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!

Another reason Firefox 3 rocks

We're all photographers these days, aren't we? People love taking photos, with digital cameras and cell phones making it easy to accumulate loads of snapshots without all the cost of getting film developed. Add to that all the free Web photo hosting services out there and you've got a world crazy about photos. I wonder how many pictures are taken and shared each and every day?

Anyhow, what I personally have never been crazy about is how most Web browsers rendered the color on my photos. They don't look the same on the Web as they do on my computer's screen, using my programs such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Bridge, etc. They look flat.

The reason? (you knew one was coming!) Until now, most Web browsers didn't support the sRGB color profile. My software - and the software most other photographers use - exports Jpegs for the Web using this sRGB profile. And then Internet Explorer or Firefox 2 just flat out ignores it. (note: If you shoot jpeg on a point-and-shoot and just upload with no adjustments, ironically enough, you might not notice this difference. That's because Jpegs are adjusted in-camera and usually really boost up the saturation and contrast beyond what I personally feel looks "natural." So viewed through the browser, these kinds of images - a little hot to begin with - actually end up looking normal).

Safari on the Mac (and now Safari for Windows) has always supported color profiles, so images viewed thru Safari should look just fine. Now Firefox 3.0 has joined the party, which means that the sRGB color space is finally supported by a major browser. It's not on by default, but fortunately pretty easy to enable. Here are the instructions:

• Enter about:config in the address bar - hit Enter.
• Scroll down to 'gfx.color.management.enabled'
• Clicking twice on this line triggers between TRUE and FALSE.
• Restart Firefox, and you're set.

Here are some photos I put up to help test out colors in Web browsers. Check them out with Internet Explorer and Firefox, side by side, and see how they look to you. They're nothing special in terms of content; just useful for looking at colors.

http://www.vincedistefano.com/lancasterscenes/

See the sliver of sky on the upper left on the dome/clock photo? It looks light blue, just like the sky did on the day I took it - and just like my camera LCD and Lightroom displayed it. When I looked at this photo in IE, however, it barely had any blue at all and was closer to light grey.

Hopefully all my friends over at photo.net upgrade to Firefox 3 soon as well; maybe my ratings will improve once my photos are viewed a little closer to the way I meant them to be seen. :-)

Firefox 3

I've recommended the Firefox web browser (available for Mac and Windows) to a lot of people. After spending about a week using this latest, greatest version 3, I can tell you that it's an even easier recommendation to make. Why's that, you ask?

First, it's definitely more responsive, and tests show that it has a lower memory footprint. That means it uses less RAM for the same tasks, freeing up memory for your other (more, ahem, RAM-hogging) applications. As somebody who opens a lot of tabs, whatever improvements they made to keep the browser from slowing down with lots of tabs is most welcome.

Second, there are lots of little tweaks and additions geared towards making your web browsing life more enjoyable and productive. For example, the Bookmarks toolbar gives you a "Most Visited" option, the usefulness of which should be apparent. There's also a "recently bookmarked" feature that comes in handy. In fact, the whole Bookmarks area has been overhauled, so check it out.

The "Awesome Bar" is nice too. Here's how Firefox describes it:

"The Awesome Bar is the affectionate name for the new Firefox 3 Smart Location Bar. The new location bar learns as you use it, adapting to your preferences and making your browsing more personal. When you type in text, the auto-complete function displays possible matching sites from your browsing history, bookmarks, and tags. This makes it easy to scan the list and quickly identify the site you want to visit. Our beta testers started calling it the Awesome Bar and the name stuck!"

I also really like the "identity" notifier, which shows up to the left of your location bar. It's very helpful for identifying secure sites - much more so than the old-school, wee-little lock hidden down at the bottom of the screen almost like an afterthought on older versions. Anyways, you can hover over this area (shown below - the green area on the left) and get useful info about the site you're visiting.

I haven't even looked into the security improvements, but supposedly it's more impervious to malware than previous versions or other browsers.

On Windows, Firefox 3 will replace your version 2 - so if you're the sort with a lot of Firefox 2.0 plug-ins you just can't live without, check to see if your plug in providers have upgraded to support 3 yet. Otherwise, hold off. On the Mac, the new and old version can coexist provided you rename the old version to "Firefox 2."

The FF people were hoping for a million downloads on "opening day," knowing that a LOT of people were looking forward to this release. They far surpassed it. Eight million Web users can't be wrong, so give it a try yourself.