Last night, I was trying to print out our recently completed christmas cards, and ran into a spate of trouble.
Photoshop wouldn’t launch, nor would Illustrator. No error message, no nothing. Awesome. I recently cloned my OS over to another drive, and given Adobe’s completely retarded file structure linking (Want to have fun? Move Photoshop out of the applications folder. Barf. Good times), I figured something got broken. Okay. Re-install. No love. Crash logs are complaining about frameworks not being found. Weird. So I pop the message into google and see what I can find. Nothing.
Sigh. Okay on to Adobe’s knowledge base. Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. So I just start searching for “photoshop won’t launch” and get results from OS 9 days. So 2 hours later I finally see a note about photoshop not working on case sensitive mac filesystems. Doh. I had formated this drive to be case sensitive a while ago to play around with some unix apps.
Turns out that Adobe’s installer for Photoshop and Illustrator has bad capitalization on the names of many of the frameworks within the applications themselves. So when the app goes looking for photoshop.app/Resources/Frameworks/Blah.framework/A, it only finds photoshop.app/Resources/Frameworks/Blah.framework/a. In a non-case sensitive file system, no biggie. But when case sensitivity is on, everything is b0rkville.
Apparently this has been an issue since CS2 was first released, and adobe has known about it, but hasn’t bothered to fix it. Okay, I’ll grant that there are probably higher priority fixes and features to be developed. But how about a meaningful error message on launch like “CS2 apps don’t work on case sensitive file systems because we’re too lazy to fix our installer. Please copy the app onto a case-insensitive drive and continue” instead of silently barfing. That would be peachy.
Or how about a note in the knowledgebase linked to the keyword “framework” or any of the error messages actually generated by this failure?
I really hope that CS3 is a much more robust application.
So cards didn’t get printed. Maybe I’ll be able to get to it tonight.