Hi,
I have a major gripe with CS6, and I am very curious if I am alone in this. It concerns the scrolling behaviour and redraw performance of InDesign and Illustrator in particular.
I use most of the CS applications professionally every day, and have used them since I started work as a professional designer in the early ‘90’s. Many things have changed, for the better. But after 20 years of development, to be honest, I think the way screen redraw and scrolling in CS behaves, seems embarrassingly primitive.
Frankly, I think it‘s not up to scratch and unacceptable for modern standards. Compared to the leaps and bounds developers of 3D design applications have made, I struggle to comprehend why a few simple 2D pages are so difficult to redraw. Case in point: the way the Pages palette in ID is updated. All thumbnails are painstakingly regenerated on every change, even when only one page is altererd. This takes close to half a second for every spread.
I use a fairly decent MacBook pro, with quite a bit of RAM, which is quite sufficient for heavy professional use, especially compared with the processing power I started out with. It‘s far better equipped than an iPad for example, which hardly ever displays this kind of screen lag. But when navigating even simple documents, screen redraw and scrolling behaviour in all Adobe CS appications (apart from maybe PS) is jerky, lagging and very stubborn. It still feels the same as when I was working in my Quadra 6100. And this is not due to using the wrong settings, I know how to work the prefs.
Now, this scrolling performance may seem trivial at first sight. But it is very important. The speed and fluidity of screen redraw is a crucial part of user interaction, especially when navigating larger documents. And it is essential for professional users, who intensively use the application every day. Jerky screen behaviour causes mental and eye fatigue and deminishes user satisfaction considerably.
So, why is scrolling behaviour and screen redraw performance of these professional applications still so jerky. Will this be resolved in new CC version?
I think the way users are enabled to fluidly navigate their documents should be a key priority in further development of all CS applications. No more jerky scrolling!
What do you think?