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Into the Azure?

Posted on 4 Mar 2009 at 10:56

Jon Honeyball poses some tough legal questions about cloud computing, and wonders how much Microsoft really cares about your security.

I was less amused to note that Adobe charges £684.25 for the product in a shrinkwrapped box but £722.92 for the download version, whereas it charges the same price ($699) for either option via its US store. That's an additional £38.67 for the UK download, but let's not forget the box and shipping can't be free: let's be generous and call it sixty quid. In that case, based on current HP or Dell price lists, it would appear that I've paid for the outright purchase of about 1/5 of a server in a rack in Dublin, so Adobe owes me about 4in of a 19in rack mount server - your PR bunnies can deliver it to the PC Pro editorial office any time you like.

But on to the software itself. I loaded up my ID2 file and everything seemed to import just fine. I was impressed until I came to print, when I was presented with the world's greatest error message: "The Adobe Print Engine failed due to an unknown error". This was repeated on several printers, and it was only when I moved to a PostScript-enabled HP Color LaserJet 5550 that the page would print without complaint. I hate that sort of message - if the program doesn't know what's gone wrong, what am I going to do? Adobe's help page on this subject is almost laughable, and might as well have asked whether I've tried dyeing my grandmother's hair purple to see if that fixes the problem. In the end, it was PostScript that led me to an answer: I had to export the JPEG and TIFF images from the page, load them into Photoshop, save them out as PSD files and re-import them, and then everything was fine. What a farrago...

I thought my problems with Adobe and printing were now over, but no - I also have an installation of Photoshop Elements 6 on that computer and I needed to print some images to a couple of different printers to judge print quality. Do not try what I did, which is to uninstall a printer driver while Photoshop Elements is running. There's absolutely no good reason why this should present a problem, but Photoshop Elements 6 gets into a complete strop and won't let you choose another printer that's already installed on the machine, and you actually have to quit and restart to calm it down. It would appear that the lazy programmers at Adobe enumerate the printer drivers when the program starts up, and refuse to believe that any of them could change in the meantime. The grown-up programmer's approach would be to check again whenever the user selects File | Print, not to "throw your hands up in the air and scream like a gurl".

And while I'm having a moan about Adobe, would someone please tell me what the UI team had been smoking when it came up with the Photoshop Elements 6 window design? It follows neither XP design conventions nor Vista's, but has its own completely weird world with buttons and menus scattered all over the shop, many of them perching on what you and I would call "a window title bar". Could I have a setup option marked "don't screw with my desktop look-and-feel!" please?

Blogging from iPhone

New Year resolutions are a very bad idea, if only because you know they're not going to be kept. Yes, I did finally buy myself a Brompton bicycle, because I ought to be trundling around the lanes hereabouts on that rather than taking the Bentley for a run. And I ought to try harder to blog into the blogosphere, but unfortunately blogging for me has always been one of those "spur of the moment" things - if I don't do it while I have the thought, time passes and it's forgotten forever. I need a tool that's with me all the time, and since I - like the incomparable Mr Stephen Fry - love the iPhone 3G, I'm pleased to say that I've found a usable LiveJournal tool for it. I have no excuse now not to post regularly to http://jonhoneyball.livejournal.com, but unlike Mr Fry, if anyone ever finds me "tweeting" on "twitter" will they mercifully give me both barrels of their Purdey?

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