Case sensitivity is hard - for companies like Adobe

Sometimes the ability of Adobe to anger me blows my mind. I’ve never appreciated any of the Macromedia side of things (feel free to review early posts on this blog for specific, tangible opinions on Flex). Everything they make is overpriced and riddled with bugs. I believe the company is 70% management, 25% compensated evangelists, and 5% developers. My impression as an end user is they have a handful of hardcore, excellent engineers trying to support the bloated weight present in the rest of the company.

Photoshop at least was useful, and though just as expensive as the rest was at least feature-rich and relatively stable (compared with the total garbage price-to-feature ratio present in Flex Builder or Dreamweaver).

I just tried to install Photoshop on my new macbook pro running Leopard with a case-sensitive formatted hard drive. Case-insensitive volumes are stupid and I was delighted to have Leopard offer this option during installation.

However, it appears making their creative suite compatible with a case-sensitive format is beyond the capabilities of Adobe so they aren’t even going to try according to this blog. The particularly telling portion follows in this comment. The square-bracketed portion is Adobe’s response.


I was all set to purchase a copy of Photoshop CS3 today once I'd got the trial installed, but now I won't be buying because it won't work on case sensitive filesystems. What makes it particularly annoying is:


* It's a very silly restriction - OS X is UNIX, and UNIX filesystems are almost universally case sensitive
* It would be trivial to fix for a company with Adobe's resources
* Adobe could at least have the decency to include mention of it in the system requirements!

[If it were trivial, we would have addressed this limitation already. Everything is a trade-off. After Apple introduced this feature/capability/whathaveyou, we had a choice: should we put resources into building/testing for both case-sensitive & case-insensitive environments, or should we put that effort elsewhere? So far, lacking a case for the user benefit provided by case sensitivity, we've chosen to invest elsewhere. --J.]


So basically making an application case-sensitive is beyond the capabilities of Adobe. I find this hard to believe given that there are posts like this one easily findable with google where people have made it run on just such a volume. I am also a little bit angry about my macbook at this point as well. I guess I assumed with all of the developer evangelism for the mac platform that their file system had always been case-sensitive.

I personally am not up to jumping through the hoop, my macbook is now Adobe free aside from the Firefox flashplayer which I admit there is no viable alternative for. I realize this may not be an option for Designers who depend on the creative suite but for my admittedly non-power-user purposes Seashore is fine. That open source, free project somehow managed to conquer the sheer difficulty of executing a program on a case-sensitive volume.