Hey, what if I told you that to offer consistent, Suite-wide extensibility we’d ditched Flash Player and had gone with WebKit instead? Would we hear a bunch of attaboys about open standards, HTML5, etc.? Would Mac aficionados in particular cheer Adobe’s embrace of an open source, largely Apple-driven initiative?
Good, because we are indeed embracing WebKit for extensibility. We just happened to keep Flash as an option, too. (The union of the two is at the heart of Adobe AIR, and that’s what we’ll leverage going forward.) Now, let the touch-of-gray-finding begin…
Sounds like a great direction to go with
Options are always good. This one sounds very good.
attaboy!
what’s flash?
That sounds great, John. Cheers!
I’d rather Adobe do its own thing. Just like with Coco or whatever it’s called, Apple are bound to shaft you and make you dance to their tune. You’ve got full control of Flash – use it.
In the immortal words of Bruce Chizen:
“What took you so long?”
I just don’t get it.. Could you explain better please?
[In CS4 you can use the Flash Player to create panels and dialogs. In CS5 you’ll also be able to use WebKit. Just like FP, WebKit will be able to send commands to the host app’s scripting system. –J.]
As a firm foot in web standards this is fantastic.
Flash runs inside or on top of (X)HMTL so I don’t see this affecting the use of Flash all that much.
Not sure why Adobe should “do it’s own thing”. Doesn’t make sense given that WebKit is open source, has the fastest Javascript and is on par with CSS2+. If not WebKit it’d be Gecko or Opera (again). I see no reason to rewrite the book.
Adobe has just gained a little more respect from me.
great! hopefully this is a new trend at the big a. cheers
So now web developers that use Adobe suite a lot will be able to write plug ins just as standard web apps. Am I right?
Largely Apple driven? There are a few other players in there. A wee company called Google, and some odd Finnish mob called Nokia. Is Adobe feeling a little threatened by the drive towards rich experience controlled by the browser rather than a closed plugin perchance? 😉
More seriously though, this is great news. Having a broad range of options for extending CS opens it up to more developers, and that means more seriously cool addons for me to download an play with.
Great stuff 🙂
@aboy!
It’s good to see Adobe is concentrating on UI. Okay for extensibility, but I still think native OS UI is the best way to create responsive, stable apps.
Applause!
Here’s hope that when you say “CS5” that means “including Fireworks”. I hate the FW JSAPI and its companion VM with a passion, and would love to move my extensions over to a decent platform : )
Thanks!
If it will help you correct the really silly stuff that is listed on http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/, then great. The adoption of a technology is good, but unless it means that silliness like:
http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/236090781/the-many-sliders-of-photoshop-cs4
and
http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/172418534/photoshop-why-is-this-menulet-with-horrible
then it’s less good. Using open standards where possible is always good, but they have to actually create an improvement.
Also, if it means that Adobe is finally going to stop hiding full copies of Opera in multiple places in CS, then that’s a huge benefit.
This is great news!
Hell.
Freezes.
Over.
I like it when it’s cold 😉
Adobe Gripes is the sole reason I will never upgrade to CS4. I’m thankful it showed that spending the money to move past my CS3 suite would be a very, very bad idea.
[That’s too bad, because although there will always be problems with Suite apps (just as there are with Mac OS, Windows, and everything else), we made lots of progress on issues big and small. You’ll never see anything positive on Adobe Gripes. It’s all just bitching, because if it bleeds, it leads. –J.]
I agree that if this means the issues it raises will be fixed, then I welcome the change.
[Why would this mean that problems magically go away? It’s amazing how very little people understand about technology. They’ve just heard, “This thing is funded by Apple, so it must be good.” –J.]
Great move. WebKit is a winning horse for sure. Can’t wait to hear more!
Agreed. I never upgraded to CS4 after I read about adobegripes.tumblr.com site.
You made my day
+1
WebKit is open source, troll.
As someone who has tried and failed many times to make an interface for a script I wrote for InDesign, this is the best news I’ve heard.
