Capria.TV
It’s also time for Adobe to get off Rosetta. Every time I attempt to use the pathfinder tool in Adobe Illustrator, the application crashes. This is a well documented OS X 10.4.8 issue without a workaround short of downgrading to 10.4.7.
It’s pretty obvious that Apple maintains a Soviet-style beta program. While it’s easy to spot an Adobe or Avid or Microsoft beta tester, Apple beta testers are nowhere to be found. Yeah, I know, the NDA says you can’t tell anyone you’re a beta tester, but we all know who’s beta testing what – except with Apple products. Either they don’t have very many, or those they recruit aren’t really well situated in the industry. I suspect both.
Based on that cheery Cupertino culture, I can’t imagine telling Apple something’s broken. “That’s how it’s supposed to work.” “No it’s broken.” “You’re no longer a beta tester. Say anything about this publicly and we’ll turn our lawyers on you.”
Every Apple software update is followed by a chorus of “Has anyone tried this?” Like the Life cereal commercial from the 1970s… “I’m not gonna try it. You try it.” No one wants to play Mikey when it’s his business on the line.
When Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 was released a bunch of very common plug-ins and drivers caused it to crash upon launch. This tells me the beta testers were a pretty homogeneous bunch. I waited until the OS X 10.4.8 update got the all clear from video community. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow the discussion in the Adobe InDesign community. They discovered the Illustrator issues pretty quickly.
This is not all Apple’s fault. Adobe’s known the Intel machines were coming for a long time, yet the company still offers no timetable for Universal applications to be released. We can guess, but that’s about it. At least Avid’s been candid about how long it would take to get on Intel. (Sometime in December)
Am I going to switch to Windows? Probably not, unless the problems continue well into 2007. Am I going to ditch Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects? Probably not. Apple’s solutions are a ways away in image editing and motion graphics, and non-existent in illustration.
I guess that makes me an enabler of both companies’ bad behavior.
Additional sharing options
[...] All can be forgiven in quite a hurry (see previous post). For the single-seat, end-to-end shop Avid’s greatest advantage over Final Cut Pro has been in color correction. FCP has always required a third party tool to meet Avid’s color correction capabilities. [...]