Adobe seems to be the favorite whipping boy of designers and developers everywhere right now. Hell, I’ve even whipped up on them a bit. Some of the abuse is unwarranted; still other gripes are totally in line with some of Adobe’s confusing decisions. I wanted to use this quickie post to talk about two such gripes.
My workflow often has me taking screenshots of pieces of a design to sample colors from. I use Photoshop’s color picker to mix a color and get its hex code, which I paste into TextMate. The problem arises when I’ve left the picker open from selecting a previous color, and I drag a screenshot to Photoshop’s dock icon to open it. What happens? Nothing. The modal color picker is blocking the file from opening, and Photoshop gives no warning or indication of what’s going on. The easy solution is just to make the color picker a standard window that gets out of the way when file/open/save activities are going on. In a little bit of back and forth on Twitter with Jeffrey Tranberry, I’ve gotten some pointers to some third party pickers that kind of fix this. None are as good as a slightly spiffed up Adobe control would be. If I enable the Web sliders in the color palette I can sample and mix hex colors, but they’re split up between three inputs. The only way to copy the hex value out is either segment by segment or with a menu command (which has no keyboard equivalent.)
My other gripe involves open/save dialogs in Photoshop—and all of CS4 and 5. By default Adobe uses the expanded open/save dialog boxes in their floating variety rather than save sheets, and it just makes no sense to me. Jeffrey tells me that Adobe tried save sheets but beta testers hated them. I have absolutely no doubt this is true, but as designers we know how people feel about change. Adobe still has a lot of customers who are holding over from old versions and who don’t upgrade very often; if you’ve been looking at the combo box for ten years, the sheet is probably pretty jarring. But on a dual monitor setup with windows littered all over your workspace, sheets just work.
I’m going to stop kicking Adobe now. For all intents and purposes, CS5 is very good. Adobe doesn’t have the luxury of ushering in new paradigms of coolness with its UI anymore. They’re supporting repeat and corporate customers now, and have been for a long time. That goes a long way towards explaining the somewhat stale appearance of Photoshop and most all else in CS5. Still, these are those rarest of tools that it would be almost impossible for me to work without. I’ve tried Pixelmator and some of the other less expensive image editors out there; Pixelmator even solves the color picker issue. But for content creation, Photoshop’s toolset is the best. Attention competitors: make better content creation tools! Ignore all the workflow/pro-photog/whiz-bang jibber jabber. If you have the toolset and the key commands for quick content creation, people will flock.
