Since the onset of coronavirus, I’d been working remotely since basically, my daughter was born. I kind of got the jump on remote working, on account of being available for my wife and newborn daughter, but then when coronavirus started shutting everything down, I had a head start on working remotely.
Needless to say, my internet at home isn’t quite the fiber-optic connection at work, so it goes without saying that I deal with a little bit more slowdown at home than I do when I’m in the office.
Regardless, I still have to do my share of work, no matter the circumstances, and these days a large part of what I do is a whole lot of reviewing documents, namely PDFs. So I’m in Acrobat a large portion of my days, whether I’m reviewing PDFs, marking them up, collating them for higher-ups, or whatever. I’m in Acrobat a lot.
A long time ago, when Adobe products were all offline, I always took a mental note of how much space every program took. Photoshop would always be a beast, but often times Illustrator would be larger. Once InDesign came into the picture, it too was rather large, and then with the assimilation of Macromedia, Dreamweaver and Flash were large chunks of disk space necessary to have to install. All the while, always in the background was Adobe Acrobat, which was but blips on the radar, and took minimal space in comparison, and also ran as smoothly as a well-maintained Audi, all the time.
No matter how much I had my feuds with PageMaker 6.0, Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 8.0, InDesign CS3, InDesign CS6, Acrobat was one of those programs that was always steady as a metronome, and stable to boot. I remember the first time I managed to get Acrobat to crash, but it was primarily because I was running it off of my old netbook, and I was trying to open a shoddily-made PDF that had a kabillion vector points in it, and frankly nothing short of a NASA computer could open it without issue.
The point is, Acrobat was always a stable and steady staple of the Adobe suite, and it could long be depended upon to do its job . . . that is, until Adobe went into the cloud, and started doing all their software subscription-based, and essentially always online.
Nowadays, Acrobat is slow, clunky, and by virtue of the fact that I have to be online while running it, due to the shared nature of proofing, I manage to get it to crash multiple times a day, leading to no shortage of aggravation. Even on projects or documents that I can deal with online, the software is laggy, takes forever to respond to basic clicks, and makes me want to calmly close my laptop, and then fling the fucking thing out the window.
The bottom line is that there is no software that Adobe is incapable of making less productive and usable, and the fact that they’ve managed to reduce ol’ dependable Acrobat to an InDesignCS6-like lemon of a program goes to give validation to that claim.
Such is the nature of software monopolization, and when there’s no competition out there to push Adobe to do good things anymore, or perhaps I’m just really tired of my job lately.
