Adobe Responds to CS4 Installer Issues
By
Mike Pasini, The Imaging Resource
(Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - 10:53 EST)
With the release of Creative Suite 4, Adobe was again taken to task for the performance and behavior of its installers. Responding to those complaints, Photoshop Product Manager John Nack promised to look into the issue with the installer team. Late last night, he published two statements from the installer team on his blog.
HILLS
The first, from Barry Hills, who leads the engineering teams for Creative Suites shared technology, explained that when the installers for CS4 became his group's responsibility, the team focused "almost all of our development time on one thing: make the installer experience more robust." And, he noted, the company has received 51 percent fewer tech support installer-related calls for CS4 vs. CS3 over the same period.
The group also focused on making the tech support experience better, writing an AIR-based utility to review the installer log and bring up the relevant Tech Note for any issue it discovers.
While data transfer rates improved in the CS5 installer, he observed, net install times increased because more apps and files are installed in CS4.
The group continues to look at ways to customize the install process, selecting fewer items and allowing more choices, he added. "And YES! I agree that we should not require 3rd party apps to shut down before installing," he said, adding "I am strongly on the side of being able to browse the Web and do other things while you are installing."
Hills began his statement encouraging feedback directly to him and he concluded it with some examples he's already received, as well as his email address. "I am quite serious when I ask you to contact me directly if you are so inclined. I may not tell you what you want to hear but I will be open, honest and take your issues seriously and use that information to influence the CS5 plans," he wrote.
WILDE
Eric Wilde from the Suite engineering group also contributed a statement in which he observed the complexity of the Suite's multiple layers of package management "are not adequately supported by platform install technology for both Mac and Windows." So Adobe has had to roll its own.
The issue here is that each product "must be installable both as a component of the Creative Suite and as a standalone installer for when the user purchases just a point product. In addition, there are extra layers of shared technology across the products that must be package managed accurately to make sure the uninstall of any one product does not break the other products remaining on the system."
He concludes, "We do recognize the troubles felt in enterprise environments and are diligently working to address those problems as quickly as we can."
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