:

Q: Are you sell­ing the soft­ware disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the soft­ware, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be send­ing the lap­top and its power cable. Thanks.

Sigh.

(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not con­vinced I want a Mac lap­top any­more. In fact, I’d prob­a­bly pre­fer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)

# by Josh on February 10th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Open Source Xara Xtreme

Open Source Xara Xtreme

Some­one alluded to this on a mail­ing list I’m a mem­ber of (Roy Schestowitz, on lyx-users), and, being the day before an exam and all, I couldn’t help but check it out. I remem­ber play­ing with Xara tools back in the day of bun­dled garbage on com­puter mag­a­zine CDs (that was also my first brush with a full ver­sion of Flash, at ver­sion 3, but that’s another story. I’d played with Future­S­plash some­time before then, too.) — it looks as though it’s come a long way.

I’ve used Sodipodi on Linux to do some use­ful things, but haven’t had a chance to play around with Inkscape yet… though it looks sim­i­lar, maybe even a fork? Def­i­nitely on the to-do list. Any­way, the folks at Xara want peo­ple to spread the word they’ve got a cool GPL’d app com­ing for the Linux desk­top (Mac OS too), and I think it’s a great thing for the Open Source com­mu­nity, which is why I’m pimp­ing it here.

There’s a ver­sion on their xaraxtreme.org site that is func­tional already, though it only views files at present… edit­ing func­tion­al­ity is… pre­sum­ably some way off.

I think if some­one offered Pan­tone swatches for sale with a good qual­ity open-source app, I’d go for it. Their busi­ness model seems solid enough after they’ve got it off the ground, but only time will tell. One hopes they stay around, because this appears to be a far bet­ter con­tri­bu­tion than Corel’s abortive attempts to launch a graph­ics app on the Linux desk­top (closed source, of course — Photo-PAINT 9, if I recall cor­rectly. It was a RAM-guzzling beast that I may have even enjoyed at the time — circa 2000 — had it not been for the fact that I was try­ing to run it on a middle-of-the-road Pen­tium (1) with 32MB of RAM) before their silent acqui­es­cence was pur­chased by Microsoft.

If noth­ing else, it’ll stir up the space a lit­tle bit and hope­fully the men­tion of open source will get otherwise-complacent Adobe inno­vat­ing again in the Mac space… or, alter­na­tively, it could go the other way and they might just ditch that plat­form alto­gether in favour of Win­dows, though I doubt it.

*Lis­tens as cre­atives the world over unite and raise arms in an unprece­dented rev­o­lu­tion against a soft­ware com­pany. Hey, it could happen.*

# by Josh on October 19th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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Adobe PR translation

Dar­ing Fire­ball: Trans­la­tion From PR-Speak to Eng­lish of Selected Por­tions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regard­ing Their Acqui­si­tion of Macromedia

Via hicks­de­sign

It seems painfully true.

# by Josh on April 25th, 2005 Tags: ,
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