In a triumph of hope over experience, I recently “upgraded” from Adobe CS3 Design Standard to CS5 Design Standard. I hardly ever use Photoshop any more since I started using Aperture and Lightroom (originally a Macromedia product, no matter what the lame “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom” face-saving branding may try to claim), the main driver for the purchase was actually InDesign CS5 and its ePub functions.

Of course, this is Adobe. Previous versions gratuitously included crud like a full Opera install (an older version, insecure, naturally) just to display a splash screen, or a full MySQL install to power Acrobat search. I never install Acrobat, of course, since that bloated and bug-ridden piece of garbage managed to steal the crown for most insecure software from Internet Explorer, no small feat.

Adobe does not want to confuse users with streamlined and efficient software, so they decided to include the mostly useless Growl on-screen notification program to nag you into registering. Increasing bloat and attack surface for malware is not a good idea, nor is interrupting creative people’s flow with interruptions. Of course, helping clients Get Things Done is a low priority at Adobe, as evidenced by their product choices.

You have to pity the Growl developers, whose reputation will suffer from guilt by association. I dislike interruptions and do not find it useful, but many people do and rave about it. They installed it by choice, not as a sneaky drive-by install for slimy marketing purposes.

Some more annoyances in CS5:

• The pricing for the suite is more than the sum of its parts: $200 each for Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator, $700 for Design Standard. I suppose they must think Acrobat and their online tie-ins have a value of $100 (hint: they forgot the negative sign).
• Of course, they won’t let you upgrade individual component applications.
• On the plus side, they now have the decency to include Acrobat on a separate CD, so you can discard it immediately and not risk installing it as a side-effect of installing the apps that are actually useful.
• The icons were designed by the world’s laziest and most creatively bankrupt designer, just as with CS3 and CS4
• Performance on a high-end 8-core or 12-core Mac is actually slower than on a lower-end configuration, thanks to legacy cruft and incompetence.
• It is slower to load on my wife’s MacBook Pro. Each successive version of OS X is faster on the same hardware, Microsoft and Adobe deliver software that gets progressively slower.

In other words, unlike Lightroom, CS5 is designed to be endured, not to delight.