[William Smith writes]: I’d like to hear something from Adobe about plans for Acrobat and their installer. On the Mac side, Acrobat seems to be a stepchild of Adobe’s installer technology and I don’t understand why.

[Adobe staffer answers]: The Acrobat installers are actually completely separate from the suite installers. Its more of an organizational issue than anything else. The Acrobat installer and the Reader installer are completely different technology and a completely different team.

That said, the Acrobat installer for the next major Acrobat release plans to be completely PKG for the Mac. In addition, the self-healing functionality should be gone (that is the technology that tries to do further setup after first launch.) They planned to get rid of self-healing in Acrobat 9 but couldn’t quite get to it. For the next version it is already removed so really should ship without self-healing.

Adobe finally seems to be listening to the screaming coming from their customers. I have spent so many hours struggling with Adobe’s installers and their ridiculously bad updater software, and I know I’m not alone. Someone even created DearAdobe.com, where people have been griping and voting for months about the poor quality of Adobe’s installers, updaters, and softwares.

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