(This post describes a problem using Adobe InDesign CS4 but applies just as well to CS5 and CS5 and a half.)

Suppose you have a text frame containing the file modification date variable, created using Type → Text Variables → Insert Variable → Modification Date, displays as “14 September 2011 7:50 PM” (on my system). Now open an existing document that was created on a different system and copy and paste the text frame containing the date variable. But depending on what system created the other document the date displays using a different format, e.g as “September 14, 2011 19:50″.

It appears that the date format is determined by the document in which it is placed, rather than by the date format in use when the variable was created.

Workaround: define a new / custom text variable that uses the file modification time but with your own explicit format, then insert your custom variable instead of the pre-defined “Modification Date” variable.

In my brief testing this custom variable and its format is preserved when pasting the text frame into other documents that were created on other systems.

But now I want to know exactly how the format is chosen for the built-in “Modification Date” variable. I am guessing that when a story with a variable is pasted into a document the format is determined by the format of an existing variable of the same name, and if there is no existing variable of that name then InDesign brings in the new variable definition (along with its format) from the clipboard.

But why models?

No, that’s not what I mean… why the default date format? I tried changing the date formats in System Preferences. Doesn’t seem that InDesign picks it up from there. I tried trashing the Adobe InDesign preferences folder, changing the date format in System Preferences and launching InDesign again. InDesign is still using the original format, so doesn’t get it from the user’s preferences. I had a look through ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.InDesign.plist but nothing date-related in there.

Perhaps it is set by the local-domain /Library/Preferences/*. Perhaps it is set by the built-in preferences of your installed language version of Creative Suite. Perhaps…

So I gave up. I will leave the investigation for some day when I am younger and it is more important to understand how Adobe’s InDesign picks the format for the built-in date modified variable. The workaround works around.

Suite!

• An RSS / Atom feed of recent updates.

  This way you can subscribe to a list of recent updates in your favourite news reader and be informed when a new update is released without having to scan product-specific blogs, etc.

• Per-product pages listing available updates.

  When you want to find an update for a product you can find it on the dedicated product update page. It will be there.

• Nice URLs.

  URLs make the Web. Putting the product name in the URL makes a human-friendly URL, as opposed to putting the opaque product reference numeric key as a query parameter. Quick test: which updates do you expect to see on http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Macintosh ? And assuming you were so insane as to guess the previous URL correctly, which updates do you expect to see on http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1

Anyway, those be my principal beefs with the current Adobe software updates site. So I made a site that tries to satisfy my beeves. Beefs.

It is here: http://reliablybroken.com/wavesinspace/

Please provide feedback to david@gasmark6.com

Adobe’s Downloads page is mostly about downloading product demos. Although on that page there is a list on the side with a link to the real product updates page and a very out-dated list of updates.

So then the actual Product Updates page has a menu for all their products that takes you to the updates for an individual product, and a list of “featured updates”. What qualifies an update to be featured is a mystery, so that list is not useful either.

They don’t think to mention it on the Downloads or Product Updates pages, but there is also a New Downloads page which is actually rather handy, although there is no indication what constitutes “new” so it can be difficult to tell if something was released in the time between your last visit and the oldest update mentioned on that page.

My favourite aspect of Adobe’s support pages is the whimsical approach to the page for a product. For example, the page for Illustrator for Macintosh includes the 15.0.2 update for Illustrator that shipped as part of Creative Suite version 5. Meanwhile the Creative Suite for Mac updates page doesn’t admit there have been any updates for CS5 at all.

What Adobe’s software update site needs is…

Please do not publish this doc without checking with Anita. I’m in the process of reviewing and editing it. Thanks. AnitaWhat’s coveredIntroduction to the GPUGPU features in Photoshop and Adobe Bridge…

Here’s how it looked in NetNewsWire:

Those run-together words in the feed are a fair example of the lack of attention to detail in the design of the Adobe support site. There’s good stuff on there, but finding it is frustrating and anyway wouldn’t you rather download a demo of something with motherfucking Akamai download manager?

Meanwhile Anita must have said to go ahead because there’s no mention of her on that article’s page now.

But I disagree that the correct cursor to use for a blocking task that cannot be cancelled is the spinning beachball of death. That cursor after all is the cursor automatically provided by the operating system when an application is not responding to input events. As such when I see the beachball I associate it with a stuck application, one that may need to be forcibly quit.

Previous versions of Photoshop showed the watch cursor for actions which took a significant length of time. Showing the watch cursor is friendlier than showing the beachball of death because it indicates that the application is busy, too busy to handle your clicks but everything is hunky dory and the train will arrive at the station.

