March 12, 2010

The Acrobat team is just allergic to simple

No, seriously, it just hit me while reading this overcomplicated bit of stupid:

This is something I do all the time, and you know what? Here's my entire process:

1. Open the destination printer


2. Hold the printer


3. Drag all the PDFs you need to print to that printer window


4. Release the printer

But reading that crap, I realized something that explains everything about Acrobat, that makes everything make sense:

The Acrobat team has an internal culture that views complicated as good, and the more complicated a process or product is, the better.

Think about it. Think about the UI for Acrobat. The installers. The update process. Think about every.single.thing that team creates and every.single.thing about those products that make you want to kill. The Acrobat team is, for whatever reason, incapable of thinking about simple ease of use as a design decision, and even worse, is incapable of doing anything to change it.

I think they'd rather suck a dead dog's dick than design a UI whose only good feature is "at least it's not Lotus Notes".

March 4, 2010

A contrarian view

Apple suing HTC isn't about 'the death of innovation' or 'Apple no longer competing on merit' or any of the other bullshit flying out of the blaaahgosphere at the speed of stupid. Fucking breathless idiots writing that should all give their heads a shake.

This is saber-rattling. This is Cold-War era maneuvers in West Germany near the Fulda Gap. This is submarines playing tag.

This is Apple telling all the other companies that are lined up to sue it for patent infringement "Look you stupid fuckers, we can play that game too, and we have more money in the bank than you make. You want to sue us, here, check out OUR lawyer penis."

And to all the idiots crying because "Apple is becoming eeeeeevil!":

Grow.

The fuck.

Up,

Apple is a BIGCORP just like Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Oracle. They are not the Last Starfighter, Luke Skywalker, or Lee Adama. Stop pretending the world is a fucking movie or television show. Idiots.

March 3, 2010

Good work Photoshop Team!

I bag on Adobe a lot. They earn it a lot.

However, I think that with that ability to bag comes a responsibility to commend what that too is earned, and in this case, the Photoshop team has earned a huge "Thank you" from me. Why you ask? For this page on the Adobe Developer Connection. Not only do they have an awesome AppleScript reference that both explains, completely, the individual parts of Photoshop's huge AppleScript dictionary, along with sample code, (SAMPLE CODE! I weep with joy!), but they have a scripting guide that talks about the non-dictionary aspects of things, even talking about the difference between the UI and the dictionary. For example:

A collection of Art Layer objects. Group is the current name in the Photoshop UI. Layer Set was the name used in an earlier version of Photoshop. The Object name stays the same to keep backward compatibility

But it gets better. Not only do they talk about AppleScript, but they talk about VBScript and JavaScript. In other words, they aren't second-classing anyone. This is the kind of work a dev needs to do to really get scripters to use the hell out of their application. It's not enough to just drop it in. Scripting isn't just a fucking file format, it's an API for chrissakes! Yet the average application gives you a dictionary or an object model and expects you to figure out the rest.

By taking this time to document Photoshop's API, my ability to do really awesome things with Photoshop for work and hobby has gone straight up, and my opinion of the application has risen similarly.

So good on you Photoshop team!

And to everyone else? This is how you fucking do it right.

The "openess" of Flash

The next time Dowdell or that Adobe CIO prat or any of the other Flash bobbleheads start nattering on about how "open" Flash is, and how "enabling" it is, or all the rest of the bullshit they spew without thinking, point them at this article, and ask them this:

"If Flash is so goddamned open, when are you planning on making SWF Verification and the rest of the RTMP content protection measures available to developers of third-party players, i.e. non-Adobe Flash players. Because if the Ars article is correct, then the only way you can ever reliably view all Flash content is via the Adobe Flash plugin/player alone, and all your talk of openness is bullshit."

I guaran-damn-tee you the first or second response out of their mouth will be to point the finger at some other company, probably Apple, and say "Well what about them? They suck too!" If it's Nack or Dowdell, I'll bet money on it, that's what those to dipwads do best.

But yeah. Every time you hear some Flashtard talking about how "open" Flash is, point them at the Ars article and watch the fun.

