Howard Oakley
During long, dark winter evenings, I’ve tried to work out what is missing, but it seems a bit futile to rummage blindly around in the nearly 18,000 files and 2.3GB that Creative Studio now secretes in /Library/Application Support.
I have filed this alongside the many other great mysteries of Macs, and life in general, somewhere between primacy of chickens or eggs, and UFOs. Perhaps the most worrisome of these great mysteries at present is why it takes my iPad an hour or so to back up in iTunes, yet I can’t find any trace of its backup on my hard disk. Given this extreme protraction, I would imagine that there must at least be a file or folder containing the whole of the 30GB or so that are stored on my iPad, something that would seem as hard to hide as an oak tree in a tropical aquarium.
Aside from the puzzle as to why any serious software vendor would still use Installer Vise to deliver their updates, there’s also the unsolved mystery of why those updates take unconscionably long to search for the application to update. It isn’t even as if they aren’t trying, as each Installer Vise updater feels it necessary to hog almost completely one of the processor cores in my Mac Pro for many minutes – when it doesn’t hang altogether.
The most pervasive mystery must be how inaccurate are the times predicted by installers and updaters for them to complete. When shuffling through the discs that make up Final Cut Studio, every fresh disc insertion drove this prediction to exceed two days at first. Adobe’s CS5 installer seemed to prefer to oscillate between two wildly inaccurate durations. Either way, they made seasonal weather forecasts look blazingly accurate, and confirmed Einstein’s disturbing views on the non-linearity of time. Nevertheless, we still put our trust and substantial sums of money in the reliability of programs whose installers might have been cobbled together by interns during a team away-day.
I therefore looked to the upgrade to Adobe CS5 with bated optimism. At last this alert should be a thing of the past, alongside daily repair of permissions, spoken Classical Sanskrit and Imperial measures. For once, perhaps because I have a separate licence for Acrobat 9 so didn’t need to mess with that, the Creative Studio upgrade was relatively quick and trouble-free apart from its timing trouble, lulling me into the sense that my six hundred quid had been well invested. I then flashed up Photoshop Extended 12, so that I could update CS5’s original components to their latest incarnations. Once it had fiddled around with fonts and other first-run duties, that same alert caught me off guard. Yet it was strangely reassuring to see that I was again missing one or more files, and Photoshop still runs just fine.
