Comments on: New Adobe XD pub, thoughts on CS4 UI

By: Rob Moir

Rob Moir — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:35:27 +0000

Inspire – how interesting. It’s like a website but broken. This is easily some of the worst webdesign I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of anything from geocities back in the old days.
Why in God’s name do I need to load flex to view a simple blog? The borked up UI in CS4 is starting to make a lot of sense to me now. *sigh*.

By: Aran

Aran — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:08:43 +0000

I tried to email the team through the suggestions link within the Inspire app, but the email address doesn’t work!
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
inspiresuggestions@adobe.com
550 No such user
John, can you pass on to the team that this doesn’t work?
Cheers.

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:47:46 +0000

Wow, what a horrible mess of a UI for a design team site. The site steals the browser context menu, which I depend on for many functions. Not all text is selectable. Mouse scrolling is inverted in Opera (so much for platform independence). I hate to imagine how consistently it handles disabled interfaces like Voice-over. Fine, it is some sort of beta testbed for Flex, but that is not useable and only puts many of us off ever visiting it.
Their reply to the criticism they’ve received is partly reassuring, but trivializes the work they need to e.g. make my goddamn context menu work as it does on *every* other web site. User unfriendly sums it up perfectly…

By: Ann Shelbourne

Ann Shelbourne — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:12:13 +0000

Actually, you CAN increase type-size: there is a “+” Button right at the top of their page.

By: NO RSS

NO RSS — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:17:23 +0000

The biggest insult of all perhaps, you can’t even bypass that HORRIBLE site and read via RSS… because they RSS articles are all truncated after about a paragraph.
What complete garbage

By: Terry

Terry — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:26:55 +0000

Why on earth did they make this in flash?
I find that quite worrying from a UI team.
You really should know where flash is wanted and where it should stay well away.
I mean yesterday I was working in fireworks and the palettes reset for some reason and I noticed the “Autoshape Properties” palette… a clunky weird mess made in flash. This made me worry about your new Photoshop flash panels, I mean looking at this the font rendering is significantly worse than my OS font rendering, the combo box and controls are neither standard to my OS or the rest of fireworks, scrollbar is weird clunky and different.
Why on earth would you want weird clunky trash like that in any product? Let alone Photoshop

By: Bjoern

Bjoern — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 01:35:03 +0000

As much as I like the fact that you create such a blog – is barely usable for me! I’m using NetNewsWire for reading blogs and when I open an entry for this blog, it takes me to the start page!!! the fact that it’s built in Flex prevents NetNewsWire to create a nice Thumbnail – instead I only see the gray background color. When I open the site it sometimes is not displayed at all and then takes me back to the start page… this is incredibly unusable! I sincerely wouldn’t mind Flex as long as it just works… it doesn’t in this case.

By: Jerry

Jerry — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:45:56 +0000

I’m not going to rant off like Hale, but I agree with him on key points. Is there a reason why that blog had to be done with Flash/Flex/whatever-it-is? Could it not be realized with HTML? It’s just some text, a few images and videos, so it seems like using a hammer to swat a fly.
I understand if it is a tech demo, but I certainly hope this is not Adobe’s future vision of the internet. We dropped full-flash sites a few years ago when we realized it was a bad idea.
I’m open to new ideas, however, and if you (or the folks behind the blog) can give me a few reasons why we can’t just stick to web standards, I’m all ears.

By: Hale

Hale — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:12:25 +0000

This is irony at it’s best. I launched the url to the Inspire blog over 15 minutes ago and the big, fat, purple progress bar that displays “Loading Adobe Flex” is just now crawling it’s way past the three quarter mark. This site is the epitomy of forced technology as there is absolutely no reason for it to be so Flash-heavy. The blatancy of this attempt to peddle Adobe’s proprietary technology is embarrassing to witness. Seriously, making the user experience blog so “user unfriendly” has got to warrant a nomination for the Darwin Awards. I’ve finished my post just in time to check and see that Inspire has just finished loading. It’s very annoying to see this site disregard the increased font size reflected in my preferences as I often make my daily reading-rounds from the couch, from which browser magnification capabilities work great with. I also have the feeling that this isn’t the only user-disruption presented by this execution, but I digress. I’m going to fix the problem right now by simply closing leaving this site once and for all. Congratulations Adobe, you’ve done little more than further Inspire me to put the kibosh on recommending and/or using your internet solutions.

By: Tim Thompson

Tim Thompson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:53:15 +0000

This is all good and well but when will I be able to download my preorder copy of CS4?

By: font9a

font9a — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:08:55 +0000

Back button on Webkit (OS X 10.5.5) nightly 10/12/08 doesn’t work. Page took over 60 seconds to load. They should just have an HTML site and invite users to download a swf file instead of using all the overhead of crappy Mac support + Flash Player. I can understand the argument of eating your own dogfood and all… but given the usability perils the Flash-dependency presents it seems a really perplexing choice.

By: Aran

Aran — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:21:57 +0000

I am also curious as to some of the decisions taken by the XD team.
If you look a the source of the page, it is great that it is using swfobject (even if it is the old v1.5), which gives the potential for indexable alternate content for users without Flash / search engines, but the team just has a generic get flash player message in there rather than any article content.
How does the site content get indexed when all of the article data is held in external XML files, and there seems to be no sitemap.xml file for Googlebots etc to follow?

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:20:12 +0000

Hey love the blog.
[Thanks. --J.]
I am going to vent for a quick moment. I recall about a year ago the term User Experience (UX) gained some momentum and the community circled around that set of terms. You wrote the XD (Experience Design) team. I am wondering, is this yet another redundant abbreviation that the community needs to deal with or, is there a difference between UX and XD, or maybe am I just behind the times a little bit?
[AFAIK the terms are interchangeable. --J.]

By: imajez

imajez — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:52:18 +0000

The website UI is a pain in posterior as you cannot scroll down apge with mouse, you have to drag slider down, not good. [Actually, I don't know whether it requires Flash Player 10 or not, but as long as you've put focus onto the SWF, the scroll wheel works. --J.] As for 'me julies' sounding like British slang - being kicked in the 'goolies' is certainly very painful! [I think I'm being influenced by Ali G on this one. --J.]

By: Niklas

Niklas — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:27:34 +0000

I wIll definitely follow the XD blog! And I really want to love it as well… But I am unable to open links in new windows or tabs, I can’t see if a link opens a new window or not or even where it leads to. Zooming text does not work, neither can I hold down option-ctrl-D and hover over a word to get the definition of that word. Selected text does not honor my operating system settings, and so on… I am running Safari 3.1.2 on OSX 10.5.5. What is up with that?