What Adobe’s software update site needs is:

– [An RSS / Atom feed of recent updates][feed].

This way you can subscribe to a list of recent updates in your favourite news reader and be informed when a new update is released without having to scan product-specific blogs, etc.

– [Per-product pages listing available updates][product].

When you want to find an update for a product you can find it on the dedicated product update page. It will be there.

– [Nice URLs][acrobat].

URLs make the Web. Putting the product name in the URL makes a human-friendly URL, as opposed to putting the opaque product reference numeric key as a query parameter. Quick test: which updates do you expect to see on [http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Macintosh][acromac] ? And assuming you were so insane as to guess the previous URL correctly, which updates do you expect to see on [http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1][acrowuh]

Anyway, those be my principal beefs with the current Adobe software updates site. So I made a site that tries to satisfy my beeves. Beefs.

It is here: [http://reliablybroken.com/wavesinspace/][wavesinspace]

Please provide feedback to [[email protected]][gm6]

[acromac]: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Macintosh
[acrowuh]: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1
[wavesinspace]: http://reliablybroken.com/wavesinspace/
[gm6]: mailto:[email protected]
[bowie]: http://www.davidbowie.com/
[feed]: http://reliablybroken.com/wavesinspace/adobe/feed/
[product]: http://reliablybroken.com/wavesinspace/adobe/
[acrobat]: http://reliablybroken.com/wavesinspace/adobe/acrobat/

This is written from the point of view of someone looking to keep abreast of software patches for [Adobe][adobe]’s many excellent products (also Acrobat).

Adobe’s [Downloads page][downloads] is mostly about downloading product demos. Although on that page there is a list on the side with a link to the real product updates page and a very out-dated list of updates.

So then the actual [Product Updates page][updates] has a menu for all their products that takes you to the updates for an individual product, and a list of “featured updates”. What qualifies an update to be featured is a mystery, so that list is not useful either.

They don’t think to mention it on the Downloads or Product Updates pages, but there is also a [New Downloads page][new] which is actually rather handy, although there is no indication what constitutes “new” so it can be difficult to tell if something was released in the time between your last visit and the oldest update mentioned on that page.

My favourite aspect of Adobe’s support pages is the whimsical approach to the page for a product. For example, [the page for Illustrator for Macintosh][illustrator] includes the 15.0.2 update for Illustrator that shipped as part of Creative Suite version 5. Meanwhile [the Creative Suite for Mac updates page][cs] doesn’t admit there have been any updates for CS5 at all.

What Adobe’s software update site needs is…

[adobe]: http://www.adobe.com/
[downloads]: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
[updates]: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/
[new]: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/new.jsp
[illustrator]: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=27&platform=Macintosh
[cs]: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/collection.jsp?collID=1&platform=Macintosh