It’s your loss. CS4 is a large step up from CS3 and prior versions. If all you’re worried about is GUI, then maybe your priorities are out of order. I love Adobe Gripes but I’m a developer who has used Adobe applications for years.
Also, I think this is great. Way to embrace an already awesome technology. You go girlfriend! High five!
Great stuff… now fix the interface, the installer and the product might finally be worth the price again…
It’s a start…
-nd
Fantastic, John.
I assume you won’t be using the system’s Webkit framework but will be bundling a custom Webkit that’s been extended with hooks into CS’s scripting apis? Or will you use the system Webkit with a plugin that extends it?
Yay!
Woohoo! I recently wrote you a long email about all kinds of minor (and a few larger-) quirks in the venerable Adobe suite. Is this move to webkit on the interface side, or on the output side?
**As in: can I script my own undo queue behavior now?**
regardless, congratulations, it sounds liek a nice step forward 🙂
AWESOME, dude!
principles I love.
AdobeGripes covers issues that extend beyond GUI problems. Though, as designers, most CS users are going to be annoyed by GUI issues more than the average *ahem* developer.
And, while I understand that the site’s abrasive nature means John won’t visit it, Adobe SHOULD be reading it. The issues raised are legitimate, and just because the guy is abusive and occasionally vulgar doesn’t make the information any less valuable. Some of the stuff he finds in CS apps IS hilariously bad.
No, if people want to be taken seriously they need to present these issues in a reasonable and professional manner.
It is completely unreasonable to expect a company to participate in a site with such vitriol and lack of professional conduct.
There’s a huge user base, and a gripe to one person is a blessing to another. Granted, some things are clearly gripes to everyone, and these need to be fixed and they undoubtedly receive attention at Adobe who then need to make business decisions about how best to move forward.
We won’t always like their decision, but it’s theirs to make and ours (as users) to reasonably and politely express our feelings (which can include voting with our wallets if we so desire).
Carrying on like a bunch of internet-tough guys and hooligans on a website thinking that it’s cool and acceptable isn’t a valid response and likely does more harm because a wide portion of the community discount what they say because of the way they say it.
This is good as it means that web developers who don’t know Flash can now make CS5 panels. Making it easier for more people to develop for a platform is always a good thing. However, it’s not that groundbreaking of an item as people are making it out to be. Also not that surprising since all CS products already included WebKit to display help content.
Great move, but don’t forget to ditch any hidden copy of Opera while you’re at it, where it’s presumably no longer needed/used — like in Bridge; since “Bridge Home” became yet another dead project)
Should Bridge require some HTML-engine for whatever bizarre feature, let it use WebKit as well if you’re at it 🙂
Probably can’t get around to have *one* copy of Opera for “Device Central” to mimic Opera Mini powered devices …
Very smart move. The move Adobe embrace the Open Web the better. Open Web and Flash are not mutually exclusive.
So i’m actually replying to Nack, but since he doesn’t actually do proper comments himself, it looks like i’m replying to Ryan.
Way to completely dismiss what is a rather thorough, and legitimate showcasing of UI issues in products from a company that in theory, cares about design.
What, because they point out literally hundreds of errors, but they never give you a pat on the bum they lack legitimacy? What would you expect a site called “Adobe UI Gripes” to do, say “we were going to point out errors, but that’s not positive, good show all the way ’round Adobe” for a few hundred posts?
What is it with Adobe and this nigh-institutionalized inability to take criticism well? Not all the groups, the installer group is actually pretty mature about the whole thing. But you regularly try to say “hey, look at what other people are doing wrong” as if that excuses any and all UI mistakes you make, or “your point isn’t valid because it doesn’t say nice things”, and the Flash and PDF teams are incapable of even acknowledging the possibility of any form of imperfection in their products.
Is there some weird orientation that says “all criticism must be met with justification and dismissal” at Adobe, and how did the installer team, who gets some serious vitriol escape it?
Did you even *look* at the screen shots on UI gripes, or did you just completely dismiss them out of hand because they didn’t go out of their way to validate you?
