This indicates severe software bugs in PhS.
That is nonsense. Preference corruption can happen in any software and can be caused by any number of reasons.
I would certainly like it if apps could recognize the bad prefs and reset themselves but right now that’s not the case.
BTW, Wall Street is in sharp disagreement with you about the stock.
Bob
That is nonsense:
Preference corruption can happen in any software and
can be caused by any number of reasons.
Best regards –Gernot Hoffmann
I hate that phrase, "Trash Prefs". Think of the poor non-english speakers who must struggle with this bit of jargon!
Personally I have never had to restore my preferences to default, but have given that advice often enough in this forum to mystified users whose adobe is not behaving as it should.
I never heard of this kind of rigmarole in any other application I have used and agree with Gernot that preference files that can so easily be corrupted are an indication of deep-seated flaws in the application.
Part of the aim of a programmer is not only to write code for wonderful functions but to achieve this with inherent stability. You could never include a program with these weaknesses in a flight control system!
John,
Did you ever use CorelDRAW? I think the keyboard shortcut there is shift+F8.
Bob
Only up to about Version 6.
I don’t recall having to reset anything there either.
I think the point here is that it isn’t all that common for folks to reset prefs.
This is afterall a support forum for folks with problems and the percentage of people needing to do it are going to be far greater here than in the general user base.
Bob
Sigh. So much guesswork, so little experience….
So much guesswork, so little experience….
LOL! Great quote!
I didn’t ever trash preferences in any program.
Not even in PhS(5..7).
Note: preferences in PhS are written by an editor
which would/should refuse to accept nonsensical
inputs. Opposed to a plain text file which doesn’t
filter the data.
The issue should be treated here seriously.
Best regards –Gernot Hoffmann
Gernot, all due respect to you, but you obviously do not understand some of the leading causes of corrupt preferences.
For example, system hangs requiring photoshop to close abnormally. There is also room for "they don’t tell us the truth" in as much as some folks fiddle with their systems, tweak this, delete that, and everything is fine until one day, they do something in an app that brings their system down. Then they say "I didn’t do nuttin’, it just happened one day."
No, the notion of rebuilding the preferences is a fine solution. Like John Joslin, I’ve never had to rebuild the preferences. So from my perspective, and that of the oh, million or so users who don’t have problems thus do not post to the forum, Photoshop and its preferences are quite stable.
Let’s be thankful that folks can screw around and turn off their machine without closing photoshop don’t have to reinstall. Seems to me resetting preferences is an easy solution for a myriad of ills.
And saving a "good set" makes it quick to get up and running.
Sorry if I was the culprit of "guesswork". I grew up with airborne software which had to incorporate "graceful degradation".
never heard of this kind of rigmarole in any other application
Just say: Quark XPress.
The reason for writing this post was a
comment in the economy part of the newspaper
‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’, which said
something like this:
‘Adobe should take care of the stability of
their products instead of offering new features.’
Again: the main programs are OK for me, but this
is probably so because I’m having always rather
simple workflows (improving good images and
preparing them for printing).
For the case that the program hangs it should be
possible to establish emergency strategies.
I had developed many electromechanical systems
(including aircraft electronics), and here it’s
really necessary to detect error states and to
counteract.
Best regards –Gernot Hoffmann
Just say: Quark XPress.
I’d rather not, if you don’t mind 😉
Seriously, I think that a lot of problems come from badly set up systems rather than from Photoshop but I often wonder if the stability of the application could be improved.
My guess (and I agree with Chris that the rest of us are only guessing) is that Photoshop is a massive pile of code that has roots from 15 or 20 years ago, and various pieces cobbled onto it. A complete rewrite of the code would certainly (probably) make it cleaner and more efficient, but it would take years and/or massive additional programming resources. And when they were finished, there would be so many new bugs introduced that it would take another several revisions to clean up.
It is easy to sit on the outside, and solve all the problems of the world at a pub. But when you are on the inside, and see the costs, constraints, and potential for problems, you may decide that your suggested solutions are short-sighted.
Just say: Quark XPress.
I don’t even want to think it. <g>
Bob
Don
My thoughts exactly!
I think the situation "went critical" several versions ago, and timescale and marketing pressures have prevented it ever being recovered.
Now, seriously, in my own particular and untransferible experience, if I have to compare the stability of Corel, Illustrator, Quark, Photoshop and Word, the last two are the most stable of all them by far (and I am talking since Windows 3.11, if I recall the bloody numbers all right).
