Apparently, Photoshop CS5, after transitioning their GUI code to Cocoa, decided to finally put the OS 9 animated watch cursor out of its misery. And replace it with a cursor version of everyone’s favorite spinner. There are no words.
Actually, there are.
It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because it mixes the aesthetics of a very common control with a cursor, creating a Frankenstein UI element that looks familiar but feels weird.
It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because the very indicator whose looks it mimics comes with clear, helpful advice (use where needed, close to whatever’s affected, and keep the rest of the engine revving) whose application would have enhanced the user experience of the whole application.
It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because people have now been conditioned to this behavior for more than nine years straight, and while some things have been constantly in flux and reinvented both by Apple and others along the way, this is one thing they’ve all been on-board with, maybe to the extent of branding the spinner.
It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because it indicates a search and replace attitude to the user interface. Don’t evolve it! Don’t fix it! Just slap on a workalike so that we may ship it. I appreciate the level of labor, grit and expenditure needed to port the Carbon-paired libraries to Cocoa-paired libraries while also getting stuff done in CS5 generally, but not to the point of excusing this behavior.
It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because it indicates that the team (that they claim worries about following the necessary conventions to please their customer base and fit in as a model application) didn’t catch this at all, or worse yet, managed to convince itself that this was a case of facepalm-inducing UI “innovation”.
It would also be stupid of me to mindlessly extrapolate all of this without any evidence. But it’s in the final product and they haven’t apologized for it or fixed it — what else are we to believe? Adobe probably spent more man hours inside Xcode last month than many of the critics of this change have combined, and yet here we are.
I would welcome some dignified feedback from Adobe: not John Nack’s Atlassian occasional brand of “oh god, you people are never satisfied, are you?” whining, but rather John Nack’s prevalent brand of weighing the pros with the cons when people repetitively yell buzzwords after him. I’d like to emphasize again that I’m not just shouting “64-bit” in a crowded theater, but telling him and the rest of Adobe actual arguments.
I don’t want people to stomp on Adobe. I want Adobe to stop repeatedly doing stupid shit that makes stomping on them a justified act in the first place, and whose side effects include deservedly drawing a large crowd, nodding, laughing and having another beer.
(Somewhat fleshed out from my comments on David Buxton’s proposal to use the OS 9 watch cursor instead.)
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