No, the site is not terribly positive, but unlike people saying “it sucks” and offering no useful information, they have screen shots. You can *clearly* see what they are talking about. From a fix POV, that makes your life a lot easier. You’ve griped enough about people not giving enough details about things, and then when you get them, you dismiss them with silliness like “if it bleeds it leads”? If that’s how you deal with problem reports, i’m not surprised you that you don’t get a lot of useful information in bug reports. With that kind of response, why waste the time, when it’s only going to be dismissed out of hand as invalid anyway.
Come off it, John C. Welch. They might provide good screenshots and legitimate issues, but the manner in which it’s presented is not conducive to getting Adobe (or any company) to listen. It’s not necessary, either.
It doesn’t take much effort to get specific people here (ie John, Steve G, Chris C – to name a few) to respond directly and take action. If you want to be heard, it’s not that hard to do and if gripes were done without the vitriol it’d be an excellent source of feedback and Adobe would look bad if they didn’t take active notice of it.
Here’s an example from the front page:
“Fireworks: The pattern fill layer style works great… as long as you want that horrible bubble pattern and only that.
Seriously has anyone even tested this shit? Didn’t the person putting that interface together realise that maybe you would need to select a different pattern?”
Now, let’s try in a professional and productive manner:
“Fireworks: The pattern fill layer style works great but only allows for a bubble pattern and only that.
This seems like a bug or oversight, as of course users will want or need to select a different pattern.
This needs to be looked at otherwise this function is not useful.”
It might make the person posting the first version feel like they’re really cool or sticking it to the man, but all that happens is they are ignored. The second example is something that can be taken on board and could promote an effective response.
You’ll note that the quote is one of the milder examples.
Then there are examples like that under the heading of Flashplayer 10.1 where the gripe includes a rant about multitouch not being useful because on the basis that no one wants to hold their arm out to touch a screen – completely missing the point that you don’t have to be touching the screen you’re viewing to make use of the functionality. But being accurate and constructive isn’t the point is it? No, it’s about stretching a pair of e-testicles to show how clever the poster is by flaming Adobe.
That is indeed great news. Flash has become such a resource hog, it’s quite sad. Proving WebKit as an alternative should be a marked improvement.
[Should it? Do you actually know that it’s less resource-hungry (esp. when doing equivalent work), or do you just assume it will be? I don’t have data one way or the other, but it bugs me when people make assumptions based largely on branding & spin. –J.]
You mention “the nigh-institutionalized inability to take criticism well” but I don’t think that’s the problem. The problem, I’m afraid, is this: Adobe doesn’t care. (Nack does care, but can’t
I remember when Bruce Chizen came on stage at the Macworld expo in 2000 (I think it was), and opened with the line:
“Adobe just had an incredible year: We surpassed the billion dollar mark”
Um, ok? Good news for Adobe to be sure, but there was a very awkward silence, followed, eventually, by what I would describe as a courtesy applause. The audience didn’t really care about that. They were expecting Chizen to mention the applications. Because that’s what mattered to them. Ok, great, Adobe made a pile of money, but so what?
I could go on but John Gruber has done a better job of laying out what happened to Adobe in this article from 2005(!). The gist? Adobe is too focused on the marketing, the selling, and profits, and less focused on the stuff they actually sell. Chizen’s remark says it loud an clear.
From where I’m standing, that’s led to rushed products, an avalanche of new features (in some of the already most feature-packed pieces of software out there) and even new applications, and much less optimization or bug-fixing. And hence the inability to listen to criticism, because that’s only about the stuff that’s already there.
Again, Adobe Gripes gives a pretty good idea of the state of things. Things have been rushed, because they would mean New!-stickers, which would increase sales. And the feature rush seems to lead to Adobe just implementing new things instead of fixing bugs in the stuff that’s already there. Who cares if the last feature worked at all, when it’s all about the next feature?
