Adobe Creative Suite 2
Let me start off by saying that Adobe, with this latest, most comprehensive offering to date, has raised the bar to such a degree that competitors would be hard pressed to even think about matching it in terms of features and component integration with the whole. Including Illustrator, Adobe’s vector graphics package, Photoshop, the raster graphics wonder, InDesign, their top of the line desktop publishing application and GoLive web authoring environment, Creative Suite 2 is fairly bursting at the seams with digital goodness. This mammoth suite of imaging and publishing tools quite simply rocks – and there are indeed few things I would say that about.
Now that that’s out of the way however, I’d like to delve into the first experience a user has with any software product: the installation. Adobe Creative Suite 2 has in this regard given me the exact opposite impression of that indicated in the preceding paragraph. Frankly, the installation process is total crap.
When attempting to first install the 4 CDs which comprise the application, my entire system locked up rock solid 5 times in a row. After I finally managed to install it on my sixth attempt, I found myself having to clean up the mess of icons and folders Adobe saw fit to leave strewn all over my PC and deal with the over 102 megabytes of unwanted background processes they clearly felt I needed bogging down my machine every time I started it – whether I was running Adobe products or not. Given Photoshop itself only uses around 60 megs, I found this situation ludicrous.
Ok, well now that I feel better having gotten that off my chest, I’ll move on to how great I think this suite is – once its installation issues have been dealt with.