Betalogue

I downloaded this Illustrator update a while ago, but only got around to installing it today. (NOTE: This link doesn’t work with Safari. You need to use another browser such as Camino instead.)

I double-clicked on the .dmg file that I had downloaded, and Mac OS X dutifully mounted the disk image. Of course, I expected the disk image to contain an installer file that can be double-clicked on — either one of those .pkg files that Apple uses or one of those older VISE installers that legacy developers such as Adobe and Microsoft still use.

To my utter disbelief, however, I saw that the disk image only contained two files of the “Shared Library” kind and a PDF file with instructions on how to install these files. No installer. Not even an AppleScript.

And the instructions in the PDF actually explain to you how to navigate to the Adobe Illustrator application file itself, control-click on it and select “Show Package Contents” in order to display the innards of the file in the Finder. You then have to browse to the appropriate folder and remove the two older versions of the library files and copy the new ones instead.

Can you believe this? Adobe have actually become so lazy and user-hostile that they now require their users to patch their applications manually!

What is next? Manual C++ coding for the rest of us? Good grief.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 at 8:40 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.