Version increments used to mean additions and improvements. But for Adobe it seems to be all about additions. It’s downright sad to see. Even the WebKit stuff is an addition on top of all the other stuff. Yes, it sounds really cool, but it means less resources to fix the existing stuff. And it’s practically impossible to remove a feature from an app once it’s there, so things like the CS4 GUI are there to stay (most unfortunately).
I wish that by now, Adobe could make a new suite that contained zero new features, zero new apps. Only fixes. But that’s not going to happen. I just wonder who Adobe is trying to outrun in the feature-race; it can only be Adobe itself, and that’s a destructive cycle.
Branding, spin, the ability to read the results of ‘top’ or Activity Monitor samples. There’s a whole lot of ‘assumption’ going on there.
Is it just me, or have the yobs at Adobe become less technical over time?
I mean, outside the hallowed halls of Adobe there ARE folks who can use WebKit and know how to SYMLINK and not embed copies in every single app they subject the user to.
Some people have no manners. A single post, that states a point of view you don’t like, and you call “troll”. Before you throw abuse, think (if you can) whether if it’s not a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Adobe have full control of a perfectly good set of technologies in Flash and should push them to the max.
All I can say is THANK CHRIST! The Flash driven UI in CS4 just doesn’t work.
Will you also be making an effort for the Suite software to be a better MacOS citizen with proper support for Spaces, Expose, etc?
[I guess I’ll go to my grave with the world blaming Adobe for what are bugs in Spaces. It simply doesn’t work well with Carbon-based apps. Maybe once we move to Cocoa those bugs will go away. But they’re not our bugs to fix. –J.]
Webkit is open source!
Apple has no more control over it than the KDE team.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/07/the-unforking-of-kdes-khtml-and-webkit.ars
If they don’t already read adobe gripes and I decided to re-post everything on that blog in a “polite” manner on my own site, they still wouldn’t read my site.
Does this mean that Adobe is turning away from Flex/Flash Builder as a development environment for extending the applications suite?
Never said it wasn’t…. Much as one loves the open source principle, as soon as Adobe do something slightly non-standard – because that works better for users – we’ll get the standards and compatibility whiners popping up. However, my concern is more for Adobe giving its users its best shot, and chopping and changing panel architecture with every release cycle isn’t doing users any favours. Take File Info panels, good old xml driven ones worked OK, then CS4 breaks them all by going Flash, now there’s another change. Configurator panels too have barely had time to bed in. Adobe has full control of Flash and Flex and should continue that track – not give up after one cycle.
It amazes me how much we pay for photoshop compared to pc games yet many game developers for months or even a few years after shipping continue to release patch after patch of bug fixes for free.
at work my firefox only crashes on pages involving canvas, wmv, or flash.
My safari and opera only crash on pages involving flash.
It would appear that flash has issues.
Webkit based feature request.
This is based on assumptions resulting from when you told us the 3d stuff in photoshop is like individual applications running “in a layer”.
I want to be able to use css & html as part of the pixel based design process within photoshop.
Currently, if I want a box (bigBox) 620px wide containing 3 evenly sized boxes (panel) with a 15px padding on bigBox and 4px margins between the 3 panals I find it’s easiest to open firefox throw in some html & css via firebug and take a screenshot. Then paste that into photoshop and use it as my guide. If the resulting width of the panels is quite as wide as I’d like it’s again quicker to edit the css and decrease the bigBox padding then take another screenshot.
It would be great to have html+css layers!
It would work like this. Below the layers in the “layer style” area there’s be 2 items. Html & Css. The area that this layer applies to would be defined the same way you define the area of a text layer. You double click the html item and add a few lines like [div id=header][h1]Some Text[/h1][p]some text[/p][/div] and then you double click the css item to write whatever css you need.
I don’t expect it to be powerful enought to design whole web pages but it would come in useful when you need to make common dimension changes to large numbers of items within a fixed area. Like designing a list of 40 thumbnails for a gallery. With rounded corners, borders, box shadows, gradients, etc. Or any other case where a change to 1 thing requires a change to half a dozen other things to get it to look like what the browser would do naturally due to the “flow” of the document.
