The installer for CS3 is nasty.

No its not just you its like that for everyone!

[rant] ...sell Freehand to whichever company will have it. Make Flash over so the consumer can enjoy it (maybe turn a few pro killers loose on web "designers" who think Flash is the cure-all and then make viewers on fast DLS lines wait literally minutes until they can use the bloody site well enough to click the "skip intro" button - let's add the creators of the intros to the death list. When I visit a web site, I want fast results, not stylistically overblown commercials).

Then, indeed, fix a whole cartload of bugs in the current product range, quickly. Then or earlier, make a definite statement on the fate of GoLive and Dreamweaver. Sell either of them off or kill it. Just don't keep people guessing on this. Serious web coders use neither anyway (they generally seem to prefer HomeSite, BBEdit, Bluefish or Quanta+, or any of a huge number of other choices), but those who have drifted into web design from DTP and therefore are used to WYSIWYG tools should be allowed know what to invest in in the long term IMHO.

Then, PLEASE, buy Corel and shove their entire graphics portfolio down the toilet. Corel's graphics products (and this is a graphics pro speaking here) is a complete, utter and by now unfixable pain in the arse to use. I honestly tried. Dangit, I started out on Corel, way back when. Then-up-to-date package came bundled with a printer. I switched a few weeks later because I wanted to get work done. Unfortunately, because of my line of part of my work, by now I keep having long, long phone conversations giving Corel users step-by-step instructions how to produce files their printers can actually use... so, please, Adobe, buy 'em up and snuff 'em out. Very good riddance.

After all this, Adobe should invest a little in porting again - maybe CS4 for the mainstream Linuxes? I'd welcome it, anyway, and the ports can't be all that hard given that their Mac versions are already on a POSIX-compliant platform...

[/rant]

@DeFex: I agree, the CS2 AND CS3 bundle installers are about the worst I have seen Adobe turn out so far. And I've been in there since before Photoshop first came out.

Oh, my coat is the one with the "Swimmer in the Road" PS4 for Solaris PR print on it...

From a user that hasn't invested in image handling software, but uses the PDF format on a daily basis.

How about properly bug checking and cleaning up Acrobat Reader so it doesn't keep crashing every 5 minutes. It hasn't been stable since version 5.

Its a pile of faeces

hi stizzleswick. just for the record, the university i work for seems to have no troubles with corel (and ive been using it since version 1 so i do know how bad some versions have been). we use it to print A0 size posters. the latest versions have been great. that being said, i'm not sure what you mean about the installer but agree with everything else.

Adobe need to do something to fix the difference in price of their software between the US and the UK.

Adobe software that costs $1599 in the US costs $2844 in the UK.

OK, granted, I haven't used anything beyond Draw v. 10; up to that version, there was no key-actuated hand tool, and working on splines was ridiculous, really. I guess my main grumble about Draw is that in the hands of the general public it's a deadly weapon against pre-press workflows; just about every single CDR export file my company gets has a whole sheaf of problems that render them un-imagesettable.

As for the Adobe installer problems, both the bundle installer for CS 2 and CS 3 offer so many ways to botch the installation that it would probably be far quicker to install the applications individually. I've had situations ranging from the installer jumping over one step for no discernible reason (and by that way making it impossible to enter the serial number and/or activate the product), the activation process running foul leading to long support calls, to outright crashing on startup (of the installer!).