Adobe Creative Suite Premium: The crappiest installer

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
February 16th, 2005 • 9:34 am

For some reason, I have had to install Adobe’s Creative Suite (Premium Edition) quite a few times lately. And I just cannot believe how bad the installer is.

It’s on two CDs, but even if you only want to install a component that’s on the second CD, you have to launch the installer on the first CD first.

There is a serial number for the entire suite, and then a separate one for GoLive.

No matter how many times I have tried, invariably if I try to install everything at once (“Easy Install” option), the installation of Illustrator fails. The problem appears to be that the “main” installer actually launches separate installers for each application (even though you cannot launch these individual installers yourself), and tries to keep in sync with what these other installers are doing. And obviously it is unable to keep in sync with the Illustrator
installer, for whatever reason. The main installer goes to the last screen that confirms that the installation is finished — even though the Illustrator installation is still in progress.

Then the Illustrator installation appears to finish on its own, but if you try to launch Illustrator after that, it complains that the application is “damaged”.

I end up having to re-run the whole installer and choose “Custom Install” and select Illustrator only and make sure that I don’t do anything else with the computer while the installer is running. Even though the installation takes a bloody long time, I think the fact that I leave the main installer in the background to do something else is part of the reason why it keeps losing sync with the Illustrator installer.

But really, what a crappy installer. Of course it doesn’t use Apple’s installation package format. It has to use its own proprietary thing. It’s positively awful.


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