LiveCycle Designer 8.0 is the biggest piece of crap I have ever used.

Question

I have been digitizing some forms for a customer, and this is my first experience with this product. It has not been a good one. I have been using the 30-day trial, and really don't want to buy it now. Here is my list of problems:
1. When you copy and paste, or move and object, there is a fade effect. On some of my machines, this is not noticeable, but on some, it is very noticeable. There is no way that I have found to turn it off.
2. When you copy and item, you are moved to a seemingly random place on the page. Why does the page even need to move when you copy something?
3. When you move an item, you are moved to a seemingly random place on the page. Shouldn't it center me on the item, or at least do something that makes sense?
4. When you paste an item, you are moved to a seemingly random place on the page. Wouldn't it make sense to paste it in the center of the page, or even close to where it came from.?
5. Inability to group text / numerical fields. When I am making a form with over 200 individual fields, it would really help to be able to group them in some sort of logical order.
6. The interface is not standard, like most of the other Adobe products are. Shouldn't it be the same across all products by one manufacturer?
7. Why not have discreet horizontal/vertical guides, instead of crosshairs? At least give me the option.
8. When aligning something to a guide, why does it line directly on the guide for the top and left sides, but aligns one pixel in on the right and bottom?
9. Why do I line up to text fields, and then later those fields are not lined up anymore?
I have used a lot of Adobe products in the past, and haven't used one this bad since PageMaker 6.5. Come one Adobe, you have a lot of good products...
This is definitely not something my company will purchase.

Answer 1

funny... i am currently working on a bunch of forms in LiveCycle and I am sooo incredibly peeved at this application that I searched for "LiveCycle is a piece of crap" and found this post. =)
Yes, i know the that this post is from over a year ago, but it is obvious they havent made any improvements to the software.
I'll ditto what Jeff said and add
10.the debugger constantly disappears (yes, I followed the directions in the "help" file). I have to constantly flip between Acrobat Pro and LiveCycle, close Acrobat Pro, come back, stand on my head, while balancing a banana on my nose to get it to stay. Seriously, I feel like I'm dealing with a set of old-school TV rabbit ears trying to tune in a distant station
11. the debugger is two lines off in its error reporting. If it says you have an error at line 39, the error is REALLY at line 37. Took me forever and a ton of messageBoxes to finally figure this out.
12. The debugger doesnt actually support breakpoints, watches, etc inside of livecycle. You can set a breakpoint, but your code isnt visible while you are in preview mode, so what good is it? What good is stepping into your code if you cant SEE your code?
13. If I have two documents open, and select an object from one via the Hierarchy palette, the view of that document jumps to the beginning of the document.
14. Why cant you drag and drop objects from the hierarchy palette from one open document to another??
15. Why isnt there a keyboard shortcut to flip between open documents?? It SHOULD be Ctrl+Tab (following what 90% of other programs use), but instead that flips between the document's different view tabs.
16. Why cant you click+hold+drag from the lower-right to the upper left to select multiple objects at once?
17. When you paste in a subForm with its objects, it makes the subForm area on the page HUGE, even if the objects in the subForm are fairly small
18. When you create a new subForm in the hierarchy pallete, the view in the palette jumps to the very top object, and you have to scroll all the way back down and find your unnamed subform
19. Why are pdfs produced in LiveCycle not compatible with Acrobat Pro's Accessibility Checker? This one is HUGE. I spent over a week with our Adaptive Computing department trying to figure out why my pdfs were failing the accessibility checker when I had followed every known guide available on producing accessible pdfs. Even more frustrating, despite all the errors Acrobat Pro said were there, JAWS and all the other accessible technologies were able to use my pdfs just fine.
20. Why do you have to manually add in a guide line via measurement first and then drag it to where it really needs to be? Why cant you just grab the ruler and drag a guideline where you want it like photoshop? Yes, I know I can drag from the upper left and get both a vertical and horizontal line, but if i only need one, then I have to drag the other one back off the document.
I could keep going on and on and on....