I just cannot stand from posting this example of incredibly lame default behavior. And It is exposed by the software of the distinguished brand.
Once, I noticed small white rectangle in the notification area. The icon looked like unfinished one. What was my astonishment when I found that that was Adobe Updater. And what was my indignation when I found that it already downloaded more than 100 Mb. Isn't is a bad tone to silently consume user's resources that may cost him money?
I get caught on this each time I reinstall Adobe Products or Install new version. It seems that they have added this in Creative Suite 2, but I may be wrong.
Here is the list of things I found to be wrong with Adobe Updater:
- Incredibly lame UX that you presented with when you want to turn-off updates (see below)
- Changes in updater preferences are not shared among users on the same machine. If updates made to the executables that are shared among the users, then why not to share these preferences between them? This point is controversial, though, I know.
- When testing this, I logged in to my machine using remote desktop with second user account. And I found that when one user have any of updater windows opened, another one receives no reaction when he clicks on Help/Check for Updates
- Updates are enabled by default and are downloaded silently, the only visible clue is unintelligible icon in notification area.
To disable automatic updates you need to follow the next steps:
- Go to Help menu. Why I should go to Help menu to run off automatic updates, shouldn't it be somewhere in Preferences
- Click on Check for Updates. It will open the following screen. It is pretty straightforward that you should check for updates in order to turn them off, right?
- After it has checked for updates you are finally presented with the following window with a link to Adobe Updater Preferences form.
- Here are defaults set by Adobe
- After you click OK (or hit esc) you are lopped back to.... to the step 2 with update check window. If I just disabled updates, why they check them for me?
- And to escape from this vicious circle you should click on Cancel while adobe is checking for updates.
Shame on you, Adobe!