Did your computer start last night? Mine did! Boy, was I surprised! Ha ha!
No, seriously, I was surprised. And sometimes I don’t like surprises.
MICROSOFT
Microsoft automatically installs updates on the second Tuesday of each month. It occasionally pushes out more patches two weeks later, as it did this month. I don’t always have to know when my computer will restart on a Tuesday night and I don’t always post something to warn you. It’s part of the game.
I read pretty widely, though, and I had no idea these were coming last night. Usually I see mentions of upcoming patches in the technical and support blogs but this one arrived with no buzz.
So it goes. I’m more frustrated by Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 1, which was released yesterday as well. It was not installed automatically last night but you might find it down in the lower right corner, marked as an “Important” update.
Service Pack 1 is a collection of updates and bug fixes that will not change anything dramatically for you. It will be installed on anyone’s computer with Office 2010 in due course. With luck, it won’t break anything. Here’s an article about the Service Pack, and here’s a complete list of fixes.
Don’t misunderstand me. Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 1 is a lovely update. It’s not broken. You can install it. I’ll take care of it for clients that are signed up for my monitoring service.
The botched part of the update is the timing. Microsoft released the service pack yesterday to accompany the Office 365 rollout, presumably because the service pack fixes some issues relating to the online Office Web Apps. For some reason the company did not tell anyone that it intended to push it immediately into all the update channels – the Automatic Updates system and WSUS. With luck it’s perfectly safe and absolutely stable and there’s no reason to delay, but I’m more comfortable if I’ve watched for trouble reports for a week or two before these things land on your doorstep. I’m not the only one miffed by the lack of notice – Susan Bradley commented on the same thing earlier today.
ADOBE
Adobe released an update for its Acrobat 9 lineup on June 15. Acrobat 9.4.5 fixed multiple security vulnerabilities; it was installed automatically and on schedule, so no complaints about the process or the timing. Slowly but surely Acrobat is becoming more secure and Adobe is becoming more grown up.
And yet Adobe managed to bring a special ineptitude to the table yet again. The update introduced a bug – not a security problem, just a feature that was broken by the update – and it likely won’t be fixed for a while. Two weeks, when the next patches are scheduled? Longer? Adobe’s not saying.
Acrobat’s navigation bar on the left has a “Pages” panel to display thumbnails of the pages in a PDF. It ought to be possible to select multiple pages by ctrl-clicking or shift-clicking to select the pages, which then allows you to remove them, change the order, replace them, or more.
The 9.4.5 update broke the ability to ctrl-click or shift-click to select multiple pages. It just doesn’t work.
People who use that feature depend on it. They are outraged, with good reason. Here’s where I finally tracked down Adobe’s resonsibility for the bug, after a fruitless hour or more running repairs and trying to figure out what was going on. There are lots of exclamation points on that page.
After a week of silence, Adobe finally responded: “Oops! Our bad.”
Fortunately, there is a workaround. You can select pages by dragging with the mouse around the first page you want to select. It will be outlined in blue as if you had clicked it. Then hold down the shift key while dragging around the next page or group of pages. The pages do not have to be contiguous or near each other.
Eventually it will be fixed, just another bumpy pothole in our technical road.
To the best of my knowledge, this only affects Acrobat 9, not Acrobat X.
Good luck out there!
Although I have been able to find no other reports of this problem, I also suddenly lost the ability to dictate into Adobe Pro bookmarks using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I am a lawyer specializing in criminal appeals and this is the means by which I organize and annotate trial transcripts as I read through them. Given the timing, I have to believe that the 9.4.5 update is responsible for this incredible loss of functionality as well.
Thanks for the info on the Acrobat9 update foo. I thought I’d lost my mind. Again.
I think that there’s another bug here that crept in in 8 or 9. Maybe you know of a workaround for this. If you have a non-integer multiple of pages displayed (like 11 when there are two across in the page view), the remainder pages are not visible, and can’t be scrolled to. You can fiddle to get them displayed, but it immediately goes back the way it was.
Acrobat 9.4.5 was released almost two months ago. Adobe didn’t have anything new on Tuesday this week, when it issued its scheduled monthly updates for a number of its other products. I wonder what the delay is? These are fairly gross errors that deserve a quick response.
I might add that while doing your Acrobat 9.4.5 bug circumvention, once your blue highlighted selection is made, be sure to drag a thumbnail graphic directly to move it and not the blue shaded perimeter area (which results in clearing the blue highlighting). The other 9.4.5 bug of not highlighting the first “hit” on each page when doing a search is much more annoying. How could Adobe break the most commonly used feature in Acrobat 9 in such an obscure way, never have regression tested this basic function given the 3 month release cycle, and conveniently not broke it on Acrobat X? Then I see a lot of web forum recommendations pushing to upgrade to X — which completely changed the User Interface resulting in significant loss of productivity while bridging the learning curve. It reminds me of how OCR Suspects are never found/flagged in 9 and then was fixed only in X (paid upgrade to fix bugs and have to relearn). Similar to the MS Ribbon changes that annoy long time loyal customers with interface changes/lost productivity in the effort to make it easier for new customers who have to learn something either way regardless. Abobe, do you think enhancing the Help interface/documentation for newbies would be the better way to go than to force needless change/lost productivity on long-time loyal users?
I have also had problems laser printing InDesignCS5-generated PDFs from Acrobat Pro 9.4.5 (Mac). Solid black text elements will not print black but have a halftone greyscale screen that can’t be eliminated, and fine dotted rules fill in and print as much heavier solid rules, even though the PDF is rendered correctly on screen. I reported this to Adobe and sent thm a sample PDF file exhibiting the problem. Adobe’s response: Please ‘roll back’ to Acropbat 9.4.4 — uninstall Acrobat 9, reinstall it from scratch, then update to 9.4.4. ‘Please do not update to 9.4.5’
Louis Mackay
Adobe 9.4.5 update also messed up the highlight feature when using “find”. Now if I’m searching for a particular word in a document, it doesn’t highlight ever instance of it. It does it sporadically and this is completely unacceptable. I need to search bid documents and they can be hundreds of pages long. Is there a way to uninstall this update? Windows Control Panel Installer will not let me do it.
Yuck! I haven’t tried to uninstall it but there were reports in the forum thread from people who had found it quite difficult. We can only hope Adobe gets another patch out relatively quickly.
You know, I hate to bitch about technology, because lets be honest, we have things pretty easy. It just gets upsetting when something that we’re used to working so flawlessly decides to go rogue… which in turn causes us to have to do a little more work and use a little more brain power.
While I agree that they should probably make sure that in fixing their bugs, they don’t create new ones, I think we should still all recognize the fact that the Adobe systems are still pretty snazzy and be grateful that we’re not still working in the dark ages of technology.
It’s all true, but Adobe is such a fun target! Everything comes together to make me want to poke at Adobe: It charges premium prices, its products have become absolutely essential to almost every business, it’s never been particularly transparent, and it’s had a bad couple of years for bugs and security holes. But problems like this bug are trivial in the big scheme of things and I think Adobe has been stepping up to the next level of security and code review fairly aggressively (much like Microsoft did a few years ago).
You’re absolutely right, though – Acrobat is enabling offices to do things that are magical and that cannot be done by any other product. I’ve got clients going paperless simply because Acrobat offers such rich tools. (And as it happens I’m in the process of learning Dreamweaver, which is like so many Adobe products – complex to learn, dazzling in its richness.)