Apples decision to completely rewrite Final Cut Pro has been met with a lot of mixed opinions. John Gruber has a summary of the backlash here -http://daringfireball.net/2011/06/final_cut_pro_x_backlash

It seems clear to me that it was done in order to ultimately progress the app, extend it’s future and no doubt update what was a legacy code base. It will have been this update in legacy code that will have meant some features have been lost (for now). It’s a bit like those uncluttering techniques where you chuck everything out and then slowly reintroduce things as it becomes obvious that you need them. A risky approach perhaps but the long term benefits should out way the short term niggles.

Adobes Photoshop feels and performs like an app that needs this kind of attention and approach, you just need to look at apps like Pixelmator & Acorn to see what could be achieved starting from scratch and utilising the OS it’s made for.

Photoshop feels like a Frankenstein app, lots of different parts cobbled and stitched together to make a lumbering and stumbling collection ofiInconsistent dialogs and behaviours. I wonder if the developers have ever played Buckaroo

Not something I’d immediately picked up on but with so much visual noise in these apps today thanks to the myriad of options it’s good someone’s taken the time to point this out. Whether it leads to anything is another thing.

mrgan:

I did not mean to write an essay detailing all the ways in which slider controls in Photoshop CS4 reveal problems in the design, development, quality control, and management of the product; I really didn’t. I just pulled up the Smart Sharpen dialog one evening and, sighing at its hideousness for the n^th time, decided to put together a little joke post. That was all.

Is there an Internet rule yet stating that even the most obviously indefensible mistake will eventually be defended by someone somewhere? Awful marketing efforts get explained as genius viral campaigns, broken features become solutions.

So, several people wrote to yours truly picking on one single item from my post: the sliders’ deviation from OS X’s standard. The defense being twofold, it seems:

1. Photoshop’s sliders are different for a reason, and
2. Hey, Apple does custom controls too, so it’s alright.

To which I say:

1. No they’re not; not as a rule, anyway. There’s no reason for Memory Usage, Brightness, Pencil Width, Radius, and Scale to be different from each other. They all do the same exact thing: pick a single value from a range. (Needless clarification: yes, Scale has to be a bit smaller to fit comfortably in its window. Making well-fitting smaller versions of controls shouldn’t be rocket science.) These make up more than 50% of my examples. What’s the explanation for those?
   
   As for the remaining custom controls, they do more than pick a single value, so they should be different. But… this different? Why are the Threshold and Color Balance sliders aliased when Layer Blending isn’t? Does anyone find these well-rendered?
2. When Apple deviates, they usually innovate. When they introduce a new slider (like the one in iTunes 9) it’s an improvement. It feels at home in its window.
   
   However, Apple is sometimes wrong. Final Cut Pro - originally designed by Macromedia - is not Apple’s finest UI hour. Children learn at a young age that bad behavior isn’t excused by saying “Cathy did it too!”

(I have now written way too much about all this. Aren’t these flaws simply obvious?)

I’m not saying anyone at Adobe is evil or crazy. I thought it was, in fact, pretty clear why Photoshop’s sliders are an unappealing mess: they were designed by someone who shouldn’t have been designing, implemented by someone who should’ve been implementing better, skipped over by someone who should have been finding bugs, and approved by someone who should have had higher standards.

It’s not the end of the world that a thumb control is misplaced by one pixel. All software ships with bugs, or it doesn’t ship. But here we are, version 11 of the app, and one of the most-used standard controls in the app is broken.

And this is only sliders we’re talking about. If this dead horse needed any more beating, I’d put together a gallery of misaligned text labels, inconsistent popup buttons (often in the same window!), badly scaled controls, and nearly impenetrable UI bugs. (I mean, there’s a whole blog for these.) What’s the explanation there - is that innovation? Or is it simply the case that this doesn’t matter enough to Adobe?

I love Photoshop. It’s where I spend eight hours five times a week. I just wish that one of these days, instead of piling on more furniture, they’d clean up the place.