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This article is from October 1, 2008, and is no longer current.
Adobe Responds to DearAdobe Gripes
We mentioned the DearAdobe.com site a few weeks ago, noting that many of the gripes mentioned there were spurious or misguided. Nevertheless, there are also many good ideas that come up there, too, and Adobe is obviously listening. Michael Ninness, InDesign’s senior product manager, responded with a boatload of answers to many of the top complaints listed on the site, which you can read here.
I think Ninness didn’t entirely understand all the concerns (or at least I interpreted them differently than he did), but this is understandable, given the twitter-short nature of the entries. For example, in #13, I believe the griper meant “straddle heads” that could span multiple columns. In #16, the griper’s issue had to do with changing layer names or order in the AI file, and Ninness’ answer wouldn’t help. However, there probably is no real answer to that, as InDesign can’t look into the history of the AI file and see what you did to it (it doesn’t know that what used to be “Layer 1” is now “Layer A”).
Finally, I love the answer to #18, but he left out an important piece of the answer If you want “true” black when you’re in CMYK mode (as the griper asked for), you can get it in the Appearance of Black pane of the Preferences dialog box.
I believe that DearAdobe didn’t publish all of Michael’s reponses yet (too many to chew on in a single blog post, I guess). So watch that space for more as it comes in.
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Yes, it’s good Ninness & Co. is “watching us”. But it’s a bit depressing that, even before CS4 is shipping, he’s mostly saying “Yes, that might be fixed/added/improved in CS5 — maybe”. That’s at least 1.5 years from now. All I’ve read on the CS4 packages indicates that the ID upgrade is a puny one — in contrast to the HUGE upgrade which PS will be. How sad for us ID lovers.
Klaus, we’ve covered that before: IDcs4 is a huge upgrade for those people who need those features! Perhaps you don’t need them.
I certainly don’t mean to be an adobe apologist, but a) There’s only so many features and fixes they can put in the program each version; b) My guess is that you’ll find the features in IDcs4 more useful than you think; c) I personally find it refreshing that the product manager is already saying publicly that they’re working on CS5 — obviously, they didn’t get everything done that they wanted to in CS4, so they’re back to the drawing board!
In the meantime, I can tell you that I just don’t like going back to CS3 anymore. It’s a great upgrade, even if it’s far from perfect.
David, it’s not just a matter of me “needing” feature X or not. It’s a simple, quantitative difference between the Big New Things found in ID vs PS which peeves me. Yes, I am as sure as you are that I’ll like whatever is New & Improved in ID CS4 — it’s just that, based on my readings of feature lists & fixes, there will be vastly *more* New Good Stuff in PS. So whether I “need” SWF output from ID or 3D output from PS simply isn’t a factor in my judgment that ID CS4 is only a modest update.
From what I recall M. Ninness is not a designer and I find most of his replies pure marketing bs without meaning to be rude. IMHO, he’s merely trying to fight the fire that has been lit on DearAdobe.com. I’m not sure, but has anyone from Adobe addressed the overall top 25 gripes? I still see bloatware and outrageous upgrade prices and it seems like everyone still agrees to be ripped off again while waiting for CS5. Sorry for the rant, but I’m not sure that IDSecrets is being truly ‘independant’ here.
@ep: Actually, Michael was originally a designer who became a product mgr. to create design tools. That’s interesting that you think his answers were marketing spin. Seems to me that most of his answers were, “I agree with your concern and we’re going to try to fix it.” That’s not “bs”, that’s just truth.
However, some of the gripes at dearadobe are obviously based on people not actually understanding the program well enough.
As for whether we’re being “independent”…. hm. As far as I can tell, I’m just responding the same way as the people who run DearAdobe: It’s always cool when someone in authority at Adobe steps up and says, “yes, you’re right, those are valid gripes, and we’ll work to fix them.”
Sure, I think adobe is charging too much, especially overseas. But “bloatware”? Can you give me an example of what in InDesign is bloat to you?
Can you give me an example of what in InDesign is bloat to you?
Sure, open up every panel! What I don’t get is why software developers keep adding features and letting marketing departments sell us the idea that we need them. Don’t put me wrong, I love ID and around here (in Switzerland) every prepress shop hates me for having been an early adopter who has encouraged the switch from Quark. But since ID is here, are we seeing better type, better publications, happier printers and smarter designs out there? Not here. We sure are seeing more noise, more activity, more stuff and more problems.
The problem is that it has become the norm that we *have* to pay a rent to Adobe every 18 months. It’s become the norm that we need more features, more panels, more clutter on our screens. Even you admitted in the last podcast that a useless panel or two have been added in CS4. Honestly, wake up, stop making us think we need all this and let’s concentrate on what these tools are meant for.
Gosh, am I griping? :)
What I don?t get is why software developers keep adding features…
What would you propose instead? To continue to make a profit, software developers need to continue to sell product upgrades, and those upgrades need to include either new features and/or refined features. At least Adobe, in my opinion, does a reasonably good job of listening to customers and including features that are sought after.
since ID is here, are we seeing better type, better publications, happier printers and smarter designs out there?