February 22, 2010

Fucking Acrobat

I may have raged about Flash.

I may have said that even coprophiliac porn was preferably to installing CS3.

I may have, between the CS3/CS4 installers and Flash, come up with ways of using profanity that amazed even me.

But nothing, no product team from Adobe, Microsoft or even Apple can begin to create the kind of cold, sadistic, evil fury that Acrobat does.

All I ask, *all* I want is to have Joel and the rest of those fuckers in my office at 7pm, so i can make them personally udpate every fucking machine i have control over while I spur them on with a fucking cattle prod, a paintball gun loaded with rock salt, and a fucking bullhorn.

Then I want to ship them off to every IT manager I know, with a load of rock salt and fresh batteries.

There is always hope...even for Adobe

As some of you may know, I had a meeting with the Adobe Flash Team the Monday before Macworld. (yes, I know, it's strange, but so is my life in general.) It was...really good. No, Dowdell wasn't there, thank god. It was a room full of engineers, with a guest appearance by Emmy Huang, and me. No yelling, no shouting, just an open, frank exchange of ideas, wherein I tried to tell them that as the people doing the work, they had to, had to, start talking about the actual engineering issues, so that their sole representative to the world wasn't Mr. "Use a Flash Blocker".

I asked them to frankly and openly, even in technical detail, talk about some of the issues they face. Not blamestorming, not to justify, but to illustrate that, like the case always is, it's not so easy when you're elbow-deep in the code. But get the damned information out there, because if you're pissed off that everyone is hammering you, well, look at the information your providing! What do you expect people to think when your major public voice is a mindless bobblehead with all the technical acumen of a particularly stupid cat?

If the only facts people have suck, then the only opinions the can have will suck too.

I was happy with how the meeting went, but everything's easy in a meeting. What's hard is actually doing stuff. I wasn't sure if the Flash team was going to skew ala the CS Installer team, (i.e.: "good"), or like the Acrobat team, (i.e.: "bad").

Today I see a bit on Daring Fireball that links to an article from someone on the Flash team may be trying to nudge the supertanker in the right direction. Tinic Uro, an engineer on the Flash team has the kind of post that more people need to associate with Flash. It's concise, seems reasonably correct, (although I absolutely don't have the chops to really judge), but most importantly, it's the opposite of the tripe we have seen too much of from Adobe on this issue.

In truth, all of Tinic's blog is pretty damned good.

So go there, read it, (even if you don't like what he's saying, he's saying it well, and in a non-accusatory fashion. Given what we see too much of from the Flash team, this needs to be encouraged. In other words, don't be reflexively douchey to him), and spread the link love. More Tinic and less Dowdell cannot be anything but good in the long run.

February 21, 2010

An easily answered question

Can someone, preferably from the Acrobat team, tell my why that team makes applying updates to large amounts of computers as hard as possible?

Because i'm just kind of curious about it. Logically, it makes no sense. Yet they do it over and over:

• No native installers for patches and updates. (This is actually worse than making you manually install the main application the hard way.)


• No cumulative updates, so if you're behind, you have to stroke the updater manually over and over, (Acrobat 8 via the Adobe Updater), you have to answer the same inane dialogs over and over, even though the updater is chaining many, many updates together in the illusion of the update, (Acrobat 9 via the Adobe updater), or you download them and manually apply them to every.single.machine. (Both if you download from Adobe.)


• Even if you install Acrobat as part of CS, you have to run the Adobe updater from inside of Acrobat or it will never know you have Acrobat on your system. This is really bad, because if someone doesn't know that the Acrobat team is being this stupid, it can lull them into thinking they're up to date.


• You can't even check for updates as a non-admin.

February 18, 2010

This is why relying on file extensions is stupid

I have a file. It's a text file, with HTML markup.

It has no extension.

I can open it with BBEdit fine, because BBEdit is written by competent developers who understand that you can't always get what you want, and even if a file doesn't have a fucking extension, you should open it anyway, and use the file contents to guide you.

So, I decide that I want to open it in Safari, you know, to see what it looks like all rendered and pretty. Oh fuck no. Safari won't touch it. Why?

