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Lucid Nonsense

Stuck Record

I’m going to sound like I have a vendetta with this, but I promise I’ll leave Adobe alone after this post. Certainly for a week or two at least…

As a follow up to my request to Adobe from last week, I had my suspicions confirmed when I stumbled across a rather unusual InDesign bug. Adobe must have a department dedicated to finding strange ways to interact with the OS. I’ve not seen this issue but apparently InDesign running on a 10.5 system may not print EPS or PDF images embedded in documents, if the InDesign document is stored on an AFP share. Other images are fine, SMB shares are fine and 10.4 systems are not affected. The technote certainly gives the impression that Adobe believe this is Apple’s fault, but again it just seems a bit weird.

In seriousness I’m starting to wonder if these problems are all a symptom of Adobe keeping as much of the code for their applications as cross platform as possible. Even the dialog boxes in CS4 aren’t standard system widgets and as a result display some odd user interface behaviour at times (I seem to remember that they’re actually displayed by Flash, but cannot verify that at the moment). I know that this makes absolutely perfect sense for Adobe; maintaining entirely separate OS X and Windows versions of their core apps would be a bit of a nightmare at best and probably bordering on impossible. From my point of view however it just appears that the more the apps move towards being as undifferentiated as possible across the systems, the more problems seem to crop up. There is a lot of shared code and it just makes me wonder that with Adobe creating their own subsystems to avoid using the supplied OS functions, such as CoreImage on the Mac - something they won’t use as it isn’t available on Windows, the result is an application that isn’t entirely optimised for either OS. There’s also some fantastically jarring UI decisions that are a direct result of this move as well. The tabbed MDI method of managing multiple windows in CS4, a resolutely Windows concept, is, to me, a particularly irritating addition to a Mac application. It can be turned off, thankfully, but it concerns me that in the next version, it may not be optional.