WTF, Adobe AIR? sincerely, the rest of the world



  • A lot of website are using the Adobe AIR technology to (rapidly) make a (crappy) desktop version of their site. It's the case of Deezer, a famous legal french music-streaming website. To fight Spotify, they decided to literaly copy their old flash-site in AIR. I don't mind the "normal" bugs which came along with every Adobe product; but my matter is not a bug, but a real feature. When AIR need to be updated, it INSTANTLY kill every app using it and pop a f*cking black window saying "Hey buddy, ima let ya finish what you were doing, but my update is more important than your fucking application and I don't need your approval. Deals with it." and wake up the windows UAC.

    It's pretty... hem... annoying when you are listening to one of your favorite music. I almost killed my coworkers.

     

    And no, I can't use the regular website, some network admin just want to watch the world burn and add Deezer to their blacklist but not the desktop app.



  • I haven't had any issues. The Pandora desktop app runs on AIR and it just tells me I can close Pandora and update AIR now, or it'll update the next time I launch an AIR app.



  • I maybe was a bit angry... is there a checkbox somewhere telling "close every app before update" ?

    Anyway, I found a reason to create a new post to criticize Adobe. Isn't it nice from me?



  • @mott555 said:

    The Pandora desktop app runs on AIR

    ??? I run that every day, it sucks on toast.

    @mott555 said:

    I haven't had any issues.

    Oh. You're one of THOSE people.



  • I'll redeem myself by pointing out that AIR/Flash always try to auto-update at login on my personal laptop, except the update always fails and leaves me an error dialog with no buttons and with the red "X" button disabled. The only way to get rid of it is to go into Task Manager and kill the process.



  • @mott555 said:

    I'll redeem myself by pointing out that AIR/Flash always try to auto-update at login on my personal laptop, except the update always fails and leaves me an error dialog with no buttons and with the red "X" button disabled. The only way to get rid of it is to go into Task Manager and kill the process.

    ^- which of course counts as "had no problems."

    See what I mean? THOSE people.



  • I develop AIR applications regularly, and I question your recollection of this event. In my experience, the update window (which yes, is black), will pop up and ask if you would like to update now or later. It has never closed any running AIR programs for me, though that's not to say that this didn't happen. I can't comment on the UAC, since I don't have that enabled. I'm guessing this was the update from Nov 7th to AIR 3.1?

    It might be helpful for you to file a bug report, as I am certain this is not the desired behavior.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @mott555 said:

    I'll redeem myself by pointing out that AIR/Flash always try to auto-update at login on my personal laptop, except the update always fails and leaves me an error dialog with no buttons and with the red "X" button disabled. The only way to get rid of it is to go into Task Manager and kill the process.

    ^- which of course counts as "had no problems."

    See what I mean? THOSE people.

     

    I only use the Pandora app on my work PC which works fine, which is what I originally meant by "has no problems". My laptop gets fired up maybe once a month and I don't use anything AIR-based on it and Flash continues to work fine despite failing to update.

     



  •  @stevenvi said:

    I develop AIR applications regularly, and I question your recollection of this event. In my experience, the update window (which yes, is black), will pop up and ask if you would like to update now or later. It has never closed any running AIR programs for me, though that's not to say that this didn't happen. I can't comment on the UAC, since I don't have that enabled. I'm guessing this was the update from Nov 7th to AIR 3.1?

    It might be helpful for you to file a bug report, as I am certain this is not the desired behavior.

    The UAC is not the main problem, but only a part of it; and it pop on every update. The update window is pretty clean and simple, I must admit that. I will submit a bug report, but with little hope...



  • @stevenvi said:

    It might be helpful for you to file a bug report

    Helpful is not what we aim for here!

    @stevenvi said:

    I am certain this is not the desired behavior.

    And how would you know that for certain unless..... 


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    @mott555 said:
    The Pandora desktop app runs on AIR

    ??? I run that every day, it sucks on toast.

    What sort of problems did you have? I only ever ran the desktop version briefly. I prefer the web interface. The old flash interface was better than the current HTML5 stuff.



  • @stevenvi said:

    In my experience, the update window (which yes, is black), will pop up and ask if you would like to update now or later.

    Is it one of those hate-filled ones that pops up, steals all window focus, and sets focus on its go button? So that if you are typing away and hit the space bar right when it pops up it goes ahead and does the hateful action as if you approved it? Because I hate those.


  • BINNED

    @Xyro said:

    @stevenvi said:
    In my experience, the update window (which yes, is black), will pop up and ask if you would like to update now or later.
    Is it one of those hate-filled ones that pops up, steals all window focus, and sets focus on its go button? So that if you are typing away and hit the space bar right when it pops up it goes ahead and does the hateful action as if you approved it? Because I hate those.

    I love KDE, KDE has focus-stealing prevention

    Windows supposedly has focus-stealing prevention, too. Though I throw no better rage fits than when exactly this happens.



  • @topspin said:

    Windows supposedly has focus-stealing prevention, too.

    That's quite a change of tune from the days when it was what seemed like official MS policy.  I used to go in to work every day, fire up my computer, start trying to work and insta-rage as Outlook 97 stole the input focus from me, like, six times while it was starting up MINIMIZED FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!




  • @DaveK said:

    @topspin said:
    Windows supposedly has focus-stealing prevention, too.
    That's quite a change of tune from the days when it was what seemed like official MS policy. I used to go in to work every day, fire up my computer, start trying to work and insta-rage as Outlook 97 stole the input focus from me, like, six times while it was starting up MINIMIZED FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

    Yeah and remember how DOS 5 sometimes you needed a custom autoexec.bat to get things to run?

    #ragingaboutproductsfromdecadesago


  • BINNED

    @topspin said:

    Windows supposedly has focus-stealing prevention, too.