There is no watch cursor listed in Apple’s documentation on cursors. However the cursor is still present in the system and can be found in the headers for the carbon appearance manager:

kThemeWatchCursor             = 7,    /* Can Animate */

If you have Xcode 3.2.2 installed you can find this in /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Headers/Appearance.h, line 634.

I don’t know enough about Macintosh programming to say whether it is possible to employ this cursor from a Cocoa-based application.

What the fuck is wrong with these guys?

Not certain which is worse, that the updaters created a folder in /Applications that clearly belongs somewhere in /Library/Application Support (if it should exist at all) or that they made it hidden.

You can delete it.

#!/usr/bin/python
"""
    Search for and kill app. 
"""
import os, sys
import commands
import signal


def main():
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        print 'Missing or too many arguments.'
        print 'One argument and only one argument is required.'
        print 'Pass in the app name to find and kill (i.e. "Safari").'
        return 0

    psCmd = '/bin/ps -x -c | grep ' + sys.argv[1]
    st, output = commands.getstatusoutput( psCmd )

    if st == 0:
        appsToKill = output.split('\n')
        for app in appsToKill:
            parts = app.split()
            killCmd = 'kill -s 15 ' + parts[0]
            #print killCmd
            os.system( killCmd )

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

(You can download the Acrobat 9.1.3 update and find this script at Acrobat 9 Pro Patch.app/Contents/Resources/FindAndKill.py.)

Was the author not aware of the killall command for sending a kill signal to a named process? The killall man page says it appeared in FreeBSD 2.1, which was released in November 1995. Adobe CS4 was released about 14 years later. How is it Adobe’s product managers approve these things for release?

What is particularly galling about Adobe’s Acrobat 9 updaters is that they seem to re-implement so much of what the Apple installer application does, even down to their use of gzipped cpio archives for the payload.

I was installing Adobe Creative Suite 4 today on a Macintosh. I had the amazing Adobe CS4 Master Collection media to install from, but all I needed was the Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and Bridge. So in the installation process I choose a custom install and de-select most everything except those applications. I un-ticked After Effects because I didn’t want to install After Effects. I un-ticked Soundbooth, I un-ticked Dreamweaver, I un-ticked all them other applications.

The installation process begins. Finally it finishes. Afterwards I had Illustrator CS4, InDesign CS4, Photoshop CS4 and Bridge CS4 installed on my Mac’s hard drive. They all worked a treat.

I also had a dog’s dinner of all the other flipping applications installed, all the applications I did not want to install, I had little vomit stains of Adobe installations that didn’t quite actually install, but installed.

So for example I had a new folder in the Applications folder called “Adobe After Effects CS4″ and inside there was an application named “Adobe After Effects CS4.app”. Except it isn’t an actual flipping application. It has a great big no entry icon on it because it isn’t an actual executable application.

In one sense the installer did what I expected: it did not install a usable After Effects CS4. In another sense it effing ignored what I expected by creating an installation folder for After Effects CS4 and then created an incomplete stub of the After Effects CS4 application.

I wish the Adobe CS4 installer had just done what I asked for. The Adobe installation and licensing blog is here.

To find reasons to use AppleScript, just leave your mental annoyance meter turned on.

But don’t forget to switch off your brain once you do start using AppleScript; the frustration of getting anything done with the miserable Macintosh applications that expose their workings via AppleScript never fails to kick my mental annoyance meter into the red.

The following paragraph employs sarcasm. I’ve just being having a wonderful time figuring out that Adobe InDesign CS3 keeps the list of items on a page sorted by layer, but sorted in reverse layer order and then sorted forward within each layer. This makes it super sweet when you want to determine if box A in layer 1 overlaps box B in layer 2. Thanks Adobe! Another genius implementation from you guys! You guys fucking rock!

And it isn’t just the fault of the applications you want to script, the language itself is intentionally imprecise in trying to allow programs to be written in natural language. “Whether this English-likeness is a good thing is debateable,” writes Matt Neuberg, but he is being polite because if there is any debate on this question it is a fucking short debate: AppleScript’s English-likeness only serves to have you make mistakes with more confidence.

There is an interesting history of AppleScript which tantalizes the present-day scripter with the revelation that the language authors wrote a syntax “which resembled Java” but never released it, preferring to support scripts written in fucking French and fucking Japanese!

But Tweetdeck requires the Adobe AIR runtime. And the Adobe AIR 1.5 installer takes Adobe’s favourite approach of ignoring Mac OS X’s package installer format in favour of a custom installer application.

