Another reason for my slacker performance on this weblog over the past week is Adobe Illustrator CS’s new, bewildering habit of creating dozens of unaccountable temporary files all over my hard drive. There are various explanations for the cause, none of which are conclusive, but the answer seems to lie somewhere between the Creative Suite’s PDF features and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
The impact of this bug can be mildly annoying or very frustrating, depending on whether you’re uptight about keeping folders clean, as I am, and whether your backup strategy will suffer bloating as a result of saving possibly thousands of useless files. At a higher level, it’s indicative of Adobe Illustrator’s recent and increasing shakiness. I used to consider this program to be rock solid, and on the very few times that I ever crashed it, I found the incident almost laughable. I don’t feel quite that way any longer; I hit save frequently and fearfully.
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