No filename extension.

Yeah. This is the most modern operating system on the fucking planet, and yet if you don't have a fucking period followed by random fucking text that safari may or may not know what to fucking do with on the end of a file name, a fucking web browser can't open a fucking text file.

This is what happens when you let unixtards make decisions about user interfaces and user interaction. You get this kind of idiocy. You want to know just how fucking stupid this complete and total reliance on the file name extension is?

If I add a .png or .jpg or .gif extension, the idiot browser tries to open it as a fucking image. Not even an attempt to validate the file contents or even READ THEM. Because it's not like anyone would ever LIE ABOUT A FILE EXTENSION TO GET YOU TO OPEN SOMETHING IN A PROGRAM IT SHOULDN'T!

Even fucking better, if you change the file extension to .txt, because this is not a full-on HTML file, but a text file using HTML markup, goddamned idiot browser is too fucking stupid to even TRY to render it. "Nope, nope, it's a text file, ignore all the html tags DUHHHHH". But put .html on the end, even though it really isn't an HTML file, and SUDDENLY SAFARI CAN OPEN IT.

Holy fucking shit, does someone have to start writing trojans that remove filename extensions in Snow, thereby crippling your ability to OPEN FUCKING FILES before Apple realizes just how fucking asinine this is? How fucking stupid is it for "the most advanced OS in the world" to actually be stupider than Windows here?

Let me be clear, Windows handles this better, because Windows allows for the "fuckit, open it anyway" option, that whatever Apple fuckstick who made this moronic decision didn't allow for. Of course, since, by default, you can't see if there's an extension or not, there's no immediate, obvious way to tell that the file is fine, it's your OS and applications that are fucking idiotic.

Way.To.Go. Apple. Way to be Adobe.

Fuckers.

February 17, 2010

IT NEVER ENDS

If you say the title like the late, great Sam Kinison, you come close to what I'm hearing in my head right now.

So as I talked about before, yay, more Adobe fucking Acrobat security holes. Yah. Hoo. Brian Krebs, being the security guy he is, does his usual excellent job of talking about it. Nothing new there at first, until my feed updates, and in the feed, (But not showing up in the main article yet), I see this:

Update, 4:06 p.m. ET: If you decide to do without Adobe Reader and uninstall it, you might want to nix the Adobe Download Manager as well. Researcher Aviv Raff points to some nifty work he’s done which shows that Adobe’s Download Manager — which ships with all new versions of Flash and Reader — can be forced to reinstall an application that’s been removed, such as Reader. According to Raff, a Web site could hijack the Adobe Download manager to download and install any of the following:

• Adobe Flash 10
• Adobe Reader 9.3
• Adobe Reader 8.2
• Adobe Air 1.5.3
• ARH tool – allows silent installation of Adobe Air applications
• Google Toolbar 6.3
• McAfee Security Scan Plus
• New York Times Reader (via Adobe Air)
• Fanbase (via Adobe Air)
• Acrobat.com desktop shortcut

Raff writes: “So, even if you use an alternative PDF reader, an attacker can force you to download and install Adobe Reader, and then exploit the (yet to be patched, but now known) vulnerability. The attacker can also exploit 0-day vulnerabilities in any of the other products mentioned above.” Read more on his findings at this link here.

Ye

Fucking

Gods.

I can't even really rage at it properly. The logic behind what Aviv and Brian are talking about hear fucking beggars me. Is Adobe so eager to be the next Microsoft that they are determined to duplicate every mistake Microsoft ever made?

Acrobat: Making sure you hate Adobe

Acrobat, Acrobat, Acrobat...how many ways can you fuck up a ZOMG CRITIKAL SECURITEEEE UPDATE? Let us count the ways:

1. Don't provide a cumulative update from your site.
2. Put the newest version in the middle of the fucking page. Actually, from what I can tell, Adobe just can't fucking work a list. Here, see for yourself:

   



3. Ensure that when you click on the link to actually download the file, you get told the item can't be found:

   

I swear to DOG that everyone on the Acrobat team must be on the bottom, because fucking up is about all they're good for.