So yesterday I went through the Major Pain of installing CS4 on Windows, which is in no way a worse experience than doing it on OS X. Fair enough for the pre-certified and approved crappiness of the whole process and related UI, already mentioned by a number (Adobe UI Gripes, Betalogue, DF) of reasonable people. This time it was my turn. I was installing Photoshop and Illustrator from the CS4 Master Fuckup disc paying great attention to deselect any component I did not need, as I was doing so on a forcibly space-restricted Bootcamp partition. After painfully un-checking every box, I felt my selection was small enough to warrant a click on the install button. Still, Adobe sw “engineers” thought they may as well preserve some creative install action. Ladies and gents, here is what I found in my Program Files folder (not to mention what gets dropped in the Common Files folder) at the end of the process:
Aehm… After Effects? Encore? Media Encoder? Premiere Pro? Soundbooth? The folders are full of “recommended” files (watch your language there Adobe!). They do not actually contain the executables or full installs of the aforementioned. Dirty, dirty, cheeky mess. So hard to figure out what components are shared and place them in a Shared components folder? Oh, and Mocha. Mocha for After Effects, I will surely need it for some hardcore planar tracking in Illustrator, thanks for thinking about that, I would have surely missed it otherwise.
UPDATE: To make things clearer, this is the contents of the CS4 package I was trying to install.
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- After Effects
- Premiere
- InDesign
- Fireworks
- Flash