Don’t waste your time with 14.1.0 Bridge Beta unless…

It took a while for me to find time to re-test and post a follow up on my observations that started this topic. The deeper dive was triggered by paying closer attention to one of Gary’s observations.  I’ll provide some context from Br 13/14 history that began back in May of 2022 three months prior to the very first public beta release of Bridge.

For those that don’t know me, you can find a bit of me here:  https://tinyurl.com/mr8jfb4s

After only six months of preliminary testing back in 2022, and against strong objections from a lot of asset management professionals that knew and warned Adobe what was about to happen, Adobe launched the first public release of Br 13 in the early winter of 2022. They had stripped the traditional and highly valued multi-window feature and in exchange offered a bug infested, performance crippled architecture that was, quite simply, broken.  

I needed to keep my studio staff using a  Ferrari and found that I couldn’t efficiently run a studio with the remanufactured Yugo that Adobe tried to pretend was the future.  I chose to remain with the vastly superior design of Br 12.

• Do things once, efficiently.
• Do things automatically whenever possible.

To this day, out of respect and loyalty, I continue to install and thoroughly inspect every test and release/update version of Bridge.  Until early this year, it usually took less than 15 minutes of exploring each new test build to realize that The  Emperor still wasn’t wearing any clothes. I would uninstall each unprofessional build, clean up Adobe’s sloppy leftovers, and continue using Br 12 in all our professional environments.  

Adobe management has been repeatedly informed about Bridge’s defective workspace migration, (along with the vast number of bugs and workflow destruction that came along with it), starting back in the early summer of 2022. During all this time and after multiple inquiries, Adobe has responded only once in August of 2022 before the first public Br 13 release when Subbi Pillai stated:

“Since the underlying UI framework has changed now, migrating the workspaces created in the older version (released version) of Bridge [ Bridge 12] to the newer version [Br 13] is very tricky. The team is working on this as a top priority.”

Since the defect still remains today, obviously they have not.  Perhaps they thought if they ignored the problem, it would go away.

Since late winter of this year, I test Bridge installs on both a new Windows 11 laptop and a four year old Windows 10 workstation. Both test machines are now identically installed with both Br 12.0.4.266 and Br 14.0.4.222. Each version has an independent cache location.

I won’t bore you with the testing details. If you’ve explored the link at the beginning of this message you’ll know that I’m an expert at this sort of Bridge testing. I have discovered that Bridge beta and pre-release builds all display the following dialog box when first launched after a clean install.

It was a pain in the ass to test for it, but I have discovered that regardless of which option one chooses in the above dialog box, Bridge test builds ALWAYS attempt to migrate workspace definitions from an installed Br 12 version, while ignoring all the contemporary application settings, (including custom KBSC settings), found in the installed versions of Br 14.  Apparently, since the summer of 2022 the test builds have always behaved that way.

Since by their own admission Br 12 workspace migration to the new Bridge version is problematic, why does Adobe keep dishing out the same lazy effort and force their customers to repeatedly waste valuable time repairing this sort of incomplete and disrespectful behavior before choosing to move on to proper testing?  How many more times will we have to rebuild our workspaces and KBSCs just to properly test potential advancements within existing professional workflows? 

More importantly, if the current stand-alone test builds are any indication of what is to come, what happens at the next full version Bridge upgrade?

I lay responsibility for this time-wasting nonsense directly on the shoulders of the two Bridge product managers Subbi Pillai and Ajay Shukla.  Subbi has been around since Br 12 so he should know better.  On the other hand, Ajay’s CV  almost exclusively describes himself as an expert developer of animation applications since joining Adobe back in 2007.  It is beyond my comprehension how an animation expert became a product manager of an asset management tool without any obvious experience in professional asset management in high volume production studio environments.

Adobe Bridge is both elegant and unique in the asset management application world. It has no significant competition. Ignorant design ideas at the start of the Br 13/14 era have mangled or destroyed decades old reliable asset management workflows. Isn’t it time that Bridge receives not only the development respect such a unique tool deserves, but also the marketing resources necessary to get folks to know just how valuable Bridge can be?

If I believed that they are listening, I’d ask Adobe how any accomplished digital craftsman could respect a digital tool manufacturer that is so insecure that it now streets over 20 versions of Photoshop, more than a dozen versions of Bridge, and a handful of versions of Lightroom classic?  These are just the variations of applications contained within a “Photography Subscription” package.

It appears that Adobe has gotten so afraid of their own indecision that they are now creating a “feature” inside Bridge that allows one to pick a Photoshop version from among the vast array of CC Ps “version noise” that currently exists.  Keep in mind that Adobe has chosen to exclude in the CC desktop app, a version of Ps 2022 that fully interfaces with Br 12, currently the most efficient version of Bridge ever created.

I’ve suspected since the beginning of the CC, subscription era, that Adobe is intentionally cultivating a type of “drug cartel business corporate culture” by design, rather than by accident.  The current watered-down state of Bridge is just one example.

If this pisses you off, join the club.  We’ve got jackets.

FOR EVERY ADOBE UPDATE... HONOR THE DAMNED UI SETTINGS!

I despise dark mode and upgrades always ignore the setting so i get dark mode every #&$!* time and my eyes explode until i can get to Prefs and fix it.

Hey VI, 

I can only think you've messed around with your computer's settings to such a point that that might be the cause of your issues. In EVERY one of your comments above, I've not seen ANY of them in this and in previous releases except the rebuilding of personal workspaces, which was a build from over a year and a half ago. Since then, my workspaces have shown up as intended. And, oh yeah, I've never even seen that screenshot you show above, on my computer, that's just done without any intercept on my part.

I seriously suggest you reset your computer to its original settings, reset everything, and see if that solves your problems.