Last December, I blogged about the lengths my roommates and I had to go through to get Adobe Photoshop CS3 to install on Leopard formatted with a case-sensitive filesystem. In the end we got it to work. The problem seemed to just be laziness on Adobe’s part and an oversight by their QA team. Since we were able to get Photoshop CS3 to work without modifying source code, just renaming a batch of files, I fully expected Adobe to be quick to make CS4 work on a case-sensitive Leopard install. Unfortunately, I assumed incorrectly. I got this error message when I tried to install my copy of Photoshop CS4.
What the hell!? Adobe, as a professional software company you should be able to do make your software installable on a case-sensitive file system. It’s really not a lot to ask and every other Mac software developer is able to do it. Honestly, it is assumed that software written for a Unix-based OS will run on a case-sensitive file system so much that it does not even occur to people that there is a possibility that it won’t work.
The grammar of the error message is also eye catching. I know we can’t be perfect but I set the bar higher for companies like Adobe who charge a lot of money for their software. So Adobe, in case you didn’t notice your comma is hanging out between two spaces and there should be an “a” between have and non.
I cut Adobe some slack last year when they dropped the ball on CS3. Leopard is the first release of OS X to support a case-sensitive file systems and the release date of CS3 was close to the release date of Leopard. However, a year later with the release of CS4 you opted to add in an error message instead of just fixing the problem? Even after tons of people complained on the Adobe blog about it? Unbelievable.
