LiveCycle Designer 8.0 is the biggest piece of crap I have ever used.

[Former Community Member]

I have been digitizing some forms for a customer, and this is my first experience with this product. It has not been a good one. I have been using the 30-day trial, and really don't want to buy it now. Here is my list of problems:

1. When you copy and paste, or move and object, there is a fade effect. On some of my machines, this is not noticeable, but on some, it is very noticeable. There is no way that I have found to turn it off.

2. When you copy and item, you are moved to a seemingly random place on the page. Why does the page even need to move when you copy something?

3. When you move an item, you are moved to a seemingly random place on the page. Shouldn't it center me on the item, or at least do something that makes sense?

4. When you paste an item, you are moved to a seemingly random place on the page. Wouldn't it make sense to paste it in the center of the page, or even close to where it came from.?

5. Inability to group text / numerical fields. When I am making a form with over 200 individual fields, it would really help to be able to group them in some sort of logical order.

6. The interface is not standard, like most of the other Adobe products are. Shouldn't it be the same across all products by one manufacturer?

7. Why not have discreet horizontal/vertical guides, instead of crosshairs? At least give me the option.

8. When aligning something to a guide, why does it line directly on the guide for the top and left sides, but aligns one pixel in on the right and bottom?

9. Why do I line up to text fields, and then later those fields are not lined up anymore?



I have used a lot of Adobe products in the past, and haven't used one this bad since PageMaker 6.5. Come one Adobe, you have a lot of good products...



This is definitely not something my company will purchase.

[Former Community Member]

I'm using Livecycle for the first time also and maybe some of these things will help. When you paste an item, I found that wherever you had clicked your pointer last, that's where the next pasted item will go.



Also, this will cause your screen not to seemingly jump randomly somewhere else. I think your screen is jumping somewhere else because that's where you last clicked. Also, if you zoom out more, than it will naturally jump less since it all will fit on a page. But the clicking is the most helpful thing.



As for the grouping, you can group objects because when you pull up the Heiarchy palette, you will see that the items indeed did group. But I do find that you can still move objects around when they are grouped, where I would rather have them all as one unit.

[_SekharN_]

I feel any judgment should be made in comparison with other slimier product. Most of the issues listed in the original posting by Rohlfing Jeff are very basic and need some training like the solutions listed by Scott Sheck. I guess reading the documentation again may help Rohlfing Jeff get better idea of the product.



I am using this product since more than a year and used several other products form the group in the past. I have seen many improvements and great encasements with the versions. I hope Adobe will continue to develop this product more user-friendly.



To add to the grouping: you have subform object in Library to group them together. Or you can hold Ctrl and start selecting items and then right click and choose 'Wrap in Subform'.



Regars,

SekharN

[Former Community Member]

Maybe we can start a wish list here also. One problem I have is when I a text object, then convert it to a numeric object because now I'm going to make it fillable. There are two problems I encounter but it might be that I'm just missing something, hopefully.



One is that once I convert it, it adds a caption, when it didn't have one before.



The second is that when I remove the caption, it then shrinks my field width, so I have to re-enlarge it back to the size it was.



Since i had to convert several hundred fields like this, it got old very quickly.

[Former Community Member]

I don't think my issues are due to a lack of training. I have used Adobe products since 1994, and I have a fairly good grasp on the concepts involved with using those products. LiveCycle Designer has a lot of quirks and they really disrupt my workflow. It is a hassle to have to move my screen back everytime I paste something. Or when I paste a group of objects, suddenly their alignment is slightly off...



WTF?

[Former Community Member]

One more thing I don't like. When I want a text, numeric, decimal, etc. field to just be underlined, it displays no border at all. What is the point of having an underline option if it doesn't work?

[Former Community Member]

Well, i vote for jeff, it happens to me so often when i'm coding and testing forms, and suddenly the program crashes and all my past 4 hours coding are wasted cuz this creature is not able to save changes everytime you test, plus debuging is a terror working with forms with more of 10 pages, why should i pay for the extensions, i didn't pay a dime for my net beans and it debugs like glory in comparison to livecicle designer. so shortening it all, my diagnostic is, building higly coded forms on designer resembles coding on punched cards

[Former Community Member]

Maybe I'm pretty fortunate, but I have had more than better luck with Designer 8.0. I've probably put in about 300 hours of form creation with as much as 12 pages of heavy calculations and even after working for over 6 hours straight, I never experienced a crash. Whereas other programming languages I've worked in crash at least once in a while.



Even the capability of what I need is there, but that's not to say I have a lot I'd still like to have, but all in all, it's mostly there.

[Former Community Member]

funny... i am currently working on a bunch of forms in LiveCycle and I am sooo incredibly peeved at this application that I searched for "LiveCycle is a piece of crap" and found this post. =)



Yes, i know the that this post is from over a year ago, but it is obvious they havent made any improvements to the software.



I'll ditto what Jeff said and add

10.the debugger constantly disappears (yes, I followed the directions in the "help" file). I have to constantly flip between Acrobat Pro and LiveCycle, close Acrobat Pro, come back, stand on my head, while balancing a banana on my nose to get it to stay. Seriously, I feel like I'm dealing with a set of old-school TV rabbit ears trying to tune in a distant station

11. the debugger is two lines off in its error reporting. If it says you have an error at line 39, the error is REALLY at line 37. Took me forever and a ton of messageBoxes to finally figure this out.

12. The debugger doesnt actually support breakpoints, watches, etc inside of livecycle. You can set a breakpoint, but your code isnt visible while you are in preview mode, so what good is it? What good is stepping into your code if you cant SEE your code?

13. If I have two documents open, and select an object from one via the Hierarchy palette, the view of that document jumps to the beginning of the document.

14. Why cant you drag and drop objects from the hierarchy palette from one open document to another??

15. Why isnt there a keyboard shortcut to flip between open documents?? It SHOULD be Ctrl+Tab (following what 90% of other programs use), but instead that flips between the document's different view tabs.

16. Why cant you click+hold+drag from the lower-right to the upper left to select multiple objects at once?

17. When you paste in a subForm with its objects, it makes the subForm area on the page HUGE, even if the objects in the subForm are fairly small

18. When you create a new subForm in the hierarchy pallete, the view in the palette jumps to the very top object, and you have to scroll all the way back down and find your unnamed subform

19. Why are pdfs produced in LiveCycle not compatible with Acrobat Pro's Accessibility Checker? This one is HUGE. I spent over a week with our Adaptive Computing department trying to figure out why my pdfs were failing the accessibility checker when I had followed every known guide available on producing accessible pdfs. Even more frustrating, despite all the errors Acrobat Pro said were there, JAWS and all the other accessible technologies were able to use my pdfs just fine.

20. Why do you have to manually add in a guide line via measurement first and then drag it to where it really needs to be? Why cant you just grab the ruler and drag a guideline where you want it like photoshop? Yes, I know I can drag from the upper left and get both a vertical and horizontal line, but if i only need one, then I have to drag the other one back off the document.



I could keep going on and on and on....