It’s Only Software

I recently wanted to download Flash and start learning how to it with Java and/or Ruby, with the intention of purchasing once (or before) my trial period expired. I could not believe my eyes when I read that Adobe, a company in the business of making software has ceased offering trial downloads of many of its products for a full month due to what is apparently a ridiculously simple bug in date calculation:

During the month of June 2008, certain product trials that are launched for the first time (regardless of when they were installed) will function for only one day instead of 30 days, due to an error in a line of code that counts down the remaining days in a trial. You will not experience this issue if you have launched your trial before June 1, 2008, or do not launch it until July 1 or thereafter.

We understand that trials are an important tool to experience the new features of a product. However, this issue would have resulted in a frustrating situation for a large number of customers — an experience that just does not meet the high standards we have set for all of our products and solutions. We invite you to explore the other resources available on Adobe.com in order to experience the products in action.

So, rather than fix a bug that is likely resulting in thousands of lost trial users (which one would assume translates into $$ in revenue), Adobe has foolishly decided – sorry, no downloads for a month! After much searching on the ‘net, I absolutely could not find a trial download anywhere (all download sites link back to Adobe’s broken download page).

At least people can still download some of the good Adobe products while they’re waiting

Come on, Adobe! If I was a stockholder, I would be furious.

(Also covered here)

Displaytag supports easy display of formatted number columns using the format attribute on <display:column> – however, it’s not really well documented on the Displaytag site. Here’s how to do simple number formatting without requiring a decorator class:

<displaytag:column property="amount" title="$ Amount" format="{0,number,#.##}"/>

This will display a decimal formatted to a maximum of 2 decimal places!