InDesign has the potential to help people set better type, create better publications, etc., but it is just a tool. It is up to individual designers to learn and use the tool properly. Adobe can’t do anything about that, other than try to expose the features in the program in such a way that people discover them. That is part of the thinking behind panels/palettes by the way. One school of thought is that panels/palettes help expose features to users that they would perhaps never otherwise discover if the features were buried deep in a dialog box somewhere.
Adobe can?t do anything about that
I’m sorry but I can not agree. Since two versions, we are basically paying for the Adobe/Macromedia merger. I think we have all become very very blind.
Well, ep, we have a difference of opinion and a difference in terminology. I completely agree that some of the user interface is not as good as it could be — and yes, there are panels that are not well used. The Story panel is a great example of that, as it’s a whole panel for a single feature.
However, in my mind, that is not bloat. Bloat is giving us features just for the sake of adding features to sell us an upgrade. While CS3 and CS4 are full of new features, I am convinced that they are all things that people need.
Again, you may not need any of these features. However, anyone who creates long documents will want CS4. Anyone who has to work with a Flash developer will want CS4.
I believe that much of the frustration out there is that people that they are forced to upgrade even if they do not want to. This is an interesting problem.
In the 1990s it was not so important for everyone to be on the same version, I think. Perhaps people created documents on their own, and did not share them as much. Now there is much more sharing of files, which necessitates everyone having the same version.
I can see how this frustration could translate into resentment against Adobe and against InDesign, but I honestly don’t think that Adobe or the product deserves it.
Adobe deserves complaints about how the features work, and that perhaps they are not prioritizing the features that more people want. However, I agree with Keith that Adobe cannot help people design better documents except in providing education (which they do), and providing features that encourage good design (which they do).
For example, type is far better today than it was a decade ago because of paragraph composer, optical kerning, and optical margin alignment.
Now, as to your point about us all paying for the Macromedia merger… I actually agree with you there, though perhaps not for the same reasons. If the merger hadn’t happened, would we have even more and cooler features for ID, AI, and so on? Yes, probably. But we also wouldn’t have as much integration with DW, Fl, and SWF, which many people have been craving. So, there are always tradeoffs.
@ep: “What I don’t get is why software developers keep adding features…”
OK, so you don’t get that. But I get it just fine. It’s because we users keep asking for more features, and because software companies make money by selling us products with more features. What could be more normal, natural and sensible than that — or conversely, what *other* state of affairs more normal, natural and sensible than that? Since the news about CS4 broke I’ve griped a bit about the somewhat-puny upgrade which I think the CS4 version represents for ID — precisely because I want *more* useful features, not less! If anyone wants to call “more useful features” for “bloat” — well, then there’s no satisfying such people, is there? And no, a plethora of palettes isn’t “bloat”. Do many palettes on our screens cost us, say, more electricity-money to run our computers than few? Hardly. Does their binary code add anything substantial to our hard drive expenses? Hardly. Do we have to use the palettes — instead of using menus and shortcuts? Hardly. So what then is the problem with palettes?
@ep: “…and letting marketing departments sell us the idea that we need them.”
I am quite sure that neither myself nor most other folks who are smart enough to operate a complex program like ID are sufficiently mindless to passively “let” marketing departments “sell” us anything. We are quite competent to judge both our needs and the actual features of the programs, as we find them described, and any marketing” hype” has an almost-zero effect on our upgrade buying decisions.
ep: David replied that I “was” a designer. I did go to design school, and I actually still see myself as a designer. But rather than designing logos, annual reports, web sites, etc., I chose to design software for creative professionals as my outlet, and happen to have a job title of “product manager”.
My three motivations for responding to the InDesign gripes at dearadobe.com were:
1.) To let the gripers know that Adobe indeed is watching the submissions closely, and find it humbling and interesting to hear what our customers have to say. We think the site is fantastic, and hope our customers continue to use it as a vehicle to communicate with Adobe, even if only indirectly.
2.) Some of the gripes were from people who perhaps didn’t know of an existing feature that solved the very issue they were griping about. My responses were not about marketing — they were to let the griper know that the issue that they were griping about may have been resolved already. I know that when I complain about something in a piece of software, I usually find it satisfying to know that my complaint has been addressed.
3.) In the cases where some gripes have not been addressed yet, I wanted the gripers to know that their voices are being heard, and we are motivated to try to do something about their gripes in the future.
m.
We obviously won’t agree here and that’s good. Please bare with me if I don’t reply point by point because there are many other (and better) opinions than mine to be heard here. Plus my english is not good enough. I will however remain very sceptical to where Adobe is going until the heard voices are transformed in to durable actions. I’m not sure Adobe would have ever opened something like dearadobe.com.
David said
“I believe that much of the frustration out there is that people that they are forced to upgrade even if they do not want to. This is an interesting problem.
In the 1990s it was not so important for everyone to be on the same version, I think. Perhaps people created documents on their own, and did not share them as much. Now there is much more sharing of files, which necessitates everyone having the same version.”
