Adobe sucks. At least, Photoshop Elements 6 does for me.
I just picked up Adobe Photoshop Elements 6. Where are the usability people at Adobe?
I am 55 this year. I feel more comfortable with letters just a skosh larger this year than 5 years ago. But apparently the monitor I have is as decrepit as I am. Because the menus and selections and stuff in PE6 are *smaller* than I can comfortably make out.
I used Photoshop LE. Photoshop LE 2.0. Photoshop Elements 3.0. Now, I can’t even see the blinking screen because Adobe apparently assumes I work in an unlighted blinking *darkroom*. Half-shade grey lettering on black background — did they run this one off 4 years ago while the geeks were distinguishing themselves with *certified lame* black backgrounds?
What a nightmare.
OK. So, my SwishZone flash maker has skins. It lets me select the color scheme. Windows for goodness’ sake lets me pick color schemes, etc. I search for ‘change skins’ on PE6 help, and get ‘no pages found’. Do they not have skins, or do they call them by some other name? The online resources I have found don’t seem to have more material than I have seen.
How does the application work? I don’t know. Until the blinking sun went down (what working hours??) I couldn’t read the screen, see the icons, or find the labels and borders!!
Umm - in case you wondered, I am a bit upset over what Adobe did to a tool I used to be able to use.
In Photoshop LE, they let you select and move icons on the toolbars around. Many other *fine* programs do, too, as well as the cheap, the open source, and the not-so-fine programs. So when I went to PE3, I was unhappy to find out that Adobe doesn’t think I need that ability any more. So instead of a push-button ’save a copy of image for the web’ function on the tool bar, I get to open the file menu, and hit the particular function I want. Two selections, each in the midst of other action areas. Instead of a nice sized button with inactive space around it. Hello-o! Even reading this the situation reads like a recipe for disaster — why would Adobe want to make a very routine function (for me) three to four times as likely to mean a mistake?
And I don’t see anything in PE6 that allows configuring tool bars. Oops! I can’t even change the background of the menus and such *so I can see the interface in normal daytime light!!*
Tres rude, Adobe. Tres rude.
Did I mention the Adobe web site is muchly Flash now, since Adobe bought the Flash product when it bought the Macromedia company? Yes. Now that even *Microsoft’s* IE browser has tabbed browsing, Adobe is adopting links in Flash. Which disable the right-click menu to ‘open link destination in new tab’. How fricking modern (neanderthal?) is that!
And get this. To show three pages on Adobe, looking (I think, I am still waiting) for support for this problem, my modem shows I have downloaded about 4 MBytes. Yep. I still dial up - the cable company will not run a cable to my street, the phone company will not run DSL. So I use dial up. And I *notice rude damn bloated pages*. Adobe.
And that is aside from the way Adobe products like Acrobat Reader acts like a vicious virus - I have to remember I want to read a *gasp* PDF file - that is why my computer seized up like some virus froze my screen while it is wiping my hard drive. Even Microsoft Excel doesn’t pull that kind of crap.
Tres rude, Adobe. Tres rude.