When you open the installer, it takes a few seconds and then gives you a license agreement. Here’s an excerpt:

2.3 Distribution. This license does not grant you the right to sublicense or distribute the Software. For information about obtaining the right to distribute the Software on tangible media or through an internal network or with your product or service please refer to…

I read that as explicitly banning any efforts to create a package to ease the pain of deploying AIR across a bunch of Macs. Damn it.

Clicking Accept moves you to the installation proper, and Adobe loses a few more points by immediately throwing up an authentication dialog box. Why does this dialog appear? What am I about to install? If only this was a package installer I could have looked at the installation manifest to get an idea of what was going to happen before granting the installer free rein to my computer.

Turns out that everything you care about is installed in /Library/Frameworks/Adobe AIR.framework and /Applications/Utilities/Adobe AIR Application Installer.app and /Applications/Utilities/Adobe AIR Uninstaller.app. For some reason the installer also touches a couple of files in /Users/Shared/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/Updater and slips a couple utility apps in your Library somewhere. You can ignore those.

It feels particularly wrong when non-system applications put things in the Utilities folder – it is effectively a special system directory, and its contents are tools for tinkering with the system configuration or for diagnostics. Adobe Creative Suite 3 likes to create a folder Adobe Installers in there and Adobe Utilities, just in case you haven’t worked out how much you need their software on your computer.

Heaven is almost certainly running System 6.0.8. Nothing is installed without Font DA Mover.

From the miserable user guide:

Adobe Download Manager is a stand-alone application that improves the process of downloading files from Adobe. Adobe Download Manager provides the following benefits:

Here the document explains the benefits point by point. I dislike those benefits.

• Selects an Adobe product download destination

On a Mac, Adobe download manager ignores your download destination as set in the browser’s preferences. For Mac OS X 10.5 Apple went so far as to add a “Downloads” folder to the standard set of folders in an account. Adobe download manager prefers the “Desktop” and thinks you are wrong.

• Allows you to pause downloads
• Allows you to resume interrupted downloads

My browser already allows me to pause and resume downloads.

• Allows you to download multiple files from a single links

I don’t see why clicking a single link and unexpectedly getting multiple downloads is good. Other single links don’t do that.

• Allows you to download your products securely

As well as supporting HTTP, my browser supports an encrypted version known as HTTPS.

• Verifies download integrity and completion

I accept that a regular download says nothing about the integrity of the file itself, and that this can be a problem. The geeky / secure way to fix this is to provide verifiable checksums for file downloads. But if the file is inadvertently corrupted then a disk image is likely to fail to mount (so you would know it was incomplete). If the file is maliciously corrupted then why would trusting Adobe’s Java download manager to verify the file be any better than trusting the file in the first place?

• Leads you to the installation of your product

On a Mac there are existing guidelines for packaging software which do a better job of leading the user to the start of the installation process.

• Provides a simple interface

It is simple. But the existing download methods are simple, and are familiar. Why would a new simple interface be necessary?

• Provides System Tray downloading (Windows only)

Good for them. But irrelevant for Macintosh users, as is the helpful text on the download page that explains I will be downloading two files, an .exe and a 7zip archive, both of which are needed (unless you download the Mac version).

• Provides background downloading

You mean even when I’ve explicitly quit my browser session your downloader ignores me and keeps working? Why?

• Provides assistance with finding the download

If the download was saved in the expected folder and used the recommended install behaviour then I wouldn’t flipping need your assistance you arrogant twats.

Ugh.

Download managers were genuinely useful ten years ago when large file transfers were likely to be interrupted either because the server was at capacity or the client’s connection was unreliable (i.e. dial-up modems being forcibly disconnected every hour by your ISP). But I don’t need a download manager in 2009, not even when downloading a 1.36 gigabyte disk image file. I have a 40 megabit pipe and I don’t want to download another piece of software just so I can download a piece of software.

However Adobe’s download manager is not optional. If you want to download the Flash CS4 trial then you are required to use their downloader. Other Adobe patches and updaters are available without having to install the download manager, but this one absolutely will not work without you running a Java application in your browser!

But it is unnecessary. My browser is perfectly capable of saving the file to disk in a timely fashion, and it even knows how to pause and resume a transfer because it understands how to send the Range header in an HTTP request.

I wish Adobe would put the right people back in charge. The Java downloader is a pretty minor thing, but it smacks of a disregard for the simple and standardized mechanisms provided by a platform. In this respect it is much like Adobe’s continued refusal to kill their terrible custom Mac installers.

Once I got Flash CS4 up and running I found myself wondering why it kept crashing. And then I realized that Adobe has changed the behaviour for Flash CS4 so that closing the final window quits the application…

My spirits sank lower.