Monday, November 24, 2008

I love it but...

The new MacBook is fantastic, and I'm quickly learning the ropes concerning all things OSX. And Creative suite 4 has excellent new features that I love, except one. The new help environment. Back in the day, when you hit F1 it would open the built-in help documentation. You could use the index to look up your problem, or search for keywords to find a topic to help you, and 99% of the time you found what you were looking for in seconds.

Now, the help command takes you to the Adobe Community Support forum, which is basically just a collection of forum topics and blogs that may or may not be about your problem, or may in fact be
three FUCKING years old.

Evidently the whole thing is powered by a Google search, but if that's the case, why even bother with an Adobe community page if I can just jump on Google? And what if I don't happen to be connected to the internet at the time?

It seems you can download a complete PDF of help documentation. But it's only 40MB, so why not just bundle it with the software and make that the default F1 help environment?
I'm not suggesting a big thick paper manual. Then you can have an additional Help menu item that will take you to Adobe Community. In fact, I think that's the way it was done in previous versions. Adobe new help and support = FAIL.