28th
I think I might be done bitching about Adobe now, because I’ll never say any of this as well as Merlin just did.
But I do have one thing to add that might put some of the massive failure that is CS4 into perspective: most of the mistakes Adobe is making on OS X can be explained by the fact that they also support Windows. In order to maximize the amount of code shared between the two platforms, they’ve been reimplementing standard Mac GUI elements (window title bars, dropdown menus, text fields) from scratch, or via the unusable mess called Adobe Air. This is far more work and gives worse results than just using the native Mac toolkits, though it may well be less work overall than writing platform-specific GUI code for two platforms.
But it’s a terrible tradeoff, because all the little niceties that make using a Mac worthwhile are missing: standard keyboard shortcuts, Services, etc. Yes, they’re saving a little bit of development time, and for a company as user-hostile as Adobe, development time is probably the foremost concern. But the degree to which they’ve sacrificed quality is impossible to ignore. No one will ever sit through their thousandth “Adobe® Illustrator® CS4 has unexpectedly quit” thinking “Well, at least I didn’t have to wait an extra six months for this.”
