Upgrade Cycles

After Effects 8.02 is now available from Adobe, and it fixes a number of nasty bugs. General Specialist has a nice rundown of what's new.

Should you upgrade right away? Well, my friends, that depends. It's my learned opinion that you should always wait a few days before jumping in and installing the latest update to any application that's mission-critical, particularly if it's a big, shiny, whole-number update full of fancy new features. Let the other foolish mortals find the bugs, I say! And there are sure to be plenty of bugs. Major software packages like After Effects, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro are so vast and complex from a programming point of view that there's really no practical way to make sure that all of the bugs have been squashed. (The cynical part of me submits that it's a lot cheaper, er, easier for software companies to let the users bang on the app for while, especially when it comes to finding small bugs that only reveal themselves under unusual situations. But that's the cynical side of me, who I try to keep locked up in a shed, in the woods, past the river, where no one can find him. See, even there, I've probably said too much, and you've fired up Google maps and are furiously looking for locations with sheds, woods and rivers. It's a good thing I haven't shared where I lock up my paranoid side...)

Ahem. Yes. So.

Obviously, if one of those previously mentioned bugs happens to be a show-stopper for you, then please, by all means, dive in on the upgrade, but be warned that there likely a whole new set of traps hiding in there. They will be found, no doubt, but do you really want to be the one to find them, the night before that critical project is due, when you're already sleep-deprived and conjuring imaginary personality traits locked up in the woods? I think not. So you wait, you see what others have discovered, and you proceed with caution. (And needless to say, back everything up before upgrading! You may even want to keep an off-site backup, say, somewhere in the woods...)

Think about it - every whole-number software release is quickly followed by a point-oh-one version, the version they really meant to ship the first time. ("Oops! Our bad!") And most bug-fix releases are, mercifully, free. There is a special circle of hell reserved for the CEOs of software companies who charge big bucks for paid bug-fix upgrades. You sold me this defective pile of cobbled-together code (which, by the way, I love, and earn a tidy living using, thank you very much!), don't make me hand over more money to get the version that really works. (Wait - did you hear that? Sounded like rusty chains, desperately straining to hold closed the door of a shed, somewhere off in the woods...)

A graphic-designer friend of mine has a policy to keep using the old version of any software package until someone sends her a file that requires the new version. The downside to this is that she risks falling "behind" with the software, scrambling to catch up when someone does, indeed, send a file that requires the new version. The upside is that she often leapfrogs a version of two, saving money, sticking with the tools she's comfortable with. It's an interesting approach, and seems to work for her.

I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. I try to keep up with the capabilities of the latest, greatest tools, but tend not to dive in with the latest versions the moment they are released. Wait a couple of weeks, see who gets arrows in the back, then install the upgrade on a secondary machine for a non-time-sensitive project. Like the machine I keep running in the shed, in the woods, past the river.

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