[eli]

Oh, c'mon. It's easy to say "strip down all the cruft" ... but people actually use all of those tools. You'd be pretty unhappy if they removed a feature you use every day because people thought it made the menu bar look too crowded.

[merlinmann]

I also use a map of Atlanta. When I'm in Atlanta. But I don't need to store it with my salt and pepper or underneath my TiVo remote.

Cruft isn't simply a measure of menu volume, and IMO it's not necessarily about removing tools.

It's about failing to maintain an updated, sound, and sane set of affordances for doing the most important or common work with the least friction possible. To me fixing cruft means making decisions about arranging things well and moving anything that would work better (or less intrusively) someplace else. And, yeah. Removing stuff that simply shouldn't be included. That's the kinds of decisions good developers make.

For me, cleaning up PShop would be like making sure that map of Atlanta is in the right part of the garage. Alongside all the other maps that I "actually use." But which I certainly don't "actually use" quite as much as the salt and pepper or the TiVo remote.

Those? I want those right where I can get to them.

[ptomato]

In fairness to Adobe (and as somebody who has worked briefly for them) even moving things in, say, Photoshop, will result in a monumental outcry from many people who have used it for years and years.

Also in fairness, considering the wide variety of different workflows for which Photoshop is used, dtermining what is a sane set of defaults is by no means an easy task, and prioritizing things per a user's most-used isn't really a solved problem; and there is already the option in PS to customize menus, panes, etc.

That being said, I do think Adobe has lost the plot a bit since they aquired Macromedia (though not to say that Acrobat isn't every bit as bad in its own way as Flash) and from what I know of the company I don't really see them turning around any time soon - I just hope for Pixelmator or similar to get to the point where they can actually compete with Photoshop on a broader level, so that Photoshop actually has some serious competition and they have to start improving it significantly. (Though I should note to the best of my knowledge they're doing fairly well with After Effects, still, which afaik doesn't have any significant competitors.)

[merlinmann]

Point VERY well taken. Thanks.

The installed base issue is giant for anyone. It certainly seems to have tons to do with why so many smart folks at MS end up spinning their wheels on creating anything genuinely new. What's that number people throw around? Something like 26 flavors of Windows devices to support? Eee-yuck. That's a lot of masters to please.

Re Adobe and re Pshop in particular I seem to recall a few years back -- and well after the years I would have counted myself as even "competent" at PShop -- people freaked over changes to a bunch of key commands and menu nav (do I remember that right?).

I way get that. So much. It's (again w/ the kitchen metaphor) like having some joker come in and mess up your pantry and hide your knives and whatnot.

It's just that for me, as an increasingly casual user of these apps (as well as a 1-man show who has total freedom to choose/buy/change/try/dump whenever it suits me), it just feels like things are devolving at a quickening pace. Just at a gut level. These apps are no fun to use. Bloat. That's the word I keep coming back to.

FW and DW feel like Java apps at this point. SO far off the mark on performance, UX, and general polish, that I kinda can't believe Pros still pay retail for them. I guess it's just a line item in the Excel. No idea.

I owe a lot to Adobe and their apps and have for MANY years now. And like I say I love the folks I know there. It just feels like the company has lost any interest or ability in making the sorts of things that OS X power users love shelling out dough for. Great software that you want to tell everybody you love, y'know?

[ptomato]

"people freaked over changes to a bunch of key commands and menu nav"

Very much so. And then there's another set of people who freak because of some default key shortcuts (which can, of course, all be changed from the defaults to whatever the hell makes you shiny) which have been in Photoshop since version 2 or so do something that's not the OS X standard. But it would cause more freakouts to change them so...

I've never used/been a fireworks guy, but I don't believe many of the pros are using DW anymore much at all.

"making the sorts of things that OS X power users love shelling out dough for."

See, the thing about that, and in more general terms... I love "native"-feeling OS X apps as much as the next person, or probably more, for most values of "next person". And I'd certainly love for Photoshop to be more native. A couple problems with that, though... the obvious one of the vastly greater effort to do multiple platform stuff with entirely different native guis on each; then there's also the fact that native controls are just inadequate for what power users want out of photoshop. Just as a minor example, the ubiquitous scrubbing on the labels of textboxes to change values; certainly not something you can do with native controls.

In short, I'm not really sure what Adobe could be doing better. (Well, other then making their shit not crash horribly all over the room, though Photoshop is still extremely stable in my experience. I have nothing good to say about Flash or Acrobat in any way, and in fact most of the macromedia imports are generally shit.) Inevitably somebody will challenge their market dominance, and if they don't smarten up and fix PS beforehand, well, changing everything then in a desperate effort to retain their market will only make matters worse for them. Better for users everywhere, one hopes.

[masklinn]

> In fairness to Adobe (and as somebody who has worked briefly for them) even moving things in, say, Photoshop, will result in a monumental outcry from many people who have used it for years and years.

Kinda like what happened to Microsoft with Office 2007?

MS still did it. And Office 2007 is better for it.

[ptomato]

I would agree. And (anecdotally) there's a large number of people who refuse to use Office 2007 because of it. I'm not saying that's a reason Adobe shouldn't do it; I think they should. But I don't think they're likely to.

[jrwoodruff]

They could take a firefox approach. I think it's already somewhat built that way. Give everybody the functionality that everyone uses, and provide a way to easily (without restarting anything) add extensions for more functionality.

[sp332]

Actually, installing or upgrading Firefox extensions does require restarting Firefox. Mozilla has realized for a long time that this is not optimal and have a new project called Jet Pack that will give programmers a lot of control, and be a lot easier to write for, but won't require a restart. It's still in early development, though. https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/

[glhaynes]

Yeah, disappointing article -- big old piece of software A sucks in the ways that big old pieces of software tend to.