Nobody is forced to upgrade anything. It’s a misplaced sort of shame for not having the ‘latest & greatest’ version of a certain program that makes us think we ought to upgrade or fall behind. But if you’re going to work with someone, you can easily talk over which versions of what software you each have, and thus how to save the files you’re going to share.
Only in the past month or two have I started receiving files made in CS3 applications, but the majority of files (mostly PDFs) are still created using CS1 or CS2.
In fact, yesterday I received a bunch of PSD files with a note saying they’d also saved them as flattened TIFFs because they didn’t expect me to be able to open the PS CS3 files… It’s expensive and very often not necessary to upgrade right when a new version of any program gets released, unless you need the new features and enhancements to speed up your day-to-day work, yet most people will rather spend those extra minutes on a task than spend a (few) thousand bucks a year on upgrades.
ep: I respect your right to disagree with all this. Thanks for bearing with my arguments, too. I agree that ultimately only time will tell whether Adobe turns the complaints/answers into real features. ;)
Roland: That is amazing that you are still getting files from such old versions. It is a good reminder to me that we must do more CS2 or even CS1-related tips here. Wow.
However, I think it is harder to work with other people than you think, when they have different versions. For example, exporting as INX is not perfect, and I have seen a number of things go wrong with that workflow. Adobe has admitted that users should always proof documents carefully after INX export. (IDML should be better, but in the early betas I have worked with, it was very buggy. Probably better once they ship. I hope.)
#9: I wonder if Michael even uses Photoshop. The Scrubber feature he responds to in question 9 is not answered. The Photoshop scrubber is mouse-based, and that’s what the poster was requesting.
#12: Again, totally ignored the question. The poster wants FrameMaker support on the Mac.
Scott: “I wonder if Michael even uses Photoshop…” Yes, I use Photoshop almost every day, and I know the “scrubby sliders” in Photoshop are mouse based. I understood what the poster was requesting, and do agree that it would be nice if InDesign (and all the apps) had the scrubby sliders feature. By starting my reply with “For now”, I thought I was implying my agreement. While we are on the topic, I have my own gripe about how Photoshop has implemented the scrubby sliders — too few people discover them because they scrubby slider cursor doesn’t appear where it should. That is, the cursor appears when you mouse over the label of a field, not the actual value field itself. IMO, After Effects, the first app to introduce scrubby sliders, got it right — the cursor changes when you mouse over the value. AE also puts a blue dotted underline underneath any value that can be scrubbed, to help make the feature more discoverable. I was happy to see that when Flash implemented scrubby sliders in CS4, they copied the AE implementation, not the PS implementation.
For those that care, Photoshop has one additional hidden behavior when it comes to scrubby sliders. Not all edit fields in PS have labels, so in those instances, it appears that there is no scrubby slider available. If you hold down the (Cmd) [Ctrl] key as you mouse over any edit field in the UI, your cursor will change to a scrubby slider. Helpful in some of the filter dialogs for example.
Our hope is that one day, we will have a consistent set of UI widgets across the CS applications that are made up of all the best behaviors present today, including discoverable scrubby sliders. Swapping out all the UI widgets in all the apps is a pretty big task though. We’ve done a great job of this across the apps in the Video suite, but we’ve got a ways to go to make it consistent in all the apps.
Just like not everyone has discovered the scrubby sliders in PS, not everyone has discovered the “virtual sliders” that are there in all the apps today. My hope was that my response would be valuable to those folks, even if they are keyboard based rather than mouse based.
Regarding my response to the “No FrameMaker on the Mac gripe”… That I didn’t respond with an answer that said “Sorry, we’ll make a Mac version of FrameMaker” doesn’t mean I ignored the question. Like any business, Adobe has a limited number of resources. My response acknowledged that no Mac version of FrameMaker is frustrating for some, and then went on to explain where Adobe has been investing in implementing features for authoring long documents on the Mac.
m.
Michael, thanks for the detailed response. And for the hidden scrubby sliders tips in PS! Gotta get that into a DesignGeek …
Michael,
Thanks for answering all these questions and being a part of the InDesign community. It makes me a happier InDesign user when i know that the mighty power of Adobe are actually listening, and now getting involved, making Adobe seem like a much more human company rather than the gargantuan juggernaut that I had in my head.
Unfortunately I won’t be getting CS4 as I live in the UK and am unable to afford the asking price. Most people I know skip a version because of the pricing structure, which makes it hard when trying to collaborate on a project and not having the same version of the software.
I will be saving my pennies for CS5 though, as it should be an amazing release if you manage to cover most of DearAdobe.com’s requests/gripes.
Cheers
Iestyn
Michael,
I was out of line to be critical. I apologize. From your response it appeared you weren’t famliar with the feature.
I’m a little behind in my blog reading; just noticed that Mordy wrote up some good responses to the DearAdobe gripes about Illustrator — as well as made suggestions for others who might want to gripe effectively on dearadobe.
I’m impressed by your wtiring. Are you a professional or just very knowledgeable?