Yes, I know – this is the first post in this blog since … more than a year. Oups!

Demanded by Terry Ryan, this is a blog post about a terrible Adobe support experience and the solution to a problem that happened to me a few week ago (Well, Terry only asked me to blog the solution – but I think it’s fair to also tell the support story here)

All of a sudden my Creative Suite CS 5.5 license on my Mac didn’t activate anymore. Quite annoying when you’re sort of relying on it as the tools of your trade. I didn’t want to go in depth into the support experience I  had with Adobe’s first level support – let me just say it came quite close to the most useless 3-4 hours of my life (“Is your network switched on?”, “Have you rebooted?” etc). Adobe’s end customer product support is absolutely ridiculous (as many other people have previously talked about).

Anyway – after the problem of non-activating Creative Suites had spread to a few other installations we have and Adobe support wasn’t interested to help at all, I had to resort to actually “work around” the issue – e.g. hacking my way to a solution. Amazing how that solved the problem within ca two minutes for me after Adobe wasn’t able to help. Being me, I created some noise on Twitter, on internal Adobe community mailing lists as well as with the local Adobe NZ office.

The fix:

Finally my issue was escalated high enough that I was put with someone at Adobe support for the activation system who actually knew what he was talking about and interesting/enabled to help. It took him about 5 minutes on the phone with me to identify the issue and guess what – it was an issue with the Adobe activation system and the New Zealand timezone. (GMT+13 at the moment). I pretty much had to delete some old activation files on my hard drive, change my timezone to UK, activate while I was in that timezone and then change it back to NZDT. Easy fix.

Bugs like that can happen, I write software myself and I can absolutely understand. What I don’t understand and tolerate is shitty customer support though. Adobe got me to the point where I had to use technically illegal measures to actually put my software temporarily into a working state. Is that how you should treat your customers? The answer is quite frankly: no.

It’s not even that hard to improve:

- Empower your support reps to make actual decisions and give them the knowledge to do so (as a side note – just I personally know 4-5 more organisations/individuals who ran into this issue and Adobe has over the time of it occurring – ca. 4 weeks – not ever updated the scripts for their first level support).

- Software activation sucks because it’s the most annoying thing ever for your honest customers when it fails (as my case here clearly shows). At the same time, it’s tremendously easy to find a way around it if one needs to (again as my case here clearly shows – and I’m not even a professional hacker/cracker). As a software vendor you don’t gain anything but bad karma, really.

- If your providing “support” via Twitter – make sure you invest into a good & consistent follow-up system if more than one person provide support via Twitter. I can’t count the number of times that @Adobe_Care have asked me the same details of my problem over and over again (different people or people not realizing that I was still talking about the same problem etc).

Is there hope for the quality of Adobe’s support? Well, there’s always hope, isn’t it? Am I dreaming here?

You might wonder and think: “Haven’t I seen another post about cf.O(ANZ) just a few minutes ago?”. Yes, you’re absolutely right. cf.Objective(ANZ) is still over and next next big thing for everyone involved with web and (but not only) the Adobe platform in Australia and New Zealand is webDU in Sydney. Geoff has just yesterday posted the dates (14 and 15 April 2011) and a call for papers.

As a lot of people know, webDU (formerly known as MXDU) is a very special conference for Diane and I (first AU trip ever in 2003, got married there in 2004, decided to move to the southern hemisphere in 2005 and many more reasons…) and we’re always again looking very forward to it. For me it’s an absolute no-brainer to attend because it’s an awesome conference and it’s pretty much like coming home to a big family  - I also need to make sure I’m staying part of the shrinking group of people who presented at every single MXDU and webDU since the first one in 2003 – I think we’re down to three people by now *g*.

This year’s event will have a focus on three big streams: Beyond HTML, Experience and Team. I think Geoff is doing exactly the right thing by moving webDU towards also covering rather “soft” topics such as Experience and Team. The good thing with those topics is that the tracks can easily comprise of both technical and non-technical talks which will create a very nice mix and will ensure that people with a variety of backgrounds get involved and interested. Yay webDU 2011.

