Oh sure, you say, and Microsoft are a load of tarts. But I have decided this day to aim my hate at Adobe, makers of popular, overpriced, bloated "productivity" software.
This hate doesn't stem from my lost tech support job, where everyone kept asking me how to use Adobe products I was to poor too purchase legal copies of. It doesn't even stem from the fact that employers are so snobby about Photoshop that users of Paint Shop Pro are passed over for jobs when they call Adobe's layout nasty looking.
No, this hate comes from the 65 megabytes of hard drive space I recently donated to Adobe for their latest Reader. It does nothing else. Distiller isn't included, PDFs cannot be created with this large hunk of crap, no, it's only there to stall for a minute while it loads itself, and then shows me something that could have been done in bloody HTML anyway.
But my hate does not lie with the PDF format. No, PDFs themselves are neat, what bothers me is the Reader.
So I went and found a better one.
FoxitReader describes itself as the best reader for everyday, and it bloody well is.
It loads PDFs right off the web the same as Adobe, lets me save them, print, find, it's exactly the same as Adobe...except for two things.
The system requirements for Adobe Reader 7.0.8 are Windows 2000 and up. 192 RAM is needed, for what, I have no idea. Foxit works on anything from Windows 95 up.
Adobe Reader 7.0.8 takes up 64.80MB of disk space--or more, depending on the installation, while FoxitReader takes 2.76MB. Foxit's got one file. No installer, it just works.
Explain to me how this is possible.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
I hate Adobe.
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1 comment:
While I can't follow you into the gates of hell on this one, in terms of reader, yeah, definitely.
Adobe has the #1 page layout program I've ever used in InDesign (NO Quark, XPress is NOT good. It hasn't been close since 5. Go away you filthy pile of trash.), Photoshop is still better than any other imaging program I have access to (there aren't any real alternatives on a Mac), and aside from insisting on adding alpha transparency to VECTOR ART, Illustrator isn't as horrendous as it could be.
Price-wise, yeah I hear you, I can think of 100 other things i could have done with that money. I saved to buy my first versions, I worked to afford the upgrades and I'll tell you what, Quark is the one I wouldn't do that with again. Not to say its not prohibitively expensive, it is. Especially when you require complete SUITES. I can't vouch for PSP since they don't make a mac version… *looks away innocently*
Yet, I can guarantee my G4 can't install reader at all and the version of reader on my G5 is 89.7 meg and quits on its own when opening PDF's over 18 pages. Apple has Preview, billed as the fastest PDF viewer available, and it is a good 40 seconds faster to first page display yet only footprints 2.9 meg.
Preview DOESN'T open off the web, however the OS is PDF driven graphically so without reader installed, somehow Safari still displays PDF if you don't have it set for download. The only drawback to Preview (which also handles 98% of image formats, too)? It displays everything as an image, so in essence youre printing a picture, not text. Thats bad.
At least theres GhostScript and GhostView…
Poo on reader.
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