Once you launch the “ Install.app” application, you are greeted with a dialog indicating that the installation application needs to “ initialize” the installer. For some reason, Adobe’s engineers still disagree with this. It therefore seems obvious to me that this application (with a better name) should be at the top level of the disc and directly accessible. Regardless of which applications in the suite you want to install, you have to go through the “ Install.app” application. Does the end user really need to see these folders called “ deploy,” “ packages,” and “ payload”? Certainly not, especially since these folders do not give you access to stand-alone installers for specific parts of the suite. Once again, we are forced to go one-level deep just to be able to launch the installation, and once again the innards of the installation disc are exposed to us in a totally unnecessary fashion. It turns out that, once again, as with CS4, it is a folder, and double-clicking on it spans another Finder window, this time in list (or column) view: You have to double-click on it to find out. The icon used for the software (which, frankly, is a rather unsightly mess) gives you no indication of whether it is a file or a folder. While the look has been updated (and the Finder window now opens automatically when the disc is mounted), the problems with this presentation remain. But I suppose that the presentation is similar for other versions of the suite. Since Adobe was kind enough to give us a copy of the final “master collection” as compensation for our participation in the Prerelease program, that is what my screen shots are based on. As with CS4, you get a Finder window in icon view with some kind of fancy background and a couple of icons: The first problems are in the Finder, when the installation disc or disc image is mounted. But there are still a number of pretty fundamental things that are wrong. Thankfully, I do not have to repeat everything, because Adobe has made at least some improvements in the new Adobe CS5 installation process. I’ll make it shorter, though, because there is only so much time that I can devote to repeating the same things over and over again.
Now that CS5 has been officially released, I suppose I should review the installation process again. During the testing phase, I shared my views on the installation process once again through the Adobe Prerelease facility for bug reports and enhancement suggestions. I was invited to participate in the Adobe Prerelease program, which gave me access to beta versions of the next version of the Adobe Creative Suite, i.e. (At time, I posted two follow-ups, here and here.) The post was widely read and linked to, and I ended up being contacted by an Adobe representative to discuss its contents. Late in 2008, I devoted an entire post to the ridiculous installation process for Adobe Creative Suite 4 for Mac OS X.
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