The title of this post says it all – cf.Objective(ANZ) 2010 in Melbourne is over and I’d like to take a moment to state that it was an awesome conference, thx to everyone involved: Mark, Justin, AJ, Darren and last but not least our fabulous event manager Julie Allen for putting this together. It’s been a pleasure being on the committee again and working on creating an agenda of sessions that attract people from all over Australia and New Zealand to make their way to Melbourne.

All in all I think it went great. We moved to a new venue that turned out to be much better re location, conference area and food. The wifi and the internet connection was one of the best wifi networks I’ve ever seen at a conference all over the world – setup and managed by the awesome folks of Nodecity.

I don’t have the final numbers yet, but I think we’ve grown the attendee base slightly compared to 2009, a big thanks to everyone who attended. The whole conference wouldn’t have been possible though without our awesome speakers and sponsors. I feel we’ve managed to put together a very nice mix of locals and international presenters as well as alumni and fresh talent . Offering full-day workshops at this year’s event for the first time, I was a bit unsure how they would be perceived by the target audience and I’m also extremely pleased with the outcome of those. The three workshops attracted 12, 8 and 5 participants each which is much more than I anticipated. Again: Big thumbs up everyone!

I’m sure more people will blog about the Melbourne conference and I’ve seen on Twitter that a few folks already have started to post their presentations on the various slide sharing services. A good starting point might be to search for the cfoanz hashtag

All that being said – cf.Objective(US) 2011 is approaching soon (Mid May 2011 and to be held in Minneapolis). Sean Corfield has passed the torch of content chair to Bob Silverberg (have a look at Bob’s post if you’re interested in presenting or learning more about the process of how cf.Objective(US) is going to work out their agenda) and I’m sure it’s going to be a great event again. Check it out!

Somewhere deeply hidden in the release notes of the recent Java for Mac OS X update, our friends from Apple have announced that they deprecated the Java runtime for Mac OS X and that “developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X”.

Read that as: Mac OS X 10.7 won’t have Java (by Apple), maybe we’re lucky and get the 10.6 update 3 thrown into OS X 10.7, but maybe not. To be fair – Apple was never a big and fast supporter of Java on OS X, for them to release Java 6 and 64-bit versions of the runtime was apparently a major drama so that a bunch of Java developers on the Mac at some point in time just switched to SoyLatte, a FreeBSD port of Java 6. That worked and still works fine for a lot of server applications such as Tomcat.

This solution has an issue though when it comes to desktop applications as those would quite often require Java APIs such as Sound/AWT/Swing etc. Through SoyLatte one’d have to use X11 and not the native Mac UI because the problem is that those APIs tie into the underlying operating system APIs and if Apple is not keen/interested in actively supporting a tie of Java into those for OS X, who is?

A lot of chat, gossiping and commenting went on in the java/mac/webdev communities during the last few days and I have to say I’m not thrilled about Apple going down that way. For me it’s another step towards the “there is just solely our way”-attitude that they put to show when it came to Flash on the iPhone, allowing non-Objective C-apps to the app store and on other occasions such as not installing Flash Player with OS X 10.6 on the new MacBook AIR laptops/netbooks (silly game, Apple). A lot of people were recently saying that “Adobe was the new Microsoft”. Well, I might be able to see where some of those people come from, but if that was the case then Apple would be the new Microsoft to at least the same extent – if not worse

But that’s not the point I wanted to make anyway. I had a look at which Java desktop apps I’m actually running on my Mac(s). The most important one is Eclipse in a variety of flavours: Eclipse, ColdFusion Builder, Flash Builder, FDT and some others. If I couldn’t easily run Eclipse in the future that’d be a major issue. Then: IntelliJ IDEA, Aqua Data Studio and a whole bunch of little Java apps for JVM and GC monitoring or tools of a similar category.

This afternoon I got into a Twitter discussion with @BruceHoult about the whole topic. “Unfortunately” he made a point when he said: “their stance that you can install whatever you like but they’re not going to maintain them for you, you mean?”. Yes, why should Apple maintain and support Oracle’s platform? Is Microsoft maintaining the JDK/JRE for Oracle? Probably not (but I don’t know). Side note: This example doesn’t hold for the Flash/iphone situation though as I really can’t install what I want on the iPhone/iPad because Apple would not allow a Flash Player into the app store.

