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Search - "adobe"
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If you can be locked out of it remotely, you don't own it.
On May 3rd, 2019, the Microsoft-resembling extension signature system of Mozilla malfunctioned, which locked out all Firefox users out of their browsing extensions for that day, without an override option. Obviously, it is claimed to be "for our own protection". Pretext-o-meter over 9000!
BMW has locked heated seats, a physical interior feature of their vehicles, behind a subscription wall. This both means one has to routinely spend time and effort renewing it, and it can be terminated remotely. Even if BMW promises never to do it, it is a technical possibility. You are in effect a tenant in a car you paid for. Now imagine your BMW refused to drive unless you install a software update. You are one rage-quitting employee at BMW headquarters away from getting stuck on a side of a road. Then you're stuck in an expensive BMW while watching others in their decade-old VW Golf's driving past you. Or perhaps not, since other stuck BMWs would cause traffic jams.
Perhaps this horror scenario needs to happen once so people finally realize what it means if they can be locked out of their product whenever the vendor feels like it.
Some software becomes inaccessible and forces the user to update, even though they could work perfectly well. An example is the pre-installed Samsung QuickConnect app. It's a system app like the Wi-Fi (WLAN) and Bluetooth settings. There is a pop-up that reads "Update Quick connect", "A new version is available. Update now?"; when declining, the app closes. Updating requires having a Samsung account to access the Galaxy app store, and creating such requires providing personally identifiable details.
Imagine the Bluetooth and WiFi configuration locking out the user because an update is available, then ask for personal details. Ugh.
The WhatsApp messenger also routinely locks out users until they update. Perhaps messaging would cease to work due to API changes made by the service provider (Meta, inc.), however, that still does not excuse locking users out of their existing offline messages. Telegram does it the right way: it still lets the user access the messages.
"A retailer cannot decide that you were licensing your clothes and come knocking at your door to collect them. So, why is it that when a product is digital there is such a double standard? The money you spend on these products is no less real than the money you spend on clothes." – Android Authority ( https://androidauthority.com/digita... ).
A really bad scenario would be if your "smart" home refused to heat up in winter due to "a firmware update is available!" or "unable to verify your subscription". Then all you can do is hope that any "dumb" device like an oven heats up without asking itself whether it should or not. And if that is not available, one might have to fall back on a portable space heater, a hair dryer or a toaster. Sounds fun, huh? Not.
Cloud services (Google, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.) can, by design, lock out the user, since they run on the computers of the service provider. However, remotely taking away things one paid for or has installed on ones own computer/smartphone violates a sacred consumer right.
This is yet another benefit of open-source software: someone with programming and compiling experience can free the code from locks.
I don't care for which "good purpose" these kill switches exist. The fact that something you paid for or installed locally on your device can be remotely disabled is dystopian and inexcuseable.16 -
Adobe, who the fuck told you to put an icon on the desktop? Knock that shit off, no one wants to open Acrobat XD from the fucking desktop.6
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Please just let me cancel my 1-year subscription for the end of that one year NOW without only giving me an option to cancel everything right now and still pay 54 € fee, that's not only silly, it's what makes customers shout FUCK YOU Adobe! Long gone the good old times, who needs your outdated stuff in 2022 anyway?5
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My presentation looks unappealing (LaTex magic) and apparently due to Adobe stuff, videos on overleaf don't play.
So, I have the choice of moving to another format (google slides of M$ powerpoint) by tomorrow, or switch between the media player and the presentation slides.
Both look... More unappealing than my presentation. 😒🙄😤10 -
Just remembering that time (years ago) at my old job when my then boss asked our 3-man team to develop an Adobe Flash multi-level beat-em-up game with customisable characters and computer AI in 6 weeks, only for the one asshole comment on Youtube to label it "aburido" (boring)
"https://youtube.com/watch/..."4 -
Idk why but this morning I was thinking about this high school elective class where we learned Adobe flash. But specifically 2 instances where I ignored the teacher and did my own thing
1. We were using Sprite sheets and he had us use photoshop to cut out the Sprite to a different layer and manually save each Sprite one by one to disk to use in flash. Some sheets had 50 fucking sprites
So I found a script for Adobe (action script I think they called their Javascript derivative) that exported every layer for me without all the manual clicking. There is probably an even better way. But this worked for how lazy I was back then
2. Our final projects we could do anything but he suggested not doing anything too complicated cause of time constraints and he barely taught is the scrptinh language for Adobe flash so making flash games was almost out of the question.
