On First Installing Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6

Jens Alfke on the experience of installing Photoshop Elements 6 on the Mac:

But not quite the installer; more like the warm-up act. It got me in the installin’ mood by asking me to give it root privileges, then launched some other process with an identical Dock icon, which put up a progress bar. An installer so slow, it has to put up a progress bar while it launches! Finally after about 15 seconds, both icons vanished from the Dock, and I started to get nervous. Had the installer crashed? No, after a few more seconds to build tension, the real installer came up.

Every other product team at Adobe needs to study and copy the Lightroom installer. It’s the only Adobe product with a nice installation experience I’ve seen since the ’90s.

★ Thursday, 3 April 2008