Where does that leave us (or rather me)? Basically I need and want Eclipse to run on future versions of Mac OS X, otherwise the Mac platform would be as dead as it could be for me as a development platform. Luckily, that’s doable with SoyLatte and OpenJDK today as shown here: http://njbartlett.name/2010/10/24/eclipse-soylatte-no-x11.html. This solution might not yet offer the best and greatest performance ever yet, but I’m sure that people will put effort into OpenJDK for OS X re performance and additional functionality. Don’t underestimate the financial & time investments software vendors like Adobe have made into the Eclipse platform. Just alone Flash Builder, ColdFusion Builder and Flash Catalyst are built on top of Eclipse and the amount of Adobe-related development happening on OS X is still very high, even though SJ and Apple have pissed off the Adobe community to a certain extent.

Another very interesting piece to read is shoes[1].drop(); – basically saying, stop whining, the Java-on-desktop API model was flawed anyway and it’s up to Oracle to come up with a proper strategy for Java 7 and 8. This post does have a lot of merit, I still don’t see Java on the desktop on OS X being dead (yet).

Ok, as everyone was able to see, my participation in “30 days of me” has somewhat stalled. Here are days 12 to 20 – just for the sake of getting a bit further towards completion…:)

Day 12- How you found out about Blogger and why you made one

This doesn’t quite apply, but anyway. This blog started on Moveable Type in 2003, a few months later it was converted to be a mixture of MT code with add-ons written in ColdFusion and nowadays I’m running WordPress. Why did we start this? There was a need for a ColdFusion-blog in German back in 2003

Day 13- A letter to someone who has hurt you recently

Actually, I haven’t been that badly hurt for quite a long time to have the need to write such a letter. Even if I had, not sure if I would post it here.

Day 14- A picture of you and your family

Well, close Here’s a photo of my dad and my mum. I took it (reasonably) recently when I was in Germany in May/June this year.

Day 15- Put your iPod on shuffle: First 10 songs that play

Midnight Lady – Chris Norman
Things Change – Bluetones
Whiskeyclone – Beck
Not that kind – Anastacia
See you in hell – Suicide Commando
Pervert – Descendents
Stand in Line – Midnight Oil
Piano Man – Billy Joel
Mother Night – Brett Anderson
Burger Queen – Placebo

Day 16- Another picture of yourself

Oh, seriously? Don’t have any.

Day 17- Someone you would want to switch lives with for one day and why

Actually – the only person (and it’s not even a real character – sigh) I could remotely come up with would be The Doctor.

Day 18- Plans/dreams/goals you have

1. Make sure that @blauerpunto gets fit and healthy again

From here on in no particular order:

• Make some progress on the flying front, particularly on working towards the Commercial License
• Pay off mortgage
• Get a holiday house/apartment at the Gold Coast and spend 4-5 months per year there and the rest of the time in Wellington
• Re-cofirm our wedding vowels on the 10th anniversary of our wedding somewhere on the equator (to be worked out where
• Travel to South America, in particular Chile, Peru, Argentina and Uruguay
• Go back to Japan for at least two more weeks and finally have a holiday on one of the Pacific Islands

Day 19- Nicknames you have; why do you have them

Koeni (also see koeni.de) – just because

Day 20- Someone you see yourself marrying/being with in the future

Ehh, that’d be Diane (@blauerpunto)

Animals are my friends too. Here’s a photo of Lamb, Max (also known as @karoricat on Twitter) and myself.

Songs you listen to when you are Happy, Sad, Bored, Hyped, Mad – this is easy:

Some from the “Happy” playlist:

“Who’s that girl” – Madonna
“Catch me” – Bandits
“51st state” – New Model Army

There’s also a “Dark” playlist:

“Weak” – Skunk Anansie
“Hate this and I’ll love you” – Muse
“Weeping willow” – The Verve

And also a “Work mood” one, which is based on “Blue Sky Mine” by Midnight Oil and then derived from Genius.