Me being stupid really wanted to make a working pong game. So I spent too long watching a German (i dont know German) tutorial video I found, and troubleshooting outdated code from that video. And improving things where I could with my limited knowledge made worse cause I wasn't interested in programming and didn't start learning python until the following year
Yeah don't know why I was thinking about those. But I feel it's a good perspective on how far I've come. From hacking together a pong clone with no skills, to being hired to automate and optimize processes and legacy projects -
Do these stupid tech writers even research what they talk about, if it's not the same 5 points as every other article on the topic then it's an article written this week on '5 Open Source HTML and CSS Editors and they mention Brackets.
Fair enough... but they link to the adobe Gitub, saying it ""isn’t super actively maintained"" which I guess is accurate since it has been dead for 2 years. Rather than the more recently updated 'brackets-cont' project that had a release back in October 2022.
Like fuck it's like these tech writers just pump out content years after it's relevant without any research or editing.
Pointless complaining I know but it bothers me how mindless mainstream tech writing is, it's all the same regurgitated ideas, or outdated information. Not saying I could fix it, but I'm sure someone out there can do something.1 -
Adobe, the company with virtually limitless budget, somehow created possibly the worst CMS to grace this earth (at least from the UX perspective). Meet Adobe Experience Manager, or AEM for short.
For starters, there's two executable jars: author and publis. Author is where you make all your pages, publish is the "final" preview. Except they're the same jar file. It's deciding which mode to run in based on the jar filename. The filename is also how you configure things like which port it's running on.
Publishing pages (sending them to the publish app) looks simple: select the page you want, press a button and it's ready to view. Except it's not. In order to publish a page and have it visible, you also need to publish the entire directory structure this site is in. So if you have the page in a directory "my-site/en/pages/home", you have to publish "my-site", then "en", then... The real kicker is that when you press "publish" on a page there's a checkbox that asks if you want to also publish everything that's linked to this page, that seemingly doesn't do anything
Ok, enough about publishing. Let's focus on the absolute monstrosity that is the "author" environment. When you first open it, you're greeted with a pretty layout with transitions and animations that's clearly meant for the editors. This is where you make folders and pages, and this is where you publish them. It's worth mentioning that these "folders" exist only in AEM, not on your disk. This part is actually ok, and if it wasn't for the shit publishing ux I'd say it's good.
But, that part only allows you to make pages with some predefined components. What if you wanted to make your own? Don't worry, you can. You just need a maven project that mixes Java, JavaScript, scss and XML in an unholy abomination of frontend and backend that _somehow_ gets compiled into Java classes that then get shoved into AEM and somehow work. Usually. Except for when they just break for no reason (5 people tried the same thing, and each got a completely different error, and it worked for the 6th person with no issues).
But that all was just the surface level stuff. You see, AEM is much more complicated than that. It's not _just_ a wisywyg HTML editor with some customizability sprinkled in. No, sir. It's practically an entire Unix-based operating system. You can open "crxde lite", or like I like to call it, the "os view" to see the entire unix-like directory tree. Just don't be surprised by how it looks. We're in admin/developer territory here, so better get used to the UI that'd make Windows Vista jealous.
The "os" comes with a bunch of apps. Aside from the designer view and crxde lite, there's a replication manager, GraphQL browser, user manager, asset manager and many more. Each app comes with its own UI style and even worse UX than the previous ones. Oh, by the way. I hope you have plenty of ram, cause all those apps are constantly loaded in memory.
Did I mention that the entire thing is written in Java? And I really mean the _entire_ thing. From what I can see, even the frontend JS is generated from Java classes.
So, TL;DR: it's shit. Stay the fuck away from it, and don't use it unless you absolutely have to. Or you're a masochist that wants to make a living out of it. If you know your way around AEM, you're practically guaranteed a well paying job2 -
Trying to stay productive using Glyphs Mini for type design afraid to spend more $$ on something better but Adobe is very tempting.4