Adobe Updater, mystery caller
Alright already, I said to the Adobe Updater, mostly just to shut it up. I’ll install, I’ll install.
(Clicks Install Now.)
Now, where was I… Ah yes, Proust:
Vinteuil felt the sting of her friend’s sudden kiss; she gave a little scream and ran away; and then they began to chase one another about the room, scrambling over the furniture, their wide sleeves fluttering like wings, clucking and crowing like a pair of amorous fowls. At last—
Heh. He kills me.
At last Mlle. Vinteuil fell down exhausted upon the sofa, where she was screened from me by the stooping body of her friend. But the latter now had her back turned to the little table on which the old music-master’s portrait had been arranged. Mlle. Vinteuil realised that her friend—
Huh? What the…? What is this? Oh yeah, I was installing something—but what happened? “Encountered a problem”…what problem? Whose alert is this? What was I installing again?
Jesus.
Dear Adobe designers,
There are some basic and by now pretty standard questions an alert like this should answer without forcing me to ask. I'll ask anyway, because maybe it will help.
Who is displaying this alert? I started that install something like twenty minutes ago. You don’t think I might have installed something else in the meantime? And I’ve been all over the place, surfing the Web, losing twice at Peggle. And now I’m reading a book.
What’s the problem? The alert is titled “Installation Incomplete”. That tells me nothing. Why’s it incomplete? You say there’s a problem, but what was it?
Which update did the problem affect? Just one of them, or all of them? I know you know, so why not tell me?
How many updates are still pending? You ask me to choose whether to cancel the current update without telling me what it is, and now you ask me to decide to continue or not without telling me how many are remaining?
What does continue later mean? How much later? Are you going to auto-schedule another update to correct this particular incident, or does this mean you’ll simply resume your mysterious schedule as usual?
Does cancel mean skip, or forget forever?
Why is there an OK button? First, it’s not OK: you interrupted me to tell me something bad just happened, but you won’t tell me what. If you want me to make a choice here, give me two buttons, something like Skip and Continue and Stop Installing. These radio buttons are silly. (About those radio buttons: why aren’t they top-aligned, and what’s with the “updates” orphan?)
I know you have a good heart, but come on. This isn’t rocket science.
Thank you,
Your Customer
AMEN my friend! And can we get them to accept a NO I DON’T WANT YOUR UPDATE, NOT EVER while we’re at it? The last update of Reader hosed my old but still plenty adequate version of Acrobat. Grrrrr.
Right on! Adobe has one of the worst installer programs on the Macintosh platform. I suspect in part this is because of its history of hodge podging together different programs that were originally not under the same “suite”. So, for example, Photoshop never used to be part of Creative Suite. PageMaker (now InDesign) never used to be part of Creative Suite. Adobe Acrobat also never used to be part of CS. Over time, as they came up with a different marketing technique, they pasted together various programs under one suite and now have to hodge podge a way to update them so they work well TOGETHER.
It’s not an excuse for a bad job. This is trying to understand what’s wrong with them.
Hey, if you want to see more bad stuff, pop over to my flickr stream of weird dialog boxes, several of which are by Adobe.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonology/
All comments are appreciated, especially if they are witty.
I have just encountered this problem myself and the adobe user forums recommend logging in as the root user and updating. all seems a bit drastic for what should be a fairly routine operation. (and i’m scared of the root user). dialogue box should come with a “get knotted” button as well.
I stand by my method: It’s far easier to forego the automatic Adobe updater and simply download and install the updates by hand from Adobe’s support site, like we did in the 90s. That’s how broken Adobe’s updater is.
-systemsboy