Saturday, December 21, 2013

Unfriendly software – Even Adobe is not immune …

Lightroom is a relatively new bit of software, and a darned good one. In fact, Lightroom now satisfies at least 99.9% of my needs as a photographer (admittedly at the casual enthusiast level.) I own the Nik suite of Lightroom compatible plugins yet I never use them. I own the Perfect Suite 8 and use them once in a while, but not as often as I think I should. All this because Lightroom 5 is so complete. It is simply excellent.

But wow, can it ever be unfriendly sometimes.

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When you say yes to backing up your catalog (a very good idea now and again) it pops a modal dialog and just sits there. I have it full screen and there are no buttons on the dialog to minimize it to work in the background. Clicking minimize on the main windows does not work either because the dialog is modal.

Contrast this to Chrome, where the download dialog is not modal and can be minimized along with the main window. In fact, either / or can be minimized. Chrome is well written, Lightroom is clunky. I would suggest that it acts like it was written by an intern, and I would bet that I am not far off :-)

Of course, maybe that’s just how they do things there … who knows.