Adobe Blog

This feels particularly egregious because of our unspoken assumption that Adobe, of all companies, should have "excellence in design" somewhere on its list of core guiding principles (I know, I know, hear me out). It feels like there should be someone internally at some point who says "hold on, this really goes against who we are as a company, what happened here".

It's instructive to look at how a company presents itself to the public, so I went looking at what Adobe says about itself, and what is the first instance I can find of a principle or value that this bad UX violates.

Google result:

> Adobe: Creative, marketing and document management solutions
> Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. We help our customers create, deliver and optimize content and applications.

About page:

>Changing the world through personalized digital experiences.
>Adobe empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life. From creators and students to small businesses, global enterprises, and nonprofit organizations — customers choose Adobe products to ideate, collaborate, be more productive, drive business growth, and build remarkable experiences.

>Creative Cloud
>Industry-leading photography, design, illustration, and video apps that professionals rely on to do their best work.

Company values:
https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/07/evolving-adobes-values-culture

>Creativity is not only what we enable for the world but it’s…

The PDF specification is wild. My current favourite trivia is that it supports all of Photoshop's layer blend modes for rendering overlapping elements.[1] My second-favourite is that it supports appended content that modifies earlier content, so one should always look for forensic evidence in all distinct versions represented in a given file.[2]

It's also a fun example of the futility of DRM. The spec includes password-based encryption, and allows for different "owner" and "user" passwords. There's a bitfield with options for things like "prevent printing", "prevent copying text", and so forth,[3] but because reading the document necessarily involves decrypting it, one can use the "user" password to open an encrypted PDF in a non-compliant tool,[4] then save the unencrypted version to get an editable equivalent.

[1] "More than just transparency" section of https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2022/01/31/20-years-of-transparency-in-pdf

[2] https://blog.didierstevens.com/2008/05/07/solving-a-little-pdf-puzzle/

[3] Page 61 of https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandards/PDF32000_2008.pdf

[4] For example, a script that uses the pypdf library.

I'm a front-end developer who studied graphic design. A very important part of UX is app flow and navigating users through your interface in a seamless, graceful way.

When I was studying UI/UX something that helped me a lot was reading Google Material guidelines. Even if you're not using a Material UI library (like @angular/material), the guideline thoroughly explains what a good UI/UX should feel like, look like, and work.

Some links:
- https://material.io/design/
- https://www.usability.gov/about-us/index.html (this is more for government websites, but still a good source of information)
- https://medium.com/@fluidui (FluidUI is an online tool for creating user stories and design prototypes, in their Medium blog they have a vast list of resources and detailed information.
- https://theblog.adobe.com/4-golden-rules-ui-design/ (very good read)

Hope this helps.

Cheers.

You can restrict some activities, but not all. In particular you can't restrict using code as an AI training set. To be fair the law isn't totally clear here though.

For example see https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2020/02/27/copyrights-in-the-era-of-ai.html

Several cases – most notably the litigation surrounding Google Books – suggest that using copyrighted works for the non-expressive purpose of training AI models amounts to fair use.

So Copilot itself is not infringing when it trains these models. Individual people using Copilot are probably safe as well since small accidental copyright infringements are usually okay, but perhaps some cases it would run into trouble.

You can tell Copilot is using code under fair use, not according to a license, because almost all licenses require you to maintain the license and attribution and Copilot doesn't do that.

I remember learning PostScript (~1993?) by reading the Red Book, and thinking how awesome it was that this company Adobe, which I'd never heard of, had created a new programming language just to solve once and for all the problem of specifying vector graphics to a printer, and had written such a nice book to help others use the language. It was magical to be able to write a text file in emacs, send it to the printer, and have cool images come out.

Good old days.

btw PDF started as Project Camelot at Adobe in ~1990, as a way to capture the results of executing a PostScript program [1]. I'm curious if there is still that kind of foundational innovation happening at Adobe, and if not, why it died?

[1] https://blog.adobe.com/en/2018/06/14/evolution-digital-document-celebrating-adobe-acrobats-25th-anniversary

Adobe's "Press Release" [1]:

> Better with Blender, together: Adobe partners with Blender on development fund and new plugins

> [...]

> First, I am thrilled to announce that we’re joining the Blender Development Fund to help ensure the longevity and success of this dynamic open-source community. Additionally, we are going to help creators work with the best of Adobe right in Blender by launching two new plugins — Substance 3D [2] in Blender and Mixamo Auto-Control Rig Plugin [3] for Blender (both now available, in beta).

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All in all, these plugins sound like marketplaces for Shaders and Animation Curves, respectively

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[1] https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/07/20/blender-development-fund-partnership.html

[2] https://www.substance3d.com/

[3] https://www.mixamo.com/