I say: Power to the users, not the stockholders. The capitalistic stock holder syndrome is in its essense the same as saying that popularity is a measure of quality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Why not both? They’re not mutually exclusive.
Bob
I’m an artist, not a capitalist. Talk about mutually exclusive 😉
Mathias,
stable software is good for users and shareholders.
If a company would announce ‘5.000 of 30.000 workers
have to be set free in the next year’ then I wouldn’t
consider this as a positive input for buying stocks
(though it might be reasonable by capitalistic thinking).
Best regards –Gernot Hoffmann
Adobe should take care of the stability of their products instead of offering new features.’
But see, that’s where I personally disagree – Photoshop has been incredibly stable for me. Never had a crash or a hang. I process thousands of images per day, day in and day out.
So the notion that it’s unstable is, well, untenable, in my opinion.
If you visit a hospital, you find sick people. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the human race is ill, does it? So it goes with visitors of forums. A vast majority of users have no issues with PS whatsoever.
Gradually you should (please) distinguish
between my opinion (Adobe software is quite
good) and opinions as posted in Germany’s
most important newspaper, as quoted.
Such a negative comment in the economy
section of the newspaper shouldn’t be ignored.
Average Photoshop users all over the world
don’t have the profound knowledge which we
find here in this forum.
Therefore it’s very reasonable to ask for
simplification and stabilization.
Only a little OT:
My attempts to establish Color Management
for the students is partly successful, as
far as they are working on private computers,
but it fails totally for those who are
working in the computer center network –
nobody is responsible for the coordination.
That’s the reason for my strategy: locally
well defined systems.
The conclusion: simplified workflows and a
much better advertizing concept by Adobe.
Haha – shareholder and user interests are
not in contradiction to each other,
Best regards –Gernot Hoffmann
Average Photoshop users all over the world
don’t have the profound knowledge which we
find here in this forum.
Therefore it’s very reasonable to ask for
simplification and stabilization.
Photoshop is professional tool designed specifically for professionals. Photoshop Elements exists for "average" users.
Part of being a professional means knowing your tools. I still find it very difficult to believe that some of the questions being posted in this forum are coming from people that have been properly trained and have spent a lot of money on software.
Bob
Talk about stability reminds me of TeX, the par excellence system for typesetting "beautiful books," particularly in mathematics; born in 1982, "frozen" in 1992, it’s currently at v3.14159. If you find a bug, the program’s author, Professor D.E. Knuth of Stanford University, will reward you with a check for $327.68, and the version number will be upgraded by appending 2, the next digit of the never ending decimal expansion of the number "Pi" (Still a long way to go to perfection). Not bad for a public domain software.
If I am not mistaken, TeX’s remarkable paragraph typesetting algorithm was employed in Adobe’s InCopy CS.
TeX’s algorithm is other places as well. I’m quite sure it is the basis, at least, of the paragraph mode in InDesign.
As for the bug report, the first bug paid 2 cents, and Knuth doubled the amount for each bug after that, finally stopping the doubling when he got to $327.68. Apparently this has not cost him all that much, as most of the checks wind up framed on the wall by bug-finders, rather than being cashed.
To math-nerds Knuth is a mega-star.
InCopy is based on InDesign, and includes no part of Tex that I know of. The layout engine used in InDesign (and Photoshop, and Illustrator) has to deal with many things that TeX does not support (including many languages and a variety of interesting layout rules for those languages).
Gernot and Mathias,
Somehow I don’t get it: Why should be reliability and features be so confronted? In a professional tool, if you freeze you’ll be be dead in some time. It’ll take more or less time, but you’ll be dead as a piece of software. In the other hand, reliability in performance is essential in many sector that use these tools…
To cut it short: For me it goes 20% new features / 70% reliability / 10% user interface (better and more flexible so taht I don’t have to scratch my head). And they all go together. I don’t want to say bye to anything. So greedy I am ;P
Gustavo,
I have not commented on whether or not I agree with the papers sentiment. Frankly, I dont really care what the economy section says about Photoshop, and that was the point I was trying to make.
Take Gernots
Average Photoshop users all over the world don’t have the profound knowledge which we
find here in this forum.
Therefore it’s very reasonable to ask for
simplification and stabilization.
This would be a typical stockholder opinion as opposed to a power users opinion, and in my mind should be totally ignored. Dumbing down a power tool in order to make it accessible to more people (sell, sell, sell), is not in the power users interest at all.
For what it’s worth, I have had to "reset preferences" far more often in MS Word (by deleting a corrupt normal.dot file) than in Photoshop.
