Betalogue

I have already had the opportunity to mention the decidedly less-than-stellar software update experience delivered by Adobe. First there was the patch for Illustrator that actually required you to fix the application yourself! Then there was the lousy Adobe Reader 7 installer. And now this…

I have Adobe Creative Suite 2. I want to make sure all applications are up-to-date. My copy of Acrobat Professional is currently at 7.0.3. The latest version is 7.0.7. Adobe CS 2 comes with its own updater application, but since I am on dial-up and most of Adobe’s updates are gigantic files, I have to go to a location with high-speed Internet access and download the stand-alone updaters there and then copy them to my home machine and run them manually.

So I obtain the Acrobat Pro 7.0.7 updater (46 MB) and try to run it. The updater asks me to locate the Acrobat Pro application myself manually. Fine. I locate it and select it. Then I get this message:

“The selected application’s version is outside the range that can be updated with this installer.” I suppose this could mean two things: either my copy of Acrobat Pro is not the “right” version number (it’s 7.0.3) or it’s not in the appropriate location. I suspect it is the former, but since I have installed the Adobe CS 2 applications on a separate partition (which is fully supported by the Adobe CS 2 installer, by the way, although it still installs a few things on the startup volume just the same), I figure I’d better try with a copy of the application on the startup volume. So I copy the Acrobat Pro application folder to the “Applications” folder on my startup volume (where it would normally be with the default settings in the installer) and try to run the updater again. No luck.

A little bit of online research seems to indicate that Adobe’s updaters are actually incremental and that you have to install all the previous updaters first. Given that the sequence of updaters for Acrobat Pro is the following:

Acrobat Pro 7.0.1
Acrobat Pro 7.0.2
Acrobat Pro 7.0.3
Acrobat Pro 7.0.5
Acrobat Pro 7.0.7

(i.e. no 7.0.4 and no 7.0.6), and given the actual sizes of the updaters, this seems a bit baffling, but I am willing to give it a try. So I obtain from my high-speed Internet location the 7.0.5 updater that I do not have, which weighs 84 MB (!) and has the wonderfully user friendly name “Ac705PrP_ddnsfsip.dmg.” And I try to apply it to my copy of Acrobat Pro 7.0.3. It asks me to locate the application again, which I do, and then I get this:

“An invalid application was selected.” Bloody hell!

Again, I try to copy the application to the startup volume, just in case. But this gives me the same result.

I give up. This is a complete and utter waste of time. And I am not the only one. A quick search through the Adobe forums returns a couple of threads, and I also find threads elsewhere about similar problems. Unfortunately, none of them offer any solution that I haven’t yet tried, short of reinstalling the entire bloody thing.

I don’t know if the 7.0.7 update is important, but obviously it refuses to work for me. I am not about to uninstall the entire CS 2 suite and reinstall it in the default location on the startup volume just to see if the 7.0.7 updater might work then.

Adobe products are quickly becoming complete and utter crap.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 3:30 pm 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.