Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time — update the work Mac to OSX 10.5 to take advantage of the new features, particularly Spaces (the virtual desktop manager) and Time Machine, the automatic backup engine.
Aha, ha ha, silly me.
I use Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 to do most of my work. This includes the big three tools: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. PS is great for bitmap hacking; AI is a nonpareil vector editor, and ID is a pretty damn good page layout program. CS2 is one version down from CS3, the current release, but CS3 didn’t do much for adding features so much as it changed the way a lot of the tools functioned, making them more accessible to relative novices.
Oh, I also use Acrobat 7 to print to PDF, because when your work is sent to press, that’s generally the format desired.
Imagine my surprise when, after finishing the 10.5 upgrade, InDesign began behaving like it was running on Windows, complete with random crashing and unpredictable printing behavior — by which I mean that sometimes a document would print, and other times the exact same document would not print. OSX Leopard: Bad, bad kitty!
Imagine my further surprise when I learned this is not only a known issue, but Adobe isn’t going to do anything about it. CS2 is officially not supported any longer, which means that if you want to run your CS apps on 10.5, you are forced to purchase the upgrade to the tune of $1,600.
Yes, that’s one thousand, six hundred dollars, US, for an upgrade to get damned little in terms of improved functionality — and as Adobe admits, damned little reliability on 10.5 anyway. There are still crash issues. They still haven’t worked out the bugs yet.
Even the most basic tool, printing to PDF, fails on 10.5, and Adobe doesn’t see a buigfix release coming out until sometime in January.
So I spent the day today doing the only thing I could do: Rolling back to an OSX 10.4 install, removing 10.5 entirely from the Mac.
There are ample fingers to point here, but I think a lot of blame can be put on Apple for this for so fundamentally altering the structure of their OS that a version upgrade destroys all crucial functionality on a prominent, common and expensive suite of professional publishing tools; and on Adobe for refusing to support legacy users in the name of, apparently, making a few more mansion payments possible for their board of directors.
If I seem a bit miffed, I am. I actually felt betrayed by both Apple and Adobe on this one. This is extremely poor engineering and inexcusably bad customer service, and it’s going to be one hell of a long goddamn time before I decide to upgrade either my OS or my CS apps. These guys need to stop taking cues from Microsoft or they’re going to be in for one hell of a surprise.
14:46 on December 11th, 2007
Phew!, i had planned to upgrade all of our macs to !0.5 tomorrow and just saw this!!!, i reckon we will stick with the old Tiger.
20:00 on December 11th, 2007
I couldn’t have said it better. I too, am disgusted and irritated at such obvious, greedy, Microsofticity and lack of customer concern.
Afterall, it seems that the creative field was the very field that made BOTH of these companies rich to start. I too, will never, ever, upgrade until it makes financial sense with all kinds of improvements that I simply must have.
If I were to point one finger first, I’d point it at ADOBE for not continuing their support for their own products in light of a continually progressing industry. If mac was smart, they would figure out a patch to work with this. It can’t be that hard. right?
8:06 on December 12th, 2007
John: Yeah. Don’t do it. You’ll wind up tearing out all your hair, then growing more just so you can tear that out too.
leigh:
You’d think not, but there appear to be sufficient fundamental changes to X.5 that a patch might not be feasible. They took out OS9 (”Classic”) support completely and appear to have made some significant changes to the underlying screen-draw architecture — or so it would appear, since an app such as InDesign CS2 doesn’t do much more (onscreen) than cut a hole in a “document” to display another document in a frame; yet that’s sufficient to cause abending.
As for failure to write to PDF — that’s Adobe PDF that’s failing, not the OSX native version, and Apple and Adobe might not be on the best of terms there. After all it was Apple that introduced native print-to-PDF in X.0 more than half a decade ago, thereby obviating the need for Distiller for a lot of Xish users. Adobe can’t have been very happy about that.