It would be great if we could have native photoshop layer styles like gradients and drop shadows translated into the css needed to get the same look in a browser.
Would like the ability to open html files (or even urls) and transform the webkit rendered page into photoshop layers. I don’t expect a perfect transformation or even a layer order that makes sense but it would still be a great starting point when a client says “here’s my current site, i want it to look the same but different”
Being able to export stuff as svg, canvas or data urls would be nice too.
[Well, if nothing else, I can now tell my colleagues that someone else out there is crazy like me. 🙂 This kind of thing has been on my wish list for a very long time. We shall see. –J.]
Yes, Adobe, these are your bugs to fix. Apple has been telling you for at least two years (I was there, and gave a short presentation) to stop using Carbon. There’s a reason Apple told you that — because they’re not going to fix bugs in it anymore; they’re not just saying that to be mean.
Thinsoldier’s idea is brilliant. Seriously worth consideration – define a new layout type that contains an arbtitrary HTML+CSS doc and displays by rendering with Webkit – would make process of going from rough wireframes and grids to final art much easier in Photoshop.
Keep smokin that Cocoa crack, son.
Carbon is not a valid API, Apple told Adobe not to use it, and we were always at war with EastAsia. Right.
Nokia and Google only started using KHTML after Apple threw a ton of engineering at it.
Very, very smart, surprising, move.
Webkit is everywhere (except Redmond). Might as well get on the bandwagon.
That noise you hear is the sound of Opera- haters casting around for something else to gripe about. 🙂
You chose not to buy CS4 because of Adobe Gripes?
Cripes…
I could not imagine going back to CS3 now that I’ve found so many great features in CS4 that make me productive.
Some people would complain if you hung ’em with a new rope.
Heh, and then is CS6 it will be Silverlight, and in CS7 it will be technology X.
As a developer that needs to extends CS apps for internal use, the situation is very confusing. ExtendScript, C++, Photoshop Panels, Lua, Flex/Flash-develop, PathPanel, SwitchBoard and now WebKit.
Could you guys just pick a program and stick with it. And don’t forget to communicate about it.
PS. Someone teach MNR how to respond to comments, visit the developer forums and prepare presentations. You really don’t need that if you want to get a message out.
Isn’t that just the same thing wrapped in political correctness and passed as “professional and productive”? While Adobe Gripes often goes over the top a bit, Adobe’s software can be at times so frustrating in its user unfriendliness that lashing out at Adobe is the sensible reaction. Some of their UI design seems like developers reading a features list and then implementing it with basically no attention paid to how it works and ease of use.
They’re the only company I know that deliberately seems to ignore all user interface guidelines on OSX. I still don’t understand what was gained from having a non-native UI on both Windows and OSX.
At work we are still on CS3, I truly hope CS5 will be something worth upgrading to because it’s easier to use, not because it can make 3D tophats better.
Please, please, PLEASE make Flash CS4 stop crashing before you move on to CS5. Seriously. How many hours of work have I lost because I clicked on “Select unused items” in the library then said, ‘oh crap — please don’t beachballllllll—Fuuuu!.’ I know I’m not alone, I looked it up. That’s not the only thing. Sometimes I save and close a file only to reopen to find a motion object has migrated halfway across the stage. And there’s much more.
Most every time I have something backasswards go on with Flash CS4, I send screen shots and a description to adobegripes. Because if nothing else, people who have the same time-sucking issues will see they’re not alone. I see no reason to send these reports to Adobe given the huge existing cacophony saying the same thing and seeing how many of the bugs I saw in the initial CS4 release are still there. I manually load Adobe Updater all the time just hoping there’s a Flash CS4 point update I somehow missed that fixes all the crap wrong with it.
But hey the deco tool is awesome, finally I have a way to paint flower patterns in Flash.
RE, Nack: “blaming adobe for bugs in Spaces”.
Right, because CS3 was written in Carbon, so it didn’t work in Spaces… oh right, CS3 worked in Spaces just fine! It was those retched panel things in CS4 that screwed up the apps in Spaces.