    Ok guys, maybe I need to work up my wording, but my point was:

    AFAICT, it doesn't work. Everything's still stealing focus. Maybe a little less so then before, but still.

     


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @gobes said:

    f*cking
    Why's that asterisk there, and what's it doing?



  • @serguey123 said:

    @stevenvi said:

    It might be helpful for you to file a bug report

    Helpful is not what we aim for here!

    @stevenvi said:

    I am certain this is not the desired behavior.

    And how would you know that for certain unless..... 

    He's the one responsible? Get him!

     Also I believe the only "desired behavior" of any Adobe product is to make people ask "WTF?"

     

    @PJH said:

    @gobes said:
    f*cking
    Why's that asterisk there, and what's it doing?
     

    Fucking.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @DaveK said:
    @topspin said:
    Windows supposedly has focus-stealing prevention, too.
    That's quite a change of tune from the days when it was what seemed like official MS policy. I used to go in to work every day, fire up my computer, start trying to work and insta-rage as Outlook 97 stole the input focus from me, like, six times while it was starting up MINIMIZED FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

    Yeah and remember how DOS 5 sometimes you needed a custom autoexec.bat to get things to run?

    #ragingaboutproductsfromdecadesago

    I call it "trying to learn from the mistakes of history, rather than carrying on making them over and over again like some kind of dumbass" myself.




  • @blakeyrat said:

    #ragingaboutproductsfromdecadesago
     

    Nothing there.

     

    I am disappoint.



  • @topspin said:

    Windows supposedly has focus-stealing prevention, too. Though I throw no better rage fits than when exactly this happens.

     

    That takes me back...


     



  • That's probably the least of AIR's issues.



    Our main product is a 4 year old AIR product.



    A lot of issues occur when we release an update, because AIR will shit itself and refuse to update the app. The most common problem is "The application file is damaged. Download a new copy." The solution is to REINSTALL AIR, and then that same file mysteriously works fine.

    That's if you don't have issues un/installing AIR itself. Often its installer just craps itself and won't remove or reinstall AIR at all.



    And since version 3, they have a lovely bug in their javascript engine where variables...go missing.

    We've had reproducible cases where loading a project from the command line would fail ... the error message being that a [variable] is undefined. Or that /^regex.*/.projectFile is not valid. Basically, running the program and telling it to load a file was repeatedly giving a different error - that of the project file (a top level, app-wide variable that only changes when the project does) is now pointing to a function, a different variable, undefined, regex, you name it. This happens in hard to reproduce cases all over the app since AIR 3.

    Downgrading to AIR 2 fixes the issue.



    We've sent Adobe an easily reproducible case, the bare minimum - and it's not much - that shows variables randomly changing into something else. Weeks ago. And have heard nothing except their autoresponder saying they'll get back to us soon.



  • @PJH said:

    @gobes said:
    f*cking
    Why's that asterisk there, and what's it doing?
     

     

    It can replace any number (even zero) of any kind of characters. The original statement was probably "for godnes sake! What were they thincking"

    The author doesn't appear to spell things correctly.

     



  • Maybe I should install a policy that bans people for doing stupid sh*t like censoring swears, and signing their posts in earnest.

     

    - dhromed



  • @Mcoder said:

    @PJH said:

    @gobes said:
    f*cking
    Why's that asterisk there, and what's it doing?
     

     

    It can replace any number (even zero) of any kind of characters.

    Only 'f's.

     



  • @DaveK said:

    @Mcoder said:
    @PJH said:
    @gobes said:
    f*cking
    Why's that asterisk there, and what's it doing?
    It can replace any number (even zero) of any kind of characters.
    Only 'f's.
    You seem to be assuming regex syntax; it could be a simple globbing wildcard.



  • Here's my *adobe* :S story:

    It's about reader (bloated ****ware i know).

    Most of my pdf files are around 500mb and taken 60 s to load (this is an quadcore pc with each core runnen at 2.27 GHZ, without turbuboost (with they reach 2.75 GHZ) and 4 g mem, F***ing reader takes 1 gig of mem (-500mb file = 500mb mem)).

    So while waiting i check my email.

    For some reason pressing F9 in reader fires updater.

    However... i can't put anything in or kill it.

    the reader here always has to update (we ignore the info msg's because sysmins have to do it), so the updater starts updating, but UAC won't let me continue use my pc before the sysmin puts in his passwd to unlock UAC and press cancel.

    Some readers might notice that F9 is outlook's refresh key,

    so when reader steals focus on the wrong moment (and it does that all to often, that is until the sysmin added my account to the "can unlock UAC" list (i still need the sysmin's passwd to click "OK" on UAC)).

    The bad thing is that reader won't give me control of the window focus until it's done loading (this continues even after it steals focus).

    In the end i found a way of remapping the F9 key in windows to focus outlook so reader can't catch it!

    If (this->story == "WTF!?")

    {

    say("I agree");

    } else {

    say("I don't care what you think, i think it's a WTF!");

    }



  • @roelforg said:

    (bloated fuckware i know).

    @roelforg said:

    Fucking reader

    There.

     

     



  • League of Legends uses AIR for their lobby/shop browser. After using it for about a week I sort of sensed that AIR had to be subpar software. I'm glad I found this thread to justify my suspicions.



  • @Scarlet Manuka said:

    @DaveK said:
    @Mcoder said:
    @PJH said:
    @gobes said:
    f*cking
    Why's that asterisk there, and what's it doing?
    It can replace any number (even zero) of any kind of characters.
    Only 'f's.
    You seem to be assuming regex syntax; it could be a simple globbing wildcard.

    Now I have three problems!

     



  • @DaveK said:

    Now I have three problems!
     

    So you need a fourth problem for the 'P' key.


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