Keeping up with developer betas for “Leopard” wouldn’t have been easy either; you can’t actually create app upgrades for a target that hasn’t settled into a release version, nor usually even a release candidate, so while I understand Adobe’s inability to settle into bugfixes for CS3 on X.5 until “Leopard” was rolled out, their choice to not support a significant portion of their legacy user base is infuriating and, in my mind, unconscionable.
Where the blame rests with Apple is in creating a significant enough set of changes that the same legacy user base is not merely inconvenienced, but rendered incapable of working by their OS upgrade. That, too, is unconscionable in light of how significant the legacy base of CS2 users is likely to be. At least one of our local newspapers, for instance, will not be upgrading any time soon.
The implication that X.5 “Leopard” is somehow a less-painful upgrade than MS “Vista” is, at best, disingenuous from my point of view, and it would seem from yours and John’s too.
19:39 on December 12th, 2007
I should add, by the way, that this is the first time an OSX upgrade has ever gone so poorly for me.
I was an early adopter of OSX; I installed Darwin on a Blackbird laptop in 1999 and was in on the public beta and overall satisfied with the OS, though of course it was radically different from 9 and was missing a lot of the featureset I’d become used to in my pre-X life with Apple. The X.1 upgrade was smooth; X.2 added some really good features, and X.3, though it added even more, actually ran significantly faster than its predecessors. Apple had found the stride; the code was simplified and reduced, made very economical, and the release was a genuine winner.
My now-retired iBook G3 wasn’t muscular enough for X.4, but the G5 at work came with it preloaded, and what a hell of a fine little bit of work it was, too. X.5 runs flawlessly on my Mini now, but the changeover to it from X.4 with InDesign CS2 created insurmountable and intolerable errors in mission-critical daily tasks.
Fortunately the downgrade wasn’t as painful as it could have been; I was able to boot with the X.4 CD (some users have reported being unable to do even that in a downgrade attempt), and the installer gave me the option of copying the system and user files into a separate isolated directory, then proceeding as with a clean install. So most of my prefs and settings were recoverable, but still, it took me about three days to get my machine back to where it had been before the upgrade attempt.
A downgrade is feasible, but it is not something I would recommend to anyone without a lot of experience in not simply using computers, but working deep in their innards. I could probably not have done this with Vista. I’m pretty sure anyone with little-to-no practical background in programming, and especially in UNIX systems, would have been lost with OSX’s downgrade. Overall Apple’s product rozziks tha hizziks, but if you get into any kind of technical trouble, you’re just as genuinely hosed as if you’d stepped into MS’s Blue Screen of Death world.
(As for tech support — Adobe’s was pretty cute. Their phone reps had done a pretty good job on affecting an American accent, but they lost it when I was put on hold, and the music was made up entirely of Bengali Top 40 hits. That is not a joke.)
And lest you think I’m just another whiny artist, I’ve got 15 years’ experience working on Mac, Win and Lin. My first Linux install was Slackware, complete with GUI, on a 486, from a stack of floppies. The machine, an AST with 16 MB RAM, quad-booted into Linux, OS/2 Warp*, DOS/Win3.1 and Win95. Most of my history has been writing software for release across various and sundry platforms. Like many veteran users, I have a published book on programming; like many veteran computer-book authors, it’s now out of date.
Don’t get me wrong. If you’re starting fresh, X.5 is a hell of a good release. Time Machine alone is worth the price of admission, and for old multi-desktop hackers like me the addition of Spaces — though it could use some enhancement — was met (by me) with an exclamation along the lines of it’s about damn time. The only reason I rolled back the install was the failure to work with CS2.
There is a reason I gravitate toward the Linux and Mac end of the spectrum, and incapacity is not it.
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* Warp had some real potential. I even got it to run on an officially-unsupported laptop. But it was crushed by MS’s marketing engine, and its unwillingness to drop processor threads. After about a day, your CPU was maxed, even though nothing was running and your RAM was clear.