Crazy But Able

It boggles the mind how the same company can be responsible for both Photoshop AND the excreable Acrobat PDF reader.

I opened a PDF document in firefox. Adobe reader came up with a little dialog that said, basically, “Would you like to update acrobat? You can do it without having to close anything.” Okay, I clicked. Then another pop-up: “Well, we’ll have to close acrobat reader, but we’ll bring it up again when we’re done with the exact same documents open in it.” “That’s a neat trick,” said I. “It’s cool that they got that to work with Firefox.” So I clicked OK. The update started installing.

Then another pop up came up, implying that well, actually, we were lying earlier and only documents you have open in the standalone version of Adobe will be opened again when Adobe starts up, but heck, we’ll give you an option to click OK or Cancel. So I clicked Cancel.

The same box popped up. I clicked Cancel again. And again. And again. About 14 or 15 times. There’s a little checkbox on the dialog that says “Do not show this dialog again.” After thinking a moment, I clicked the “Do not show this dialog again” box, and clicked Cancel. It popped up again. I clicked Cancel one more time and this time it stayed closed.

Expecting that the install process would, you know, be cancelled, I was sadly amused to see a dialog box pop up informing me of the continuing progress Acrobat was making with installing my updates.

15 seconds later, I got a new dialog box, informing me that Acrobat needed my computer to reboot to finish the installation. Would I like to reboot now, or later? I clicked Later.

Within five seconds the computer was rebooting. When “my” computer came up again[*], there was the little box, happily informing me of the progress it was making installing my updates.

Programs should not be allowed to reboot my computer. They should initiate reboot requests and then there could be a little box in the system tray that reminded me that I needed to reboot. And if I tried to run the program in question without rebooting first, it could pop up a dialog box informing me that I haven’t rebooted yet and that I couldn’t run the program until I did.

FUN UPDATE: I had to change the title of this post because HEAVEN FORBID someone should stick an ampersand in a document that’s put on the web. I mean, honestly. IF YOU PARSE A FREAKING WEBPAGE AND GET AN ENTITY ERROR, THEN WHY DON’T YOU JUST ASSUME THAT THE AMPERSAND IS JUST FLOATING AROUND ON ITS OWN? To paraphrase something I said in a completely unrelated context 3 or 4 years ago: Hey you bastards, stop parsing my webpages.

[*] Apparently I don’t really have control over it, so in what sense is it “mine”?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 at 1:19 pm and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.