If I try to drive my car into a lake and it sinks, I don’t blame the lake for having a bad API. And then say it will work better when I rewrite my car in boat.
jnack, at the very least, you could not spread disinformation.
Perhaps John and the Photoshop engineers have access to more information than you do about the problems in Spaces?
And perhaps because that information involves bugs in the software from another company, they can’t really give you all the details?
And maybe the fact that Spaces doesn’t work with lots of apps (mostly Carbon) is a vast conspiracy of developers trying to make their apps not work with Spaces?
Oh, and maybe Adobe has all the bug reports about CS3 not working with Spaces, too.
Yes Adobe now that the shoe is on the other foot it is funny how it is Apple’s problem to fix. But when SL can out you response to CS3 users was to tell us to upgrade as you don’t go back to previous versions to make comparability updates.
Funny, they’re one of the rare ones to have that problem apparently.
related to my previous comment.
http://www.31three.com/notebook/archive/making_dotted_borders_in_photoshop/
It would be great if it was something more css-like or even illustrator like.
One of the comments there mentioned some layer styles that are really useful but hidden somewhere.
John, come ON! Flash so blatantly obviously sucks that not admitting it just makes you look stupid. Don’t defend that crap, make your people fix it. Or, if you really wanna make my day, let it die die die. And yeah, I know how realistic that is :).
if adobegripes is “just bitching”, then you really *do* have no idea.
Dude, you can’t possibly have your head deeper in the sand! Seriously… do you feel the magma?!
Ridiculous. Troll you aren’t, that’s for sure… you are something much, much worse!
How did Apple shaft Adobe? Because they opted to go with Cocoa instead of Carbon? Wow… the nerve of those guys. And as the other people have said, Webkit is OSS. Because you obviously don’t get what they means, I’ll spell it out for you: Apple doesn’t own it. No one does. So they “shaft” anybody. No one can…
Thanks for playing. You get a lovely parting gift from Stephanie, and a version of the popular home game. Goodbye.
And as for moving away from Flash? ‘Bout bloody time! There are so many other ways Adobe can increase it’s iron grip on the creative community…
Flash is in the background right now consuming 36% of my systems’ CPU to display a dialog. A DIALOG. I don’t think you need to be a developer to know that Flash is not a proper citizen and does not integrate with the OS. It’s unacceptable.
Not trying to be an ass, but my honest reaction is “Who gives a shit?” The reason people hate the Flash UI components isn’t just a pure hatred of Flash, it’s that they are noticeably different and create further inconsistency in the interface. If they worked properly, no one would even know or care what was used to construct them. And adding a third option isn’t going to help that.
A UI component found in multiple places within an app should act the same. This isn’t rocket surgery. Just fix that and 3/4 of Adobe UI Gripes goes away.
John, I see little documentation of “Just like FP, WebKit will be able to send commands to the host app’s scripting system.” So far, all I have managed to do is call a menu item in photoshop (not InDesign) from an HTML panel created in Configurator. This invokes one script with no parameters. This is not “just like FP” – with the extension builder, FP has two-way communication with the complete InDesign or Photoshop DOM. Is there in fact some deeper way for the webkit in the panel to talk with Photoshop/InDesign DOM? (i.e. direct manipulation of photoshop objects from within the panel, as we can do from Flash with extensions). If so there is almost zero documentation.
When your products cost as much as they do I think that lashing out and being vulgar on adobegripes.tumblr.com is totally acceptable.
I can not wait for the day that I can completely replace Photoshop and InDesign with better alternatives.
And yes, Flash really is as bad as everybody says.
I am lost with all this stuff, please help! I have 13-year-old twins. I recently switched their computer to Ubuntu (11.4 or something) because they are into robotics and the big guys at the college competitions said they needed Linux. I subsequently switched the whole household to Ubuntu because I love it. Being 13, now they are all about animation (and they are really good). But they lost Flash in the switchover (it was just a demo) and I’m not sure what is the best animation software to get them (they tried KTOON and didn’t like it. Any suggestions? Thank you.