Betalogue

Adobe’s applications have all kinds of quirks related to Adobe’s developers’ unwillingness or inability to follow appropriate standards and make sure their Mac applications behave like normal Mac OS X applications.

The latest one I have encountered has to do with the Clipboard shortcuts (command-C, command-V) within “Save As” dialog boxes.

If, for example, in a “Save As” dialog box in InDesign CS5.5, I select the current name of the file and press command-C to copy it to the Clipboard, I get a system beep and the name is not copied. Similarly, if I have something in the Clipboard and I bring up the “New Folder” sub-dialog and try to press command-V to paste the contents of the Clipboard, I get a system beep.

However, the menu commands themselves (in the “Edit” menu) are not greyed out and are still accessible. So I can use the menu commands to perform the operations I wish to perform in those dialog boxes. I just can’t use the keyboard shortcuts, which is a bit of a pain.

Adobe’s applications are the only ones where I have noticed this problem. So it is likely a bug specific to those applications. However, I cannot rule out the possibility that it is actually a bug in an old routine in Mac OS X that has not been updated and that only Adobe still uses, because they are so far behind in their adoption of modern software development standards. But if only Adobe uses the old routine, that proves that Apple is not really to blame, because it’s probably some deprecated routine that will be eliminated eventually.

Unfortunately, with developers like Adobe and Microsoft, it’s only when you eliminate old stuff that they are finally forced to do something about such problems, because their software ceases to work properly altogether. Until then, they are just content with buggy software that sort of works, as long as you are willing to live with all the quirks and annoyances that you paid hundreds of dollars for.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, November 10th, 2011 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.