Just Say NO to Adobe

I recently encountered a poor soul who was suffering from mysterious system crashes on his Macbook. It appears related to the interaction of the Mac and Adobe Flash player.

"It's a problem arising in the interaction of the OS 10.6 operating system and the Adobe Flash player."

I contributed my words of wisdom in the form "Just say no to Flash." Yeah, I know, you really can't since so many things depend on it like YouTube - but it's the spirit of the right answer. "Just say no to Adobe" is even more correct.

Tonight I discovered that I could no longer save Adobe Acrobat *.pdf files to one of my directories. A very clear message appearing in Adobe Acrobat version 10: "The disk you were saving to or the disk used for temporary files is full. Free some space on this disk and try again or save to a different disk."

Well, that's fine. Except there's plenty of space. A permissions problem? Nope. Thank God for Google. Here we discover that Adobe Acrobat won't save to a catalog/file string that is more than 100 characters long. Really? And this problem has only been around for 3 years or so. Nice product.

(Next Day's update) Well, I backed out Adobe Reader version 10 and installed version 9.4 Problem solved. Apparently, when advancing to version 10, Adobe reinstalled their 100 character limit problem in the product. Never live on the leading edge!