Adobe Creative Suite 3 - Great programs, lousy updater

Some tidbits on the Adobe Creative Suite 3...

(Note: If you don't know what the Adobe Creative Suite (CS) is, you probably don't need it. It's an expensive collection of the Adobe professional apps, and there are several flavors of it. The main two are Standard, for designers; and Premium, for designers who also get into Flash animations and Web stuff. The various suites' programs include Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat (the full authoring version), InDesign, Bridge, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver, among others. There are also versions that include production tools for video graphics, sound editing, etc).

This newest version, CS3, packs a lot of improvements as well as new features. Those running Intel Macs will notice a DRAMATIC speed improvement, especially if you've been hobbling along with CS1 and CS2. That's because it was written for the intel platform. The older apps were written for the G5 and G4 chips, and therefore go through an "emulation" so that they can even work at all.

Installation is pretty straightforward, although it's a LOT of data to contend with (around 3 gigs). Stability has been very good. I don't push it as hard as full-time creative pros might, so maybe I haven't exposed any bugs yet. But so far, so good.

What is NOT cool about CS3 is the Adobe Updater. Run it after a virgin CS3 install, and it wants to download between 300-500 megs of updates depending on which suite version you have. OK, that's fine. We understand.

The thing is, there are so many little parts to be updated that it's difficult to just go to the Adobe web site and grab the updates separately. Why would you want to do that, and not just let the updater handle it? That might be fine for individuals, but we I.T. folks prefer to get them directly so that we can store a single set of updaters on our own server and apply the updates from there. Beats downloading them over and over again on each computer we manage. Plus, we might not even have the programs ourselves, so Adobe Updater is useless to us (although I do happen have them :-)

But I found a really good workaround for this, after becoming frustrated about 5 computers into the job...

Run the Updater on computer with a fresh CS install. Let it download everything it wants. BUT, and this is critical - notice that when it's done downloading, the Updater will ask you for your Mac username and password before beginning the installation.

Leave that username/password dialog box alone for now, and in the Finder navigate to Users//Library/Application Support/Adobe/Updater 5.

Locate the folder called "Install," and copy it anywhere else - to another computer, or your file server, or even to the desktop (hold down the Option key while dragging a folder to make a copy of it rather than MOVE it).

This Install folder contains all of the components which the Adobe Updater just finished downloading. If you didn't first make a copy of the Install folder to store elsewhere, upon completing the actual updates, Adobe Updater DELETES all of this stuff. I guess they're trying to save you hard drive space or something.

But if you follow these instructions, you can now take that copy of the Install folder to any other Mac needing CS3 updates, and run updates at-will - without downloading from the Internet all over again. Nice. Below is a screenshot of the updaters I've collected on our file server (all of the folders contain installers; I just opened up a few so that you can get an idea of what's inside).



I haven't found any issues with the order of installation yet - I've just been starting at the top and working my way down, running one update at a time. And the updates for one suite seem to work fine for the others. After all, the suites are just different bundling of the same applications WITH ONE CRITICAL EXCEPTION. Photoshop is different in the Standard and Premium versions. In Premium, it's called Photoshop CS3 Extended, and it requires a separate download. Don't worry, if you try to run the CS3 Extended updater, it just "thinks" for a second and goes away, no harm no foul.

Well, if you've got some Adobe CS3 machines to tend to, happy updating! It still takes a long time, but at least you aren't sucking down all your bandwidth.

For those of you who never get into this sort of stuff, why did you read this far? Kidding. Maybe you were just curious about the world of professional desktop publishing software. Happens all the time!