A Tumblr collecting screenshots and complaints about bad user interface and engineering decisions in Adobe products like Photoshop and Flash.
HN commenters recommend it as the place where Adobe complaints are collected, one calling it wonderful, another noting it is less educational than other critiques.
I'm surprised at the number of Adobe supporters in this thread; it's Stockholm syndrome-esque.
For those who like the UI: Sure, it's better than the GiMP. But it's still awful. http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ has been on HN before. It's a compendium of more-or-less small things that are just howlingly wrong.
For those suggesting the installers aren't awful, Bynkii has spent plenty of time destroying that idea (and, yes, he swears):
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/dear_adobe.html (the installer rant that ultimately led to a meeting with Adobe and the installer team starting a blog)
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/10/why_wont_they_stop.html (Why install two out-of-date copies of Opera, Adobe?)
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/02/adobe_takes_back_the_crown.html (Comedy licensing ineptness)
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2008/11/dont_manage_the_message_tell_t.html (on John Nack's message-massaging over the installer nightmare)
So, Adobe software "shamefully, frustratingly incompetent"? Seems spot-on to me. The most frustrating and depressing thing is that it wasn't always this way. This is the firm that gave us Postscript, Photoshop, usable digital typography, Illustrator, PDFs and arguably played a large role in the birth of DTP, FFS. How have they become this marketing-encumbered hell-shop, trying to ram Flash everywhere and stamping all over their heritage?
Just because it's been the only viable solution, doesn't mean it's a good one.
Between, slow speed, a history of horrible support for non-windows system, a kludge of vector animations morphed into other purposes with plenty of cruft along the way.
Also security vulnerabilities...
And how long has that been the situation?
Additionally it's not the lack of an open source solution, it's that the worlds most popular web browser (IE) has been off doing it's own thing, mostly reacting, rather then advancing. Microsoft's solution to Flash is their own VM/Plugin (SilverLight, before that ActiveX). It furthers their platform and technology stack.
Lastly, Adobe themselves does not have the best track record in software development.
See http://adobegripes.tumblr.com
The reason flash wasn't included on the cell phone was battery life:
http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/231806385/adobe-gets-bitchy-over-the-iphone-and-flash-bit
Non-windows versions of flash have turned out to be incredibly inefficient: relatively simple flash banner ads make my otherwise near idle mac go wild. From what I've seen, it's even less efficient on Linux. Battery life is still going to be a huge concern for the apple tablet. If adobe gets its sh*t together, it may yet come to the tablet/iPhone OS. Until that time, it would be ridiculous for apple to allow that poorly designed of a virtual machine onto its otherwise energy efficient hardware.
From what I've seen of the CS5 packaging for iPhone,
there are no native UI controls. Adobe claims to have
a project to port Flex to iPhone, and I can't assume
that it will use native UI controls.
Adobe did not even bother with their own apps, just visit
http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/
A couple of telling examples:
http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/296745150/photoshop-why-is-the-file-info-panel-made-in
http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/236090781/the-many-sliders-of-photoshop-cs4
"This spontaneous reaction was in response to a blog that attempted to be humorous by using the word 'fucking' multiple times in reference to Adobe’s UIs which were perceived as lacking a native look and feel."
I assume he means this hilarious Adobe UI gripe blog: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/
If growing up means not appreciating that blog, then color me prepubescent.
It's hardly surprising that Adobe has problems with almost every OS upgrade, a perousal of http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ will quickly show you what garbage software it is.