adobe acrobat is unacceptable
Yesterday’s post garnered an actual response from Comcast (though we’ll see if anything comes of it), so while I’m hot, I figure I’d try complaining about another frustrating bit of software. It’s not so much a complaint as a farewell, but in any case I get to enumerate the software’s many failings, so I’m happy in that Jay Sherman sort of way.
I’m done with Adobe Acrobat. What happened? Snow Leopard happened. Mac OS 10.6 gives me the freedom to abandon Acrobat for Preview, which has a slew of new features in this latest upgrade. In the newest version of Preview you can grab a PDF, highlight text in multiple colors, add annotations, even draw on the damn thing, and save everything you’ve done. Acrobat can do this too (well, you only get one highlighter color), but it does it at about half the speed of Preview.
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but I’m in grad school.1 I read lots and lots of research papers, which these days are offered almost exclusively in PDF format. Good on Adobe for cornering the market, I suppose, but shame on Adobe for neglecting the program used to read their ubiquitous document format. Waiting for Acrobat to load has the distinct feeling of waiting around for the Second Coming. Only it’s some kind of Bizarro World Second Coming, where Jesus ascends from Hell to rough you up a bit before rapturing all the sex offenders and tax attorneys.
Using Adobe Acrobat is a lesson in agony. The actual documents scroll slowly and choppily, making it feel as if I’m trawling through text instead of skimming. In a world where we measure our processor speed in gigahertz and dedicated graphics cards are the norm even in laptops, such basic performance issues are inexcusable. Acrobat’s primary function, the thing you’re going to use it for 999 times out of 1,000, is the reading (and possibly annotating) of a document. This should be a smooth, seamless experience. I shouldn’t have to wait for what feels like an eternity just for the program to open, nor should I have to think twice about whether I want to go through the effort of scrolling back to the top of a document.
Preview suffers none of these performance issues, and it’s free. With its added Snow Leopard features, Acrobat has no conceivable advantage over it, at least from the perspective of casual users (which, I should point, are 99% of all Acrobat users). So what the hell happened, Adobe? Why does Acrobat run so poorly? Didn’t you guys start on the Mac? What went so horribly wrong? Until you figure it out, I’m sticking with Apple’s Preview.
- Sarcasm! Hah! ∧
Funny, a few weeks ago a co-worker and I were comparing Adobe gripes. There was a pretty fun website out there that we both thought was fairly apt, and we both agreed that Acrobat was just way too slow. The worst is PDFs made out of images — which are partly the creator’s fault, but honestly, how hard is it to scroll what is essentially a compressed TIFF?
Though personally, I’d just like them to un-fuck Illustrator so that you don’t have to switch between six different vector tools when editing a path (add, edit, convert nodes? Why can’t I just hold down a modifier key?)
You can also try the Foxit PDF reader. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/
Free, small, and fast. Don’t know how it compares with Preview, but maybe you could tell us.