"It Just Works!"

No it doesn't, Apple. NO. IT. FUCKING. DOESN'T.

I got the bright idea to do some desk cleaning last night, and I ran across three file folders worth of pictures, floor plans, and miscellaneous documents that I wanted to scan. My plan was to do that first thing this morning and then move on to normal my Saturday chores.

So much for those plans.

It has been a day of Apple/Adobe/Canon ROBO-PSYCHOSIS.

I knew that Photoshop had supposedly lost the ability to use a TWAIN scanner driver somewhere between CS6 and the first iteration of CC. (Even with CS6 it required a bit of finagling to get working, but by and large it worked fine.)

I haven't thought much about it since the arrival of CC, since all the scanning I've had to do since that time has been document or line-drawing based. Not exactly rocket science. Apple's own built-in image capture worked fine for that.

So when I went to scan some magazine photos today, imagine my horror when they came out looking like crap. Apple's built-in software has no ability to "de-screen," so everything came out with horrible Moire patterns and no way to get rid of them. FUCK ME SIDEWAYS IN TRAFFIC.

So after doing some Googling, I discovered that there is a fix for even the latest version of Photoshop CC: a TWAIN driver supplied by Adobe themselves! Downloaded, installed where it was supposed to be and…Photoshop immediately crashed when invoking scanning directly from our Canon printer.

GODDAMNIT!

Further Googling suggested a clean reinstall of the printer/scanner drivers. But Apple, being Apple, doesn't provide ANY mechanism for actually removing old printer drivers. (Just making them disappear from the Scanners and Printers preferences list doesn't actually delete any files, so you're left having to go digging all over the hard drive to to rip them out.)

Well, apparently I deleted something I shouldn't have, because even after reinstallation, not only did TWAIN still cause Photoshop to immediately crash—the scanner option itself was only showing up in the printer configuration when it was physically connected to the laptop via USB—not while it was wireless.

I wasted a good three hours this morning trying to fix this and finally said fuck it and wiped the hard drive, knowing full well that this time I couldn't just grab my Time Machine to do a full restore; the files had already changed on the latest capture. I could restore my profile, but all my applications would have to be manually reloaded and I was now looking at spending the entire day at this desk and not getting much of anything else accomplished.

THIS IS THE EXACT REASON I GAVE UP ON WINDOWS; THIS SORT OF ROBO-PSYCHOTIC-FUCK-YOUR-ENTIRE-DAY BULLSHIT!

And you know what? When all was said and done and I finally got everything loaded from scratch—the fucking TWAIN still didn't work with Photoshop. Oh yeah, it worked with Canon's own proprietary scanning software—a piece of psychedelic-colored crap that looks like it was designed by a six-year old.

And unfortunately, that is what I'm stuck using if I want to get decent scans from magazine or newspaper photos.

At least the scanning option is once again showing on both the wireless and USB versions of the printer, and I have a "clean" install of everything else on my Mac now. BUT GODDAMNIT ALL TO HELL, Apple. THIS is NOT supposed to be how APPLE works!

 

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