Watching Apple and Adobe to and fro over the evils and virtues of Flash has been vaguely interesting over the last couple of weeks. I don’t have a particular view on Flash but I do see that Apple has usually been early in calling time on capabilities it sees as redundant or inelegant – floppy disks, two button mice, firewire and so on. Maybe they’re right this time, maybe they’re wrong – right click works fine on the latest Apple mouse for instance.
But I do know this:
I installed photoshop elements 8 on my mac at home this weekend. I’ve been used to installing apps on the Mac in a beautifully clean way – drag app into applications folder, wait 15 seconds or so, double click app to launch. Occasionally it’s more complicated than that, but rarely.
Adobe don’t take that approach. You double click a file called setup (echoes of windows – not bad in itself, but Windows isn’t Mac and Adobe isn’t, ummm, Apple I suppose), then have to type in a 16 letter licence code (more windows) and then watch a lengthy progress bar largely fail to progress across the screen for many minutes (more windows). I haven’t plucked up the courage to actually open the app yet.
If Adobe truly (heart) Apple, I’d like to see them adopt the mac approach to installation … And move on to video and html5 authoring right after that.
