BLOG by zaiss

Adobe, Adobe, Adobe…

A couple years ago, I wrote about Windows XP’s habit of updating overnight and restarting the computer without user input. This caused its share of problems, but today Adobe topped it.

Back story: Apparently it was a big update day for Adobe, because I had almost 200 MB of updates to download and install. This process was taking a couple hours, so I went into a meeting with my coworkers. The meeting ends and I return to my computer. After a couple minutes, an unnerving dialog appears:

And here I am with Visual Studio open, an unsaved mock-up in Illustrator, two functional specs, and a half-written email. Freaking out, I desperately try to decide what to save first (meanwhile my boss is asking me what’s wrong since I’m making such a spectacle). After 15 seconds (much less than a minute!), my applications start closing. Despite my best efforts, the applications shut down before I could save any of them, losing a fair chunk of code and design in the process.

How did we go backwards in restart usability? The tradition from the 90s tended to be, “Your computer will restart now. Please close all open applications and click OK.” I have my gripes with that, but at least that didn’t give you a time limit!! I’ve watched a lot of web designers and developers work, and the one common thread is that they have many applications open at once. No matter how critical the restart is to the updating process, the decision to put a timer on the restart was an awful one.