Tag: Software

Adobe Acrobat is a Hot Mess of Ads (and it’s not alone)

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

I pay $20 a month for the “privilege” of editing PDFs.

I understand there are other solutions that allow me to do this for free or at a fraction of the cost. I’ve tried many of these over the years and found that Adobe’s solution works best for me as a production tool. Having reached that conclusion, I don’t mind paying for it.

Lately, however, Adobe is making it hard for me to continue paying this fee. Every time I open the app, close the app, or even just move the mouse to the wrong portion of the screen, I am bombarded with advertisements.

First there is the startup ad. The first time I open the app, every day it seems, I’m presented with a popup detailing new features I might be interested in trying. I must engage with this ad, either positively or negatively, to proceed. It’s like a little toll my brain must pay to start working with PDFs.

(Note: I had already cleared the irritating popup which prompted this post yesterday before I had a chance to grab a screenshot. I knew that if I came back today I would get a new one, and bingo! there it was.)

Checkout this fun popup that I’m paying to see!

Thankfully I don’t need to close an ad like this every time I open the app for the rest of the day, but every time I open a document, I can be certain that another dialog recommending an AI summary will appear at the top of the screen. Let’s leave for another day the question of whether an AI summary is good for me, good for society, or whatever. Today I am irritated by the simple cognitive labor I have to do every time I open the app to work, to learn, or even just to read for fun. This dialog doesn’t obscure the document, but it consumes valuable real estate on my screen that I often can’t afford to give up. I have to think about it instead of what I’m reading.  

Here’s a super-cool dialog that is just big enough to be a distraction. Yay!

After I’ve closed this dialog, I’m still not done dealing with distractions. If I make the mistake of moving the cursor to the bottom of the screen, another dialog appears. Not only does this dialog require another little jolt of cognitive labor to acknowledge and clear the distraction, it creates a slight disincentive against moving the cursor while reading. Worse, this one obscures a portion of the document for a second or more after I move the mouse away from the Hot Zone.

This thing… this thing just really gets under my skin.

There’s something else about this dialog that drives me crazy. It activates a feature that is already controlled by a button at the top of the screen.

Here is the button that is supposed to activate an AI Assistant dialog like the one (but not the same one?) that automatically opens at the bottom of the screen when I move the mouse to the wrong place. It’s got fun colors!

If I wanted to use this feature, I would click the brightly-colored button at the top of the screen! This drives me crazy because the application shouldn’t just execute a command on my behalf – especially not when it has recommended the feature on startup and then reminded me of its existence again and again with popups, dialogs, and colorful buttons. Don’t treat me like a stubborn child who needs to be forced to eat his vegetables. You say you don’t like it, Adobe asks, clearly the wise adult in this exchange, but have you even tried it?

What an insult.

On this computer I pay the bills. If I want to use the damned feature I’ll damn well click the damned button.

This insult poses a philosophical challenge as well. Ask yourself: when is it OK for a machine to operate itself? The deal we’ve made with machines is simple: operators should be the ones operating them. The machine should not operate itself unless the operator has instructed it to do so, or failing to perform an operation would risk injury. When it executes a command on its own, the resulting operation should be limited in scope and duration.

Perhaps a car offers some good analogies. In my car, the headlights turn on automatically when it gets dark because I’ve turned a switch—that is, issued a command—for them to operate that way. If I don’t turn the switch, they don’t turn on. The radio doesn’t randomly change channels to introduce me to new stations (yet). It doesn’t turn on at all unless I press the button. The engine doesn’t change to Eco Mode automatically when I cross the border into a new state. The things that do operate without my explicit command, such as the automatic door locks, do so because the risks associated with error are grave. If I don’t lock the door, it may open in a crash. You can imagine the consequences. I’m willing to hand over a little piece of my autonomy to the machine here.

Does this example of remote execution, this magic AI Assistant dialog, pass that test?

In my most uncharitable moods (like the one shaping this blog post) I think about how failing to click the “Ask AI Assistant” button threatens the careers of all the managers who are responsible for driving user adoption of AI at Adobe. I suspect that Number of Impressions—that is, eyeballs on the AI Assistant feature—is a KPI they can boost by displaying this dialog at the bottom of the screen when I move the mouse down there. When I’m in these dark moods I think that’s a dirty trick to pull on me. It’s especially low down when I’ve been kind enough to allow you to reach into my bank account and automatically withdraw $19.99 every month.  

Believe it or not, we’re not done with adverts yet. After capturing the screenshots for this post, I clicked the OS window control to exit the application and close the window. To my amazement, the popup below appeared because I tried to exit without saving the document. Unlike the magic AI Assistant dialog, this could have been helpful! Alas. Rather than simply prompting me to save my changes, some manager at Adobe thought this would be another fantastic opportunity to sell me on a product feature by using dark patterns to drive my behavior. “Share for review” is bright and welcoming. Simply press Enter, it suggests, and turn on the light. And that WhatsApp logo is a big green light saying Go, Go, Go. “Save without sharing,” in contrast, is dark and foreboding, like the mouth of a cave—clearly a button for dullards and dimwits to press so they can stay in the Dark Ages.

They’ve got you coming and going. I pay for this.

Adobe isn’t alone here. Companies are taking these liberties too often. Just today, for example, Teams informed me when I started the app that there was a brand-new Copilot feature for me to try. I have to use Teams for work, so I spend a huge portion of my life—like it or not—staring at this application. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t opt-in, and I can’t opt-out. My employer didn’t request the feature. But, nonetheless, there it is. A group of managers and devs forced me and millions of others to just live with this thing for eight or more hours per day and hundreds or thousands of dollars per year. And if we don’t care about the feature enough to click on it, they’ll find new ways to remind us that it’s there. I expect to see more popups, more nudges, brighter colors, shimmering icons, and other ruses from the big bag of user psychology tricks reminding me to Try Copilot! until the next KPI comes along that incentivizes Microsoft to arbitrarily and unilaterally change the app again and surface new features.

