Adobe vs Greenwich Mean Time / journal / hicksdesign

01/03/04

Adobe vs Greenwich Mean Time

I’m posting this in the hope that I can prevent someone else from losing their mind. The shiny new Adobe Creative Suite ran fine on my G5, but when I tried to install and run it on my G4 Powerbook, the dock icon would bounce for a few seconds then quit. I tried a variety of fixes – re-installation, trashing preference files, repairing permissions, installing under a different log-in. I even rebuilt the Powerbook from scratch in case that might help. Still no cigar.

Finally, after having a Damascus Road experience on a MacUser forum, I found the fix, and you’ll never guess what it is. Go into Date & Time>Time Zone and change the setting from ‘GMT’ to ‘London’ (or anything other than GMT). Suddenly, everything opens and works fine.

Go figure.

Technorati Tags Tags: adobe, bugs, osx, software

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Comments are now closed, but you can still have a jolly time reading what others have left:

Phunky said 1686 days ago:

That is one of the strangest software bugs ive ever seen! I mean not being able to run a program just due to the fact that you have your time set to GMT

Adobe should be very ashamed of them selfs!

Jon Hicks said 1686 days ago:

Whats worse is that they don't publicise it. There is no mention of it in any of their support documents. I guess it only affects those in the UK, Portugal, West Africa...

Egor Kloos said 1686 days ago:

That has to be one of the weirdest bugs I've ever heard of. I can't believe this didn't show up during beta testing.

Adobe CS installed like a charm for me, just goes to show easy it can be to mess up a brand experience and lose a customer. Not that there that many other choices to chose from but you know what I mean.

Jon Hicks said 1686 days ago:

Exactly. While I could live without the latest Photoshop or Illustrator, I use InDesign and Acrobat too much. There's no decent alternatives.

Phunky said 1686 days ago:

urgh!

Never used InDesign tbh, im to much of a NotePad junky...

As for Acrobat i wud love to kill who ever created it! i h8 the program with a passion!

Jon Hicks said 1686 days ago:

Notepad a replacement for InDesign? Are you thinking of GoLive phunky? InDesign is the desktop publishing/ print design app to rival Quark Xpress.

Marcus said 1686 days ago:

Phunky: You hate Acrobat? That program is awesome. It opens too slowly, I'll grant you that, but for viewing fun things like IRS forms and creating univerally viewable documents for things like invites to the company picnic, there's no other! :)

Andy Budd said 1686 days ago:

We encountered this problem a few weeks back. For some reason, OS X seems to set it's time zone to GMT Cardiff. I'm not exactly sure why this breaks Adobe CS, but the only thing we could think was that Adobe have some weird country licensing restrictions.

At the moment, should you take your machine overseas (to Wales say) and change the time zone settings, your apps may stop working. I can't imagine Adobe would tie your licence to a country, and to be honest, I haven't looked. However if this were the case, this would be madness.

Michael Heilemann said 1686 days ago:

I swear, Photoshop is the slowest evolving 'large' app on the market today. It seems that for every version it becomes bulkier, more and more feature bloated and breaks old features (TGA support, anyone?).

It's still a good program, but it could really need a 'revolution'.

Anyway. GMT bug?!... What does CS have to do with your timezone?!

#10

Veerle Pieters said 1686 days ago:

This is not the only weird bug in the Creative Suite. When I tried to install it, the installer would quit every time even after a complete reboot. After much looking I found the solution on the Adobe forum. I had to change permissions on the Application folder to make it work. Guess what folder had the wrong permissions afterwards, yes the Application folder. Adobe rocks ;-)

#11

Jon Hicks said 1685 days ago:

Andy - mine was set to 'GMT London'. I wonder if this means I can never leave England?!

Michael - I've not had your problems, I find Photoshop CS as quick as any other version, but I take your point about broken older fearures.

#12

Nick Mracek said 1685 days ago:

Re: Michael Heilemann

Have you heard of Windows or Internet Explorer? I think these two programs are well ahead of Adobe's strive to be the slowest evolving "bloated and broken" program.

#13

shmuel said 1685 days ago:

John, what is your over-all feeling about CS? Worth the money? I'm especially curious about your view of PS, IL, and ID v. Quark.

#14

Jon Hicks said 1685 days ago:

In my view ,the upgrades to Photoshop and Illustrator are minimal, but if you run a G5, you can get a good performance boost.

However InDesign CS is quite simply the best print design app I've ever used - it wipes the floor with Quark. I upgraded from version 2, and its definitely worth the money!...

http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/archives/000284.php

#15

shmuel said 1684 days ago:

Jon,

First sorry about the H before ;) - Thanks for the link I haven't been visiting your site for very long so I must have missed that one. I just ordered my upgrade, hopefully it'll run all right on my G4 Powerbook. Up till now I have run Photoshop/Freehand/Quark but as good as Quark once was it's the only classic App I run and I'm really sick of it.

I know Photoshop much better than I know Freehand so although I have ideological qualms about moving to a single vendor I hope that it will improve my overall productivity as well as save me some money in the long run.

#16

Michel Fortin said 1683 days ago:

I found a wired bug from Adobe too, in Golive CS. When you import a project from the old version (or even create a new one), make sure that no file has a # in it's name or Golive will start to hide random files and show duplicates of folders in it's site view and become really unusable. It's even worse when trying to sync with FTP.

It took me more than a week to track down the problem to some #template.html files hidden everywhere in the site.