You Should Be Ashamed

Question

To the Adobe Help Team:
You should be ashamed.
Like many others I recently upgraded my CS6 suite. Much to my surprise when I installed the upgrade I was met with a completely re-written and broken HELP system.
Any attempt to access the help through one of the Creative Suite applications resulted in the following messages:
• Adobe Help Viewer is not installed and you are not connected to the Internet…
(all while I’m online AND searching through your forums for a fix)
• The tutorials require the Online help files installed with this product. You may need to re-install the help files.
(Re-installed the program twice - didn’t help).
I then tried to install the community help files from your online download links and received the following error message:
Sorry, an error has occurred.
This application cannot be installed because the installer has been misconfigured. Please contact the application author for assistance.
HUH? All downloadable links for help are misconfigured?
I then called tech. support. and after spending close to 2 hours on the phone with no resolution, I spent a further 7 hours of my own time to resolve this issue.
This included repeatedly updating the AIR application from your site.
Unfortunately nothing I did worked except when I launched the application “acrobat.com”. It asked me to update AIR and after doing so I was then able to connect to your online help from all the Creative Suite application except Flash.
Unfortunately then the ‘acrobat.com’ application then wouldn’t work, telling me I needed to update it but the download repeatedly failed with an error message #16820.
So please - tell me how is it that the current download for AIR you make available to your customers doesn’t work? And the one associated with ‘acrobat.com’ does?
How could you release a suite of applications without proper help? People spend thousands of dollars on your products and should be entitled to receive the complete software - including help. Having your PDF manuals available one month later is a slap in the face to your customers.
Flash wasn’t even connected to the online help - you had to release an immediate update to resolve this.
And where are all the welcome screens? They are missing from several of the apps.
Who did the beta testing?
Just who is in charge over there?
Now, let’s examine the AIR framework. This is a glitchy, problematic application. Always has been.
To start, there is no PDF “Read Me” supplied with the install to alert one to the changes to the HELP application. So to have an application launch, then disappear is confusing.  And to have to dig through the adobe site to find this ‘read me’ (buried in the forum no less) is ridiculous.
And if you launch it on your own, it takes forever to do so - appearing first as the corner of the window, then a interminable spinning beach ball and then finally the useless application window.
The new interface is horrible. Everything is grouped together so it’s very hard to identify and choose what you need. Further, nothing is actually available - it’s only entries for javascripts that (I assume) reference the online help. Although why these need to be 22.7MB beats me. And EVERYTHING is greyed out with no access anyway.
Just who thought it was good idea for users to see these background scripts?
And finally, in updating this AIR service it knocked out access to all previous local help. So I can no longer access my local help for earlier version of the Creative Suites (CS4, 5). Instead now I connect ONLY to your online help which is terrible. No way to bookmark anything, highlight anything, search effectively. Shame on you.
Can you explain why in updating the help system to something that doesn’t work you also destroyed that which did work?
Can you explain why your ‘help team’ thought it was a good idea to only give it’s customers online help? What about people who need help who aren’t connected to the internet?
And why if the help wasn’t ready - why wouldn’t you link the various creative suite applications’ help directly to the web instead of launching an ill-coded, useless AIR application? Surely if this is the 'bridge' application - code it so it works in the background and doesn't appear to confuse everyone.
You released an incomplete and broken product. It is not up to your customers to spend their time researching, testing and fixing things only to alert you to what is apparent at first use.
Help is a fundamental segment of the product and part of what we paid for.
So I repeat:
Who did the beta testing?
Just who is in charge over there?
Does the word ‘deadline’ and ‘release date’ hold any value for you?
Shame on you…
cindy

Answer 1

You guys are becoming a joke. No basic help files in your software? GENIUS! I'm a freelance digital artist and I'm spreading the word about Adobe's new policy toward customers: "screw 'em". Does Adobe promote people with the most radical ideas, even if those ideas are the
stupidest and most misconceived?
I can imagine the meeting for the CS6 dev team:
------------ begin scene ------------
A corporate board room, much like the one in which that annoying paperclip in Microsoft Office was concieved. This is a room for BIG IDEAS. This is a pit where simple solutions to obvious problems go to die - a safe place wheren the criminally stupid devise convoluted douchery to un-solve problems.
TEAM LEADER: "We'll give them a help button (snicker) and when they attempt to get help, not only do we deny them, we spit in their face with an inscrutable message."
FIRST BOOT LICKER: "Yeah. Yeah boss."
TEAM LEADER: "And when they go online to find help for Adobe Help (snicker), make sure to provide nothing but another inscrutable message: 'in June you will receive help'. Now that's how you keep a moron in suspense. The icing on the cake is the perpetual 'Pending Download' message in Adobe Help Manager. Our Division of Wasting User's Time really appreciated that touch."
FIRST BOOT LICKER: "Brilliant.  You're too awesome to have your BIG IDEAS sullied by the petty needs of customer's who pay money for our products."
TEAM LEADER: "Quiet! I'm having an epiphany. Something about clouds - and jamming up the Internet with petabytes of garbage."
FIRST BOOT LICKER (with religious awe): "THE CLOUD. We already have product evangelists! This is the next step!"
-------------- end of scene ---------------
Update local help files and stop trying to UN-invent the wheel. The cloud is crap and I know this from experience. Instead of pulling info off my hard drive, I've got to pull it from half a world away. Really?! Who could've permitted such pie-in-the-sky BS to get so far. Come back down to earth where the rest of us actually have work to do and deadlines to make.
Sincerly,
Mike.