Adobe ain’t alone. This thing I didn’t ask for had a “helpful” little popup to announce its arrival as well.

I see this happening every day in web apps, mobile apps, desktop apps, even the operating system itself. And before you swing your boots up into the stirrups of your high horse, I know I can use Linux to avoid most of this. I know I can use open source tools. I’ve used Linux as a daily driver on my personal machines since 2007, and I was using open source apps before that. It doesn’t matter. If I want to put food on my table I have to use these products controlled by Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, Esri, Autodesk, and all the other companies who do these short-sighted, authoritarian things to try to alter my behavior and shape my daily existence. I can’t escape it, and neither can you.

But still, if Adobe could chill with the ads in Acrobat, even just a little bit, that would be nice. Until then, I’ll be over here closing popup adverts and keeping my cursor at the top of the window.

Email is Wrong

cbcrenshaw2 Comments

No matter what you do, odds are that a significant amount of your time doing it is spent answering emails. That is certainly true for me. Email is a unifying thread across my professional and creative life. It directs the course of my days at work and my nights playing music and making art. As a result, it is the first thing I check in the morning, the most important part of my workday during the week, and one of the last things I look at before I go to sleep at night. Everyone I know is in the same situation.

A literal mountain of emails. Image produced by Microsoft Copilot.

It’s too bad, then, that email is all wrong. Though email is such an important part of my day, none of the email tools I’ve tried offer any of the things that I need to respond thoughtfully and keep myself organized. Email web apps limit you to accounts provided by that host or require you to do a bunch of weird setup to look at other accounts. That’s before looking at any of the tools these providers offer. Thunderbird is stuck trying to emulate the way Outlook worked in 2007. Outlook—the default, required client for most users—offers notes, tasks, folders, reminders, rules, and integrations to other Office software, but at the end of the day every email that flows into the application looks and feels the same, and every important tool exists somewhere else on the reader’s machine. It’s up to the reader to categorize, prioritize, leverage the right tools, and follow-up on their messages. Most readers are OK with that responsibility, but the sheer volume of email we have to deal with everyday can make it difficult to faithfully execute this responsibility.

Here are the main problems as I see them:

  • Every email in every client looks and feels the same by default
  • “Reading” is the objective. For many users, when an email is “read,” it is filed away for further action in the same pile with things that don’t need action. Important items can fall through the cracks unless the user deploys some secondary processing method. These methods vary widely by user but may include flags, folders, tasks, changing the status back to unread, or (more likely, I suspect) some combination of everything the interface offers in a desperate bid to stay on top of it all.
  • Every item must be read in order to be processed. See above.
  • All of the most important tools—word processors, spreadsheets, web searches, IM clients, checklists, and so on—exist somewhere else. There is no connection between an email which triggered a process and the tools needed to complete it.
  • This is also true in the archival sense. Often an email and its attachments are the only evidence of work done. These are only the most superficial products of deeper processes which are documented on both local and remote file systems.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a different kind of email tool. I’d like to have an app where I can build process templates and drag emails to “anchors” for those processes. Dragging an email to the app would create an action item, and the process anchor would follow rules to provide the specific tools needed to complete the item.

Let’s say you have a standard process you typically need to support from email. For example, for several years my job looked like this:

  • Receive an email with an assignment
  • Create a folder on a filesystem on the enterprise network
  • Populate this folder with certain templates
  • Collect information from the internet and other emails
  • Use this information to complete the templates in the folder
  • Submit a link to the folder to a reviewer
  • Revise items based on the reviewer’s comments
  • Send approved items to a customer
  • Archive work products in an online repository

In my platonic email app, I would drag the assignment email to a process anchor in the app. This process anchor would increment an action item counter and then follow a rule to create the folder, populate it with templates, provide a list of links to the places where I need to gather information, give me the ability to open the template documents and work them right from the application, automatically send a message to the approver when I’m ready, automatically email the customer, and then pop a link to the repository upload (or, in an even more perfect world, use an API to upload the work products). After completing the process, the action item counter would decrement.

Each action item associated to the anchor would have its own workspace, which would include other tools like a notepad and calculator. Similar anchors would exist for other processes configured by the user, surfacing different tools and following different processes set in advance. These processes would be configured with natural language rules, like Monday.com automations.

Anyway, I doubt I’ll ever have the time to build this tool, but I’m always looking for it. In the meantime, maybe just writing out the ways that I think email is wrong will help me be more thoughtful about how to make it right with the tools I already have.

Computers should be bicycles for the mind, but with email we are trudging through confusion.

Mobile Zotero Part 2: Planning Features

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

Between cleanup from one hurricane, preparation for another later this week, dissertation research in history, coursework in Information Science, and a mini-vacation last weekend, I haven’t had much time to think about the mobile Zotero project. I still don’t have a name for the project, but I have at least started building a list of required features. So here, without further ado, is the first list:

  • LIbrary Read/Write
  • Note read/write
  • Search
  • Create/Modify Collections
  • ISBN Input/Scanner
  • DOI input/scanner
  • Tag navigator
  • Relationship navigator
  • File upload/download

Time to start digging into Zotero’s API, seeing how it translates into Swift, and looking at any existing libraries that might solve some of these problems for me. Avast!