February 9, 2010

Adobe TV: 3D patterns, working with shadows, & more

Adobe TV is hosting some new photography- and Photoshop-related content:

The Russell Brown Show - Painting 3D Patterns

Join Russell Brown as he shows you how to literally paint tiled 3D patterns in this Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended tutorial.

The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost - Using a Secondary Display

In this episode of The Complete Picture, Julieanne Kost shows you how to use 2 monitors to take advantage of Lightroom's dual monitor solution.

Photoshop User TV - Custom shapes, shadows, & more

Dave and Scott have a custom shape tool and a shadow tutorial respectively. Scott invites everyone to join his Photo Walk and David DuChemin is in the studio to talk about his new photography book.

Design Premium CS4 Feature Tour - Creative Suite 4: New Features for CS1 Owners

If you're using Creative Suite 1 you're not only missing out on the cool new features in CS4, you're also missing new features added in CS2 and CS3. In this episode, Terry White shows you just some of the amazing functionality you'll get by upgrading to CS4.

February 8, 2010

Notes on Flash Player stability & the future

• Flash Player Product Mgr. Emmy Huang has shared some details in response to reports of a crashing bug in Flash Player. She apologizes for the bug having gotten past the team & talks about improvements going forward.
• If you'd like to help improve the quality of Flash Player, please see these notes on betas & bug reporting from Ted Patrick.
• Interesting reads from non-Adobe staff on the future of Flash come from Grant Skinner (a long-time & highly respected developer) and Jeremy Allaire (creator of ColdFusion & CEO of streaming video company Brightcove).

February 7, 2010

Concept video: "Augmented HyperReality"

Behold your pulverized, ultra-mediated consciousness of the future:

Fullscreen viewing recommended. [Via]

February 6, 2010

Sneak peek: Future Photoshop masking technology

In this brief demo, Photoshop PM Bryan O'Neil Hughes shows off some new selection technology that offers better edge detection and masking results in less time--even with tricky images like hair:

(You can see it in higher resolution on Facebook.)

Hopefully this helps explain why we put the Extract filter out to pasture in CS4.

[Update: See also another great mask made with Photoshop :-). (Via Steven Johnson)]

(rt) Illustration: Bananas, evil, & more

• Dig this super fun Chiquita banana redesign. I want the luchador sticker! [Via]
• Here's a high-res set of 60 Recent Movie Posters. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but there's some solid Photoshop action here. (I like the Crank 2 and Terminator Salvation pieces in particular--more than the corresponding flicks themselves.)
• Newsweek features "Unattainable Beauty: The Decade's Biggest Airbrushing Scandals."
• Infographics:
  • "My Heart is Divided"--fun schematic shirt from the Chopping Block.
  • Meet The Milky Way Transit Authority: our galaxy as tube map. [Via Ellis Vener]
  • Man, does Japan have fast broadband. This and other stats get visualized via the State of the Internet Explained In One Giant Infographic.
• "Evil and Lazy" shirt. How nice. (Couldn't get the Adobe font right, though.)

February 5, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Fake UIs in movies, solid caricatures, and more

• "What you need, my friend, is an Internet Online Website!" Clever tool for educating newbie clients. [Via]
• UI designer Mark Coleran appeared on NPR, talking about creating fictional computer UIs for movies. [Via]
• Depression Press serves up a tasty carnival of retro logos & illustrations.
• I dig these groovy caricatures from Fernando Vicente. [Via]
• Heh--here's a wry comment on the excessive comping of screens in Photoshop.
• 50 cars or 1 bus? Here's a vivid visualization of the impact of mass transit.

February 3, 2010

Adobe CTO talks Flash performance on Macs, more

Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch posted some thoughts on Flash, HTML5, the iPhone/iPad, and more yesterday. I didn't see anything really new relative to all the discussions that have taken place here, so I've been slow in blogging it.

Now, however, Kevin has posted an interesting follow-up via the comments. It's worth reading in its entirety, but here are bits I found significant:

For those wondering, the main computer I use is a MacBook Pro, and I've been using the Mac (and developing software for it) since it came out in 1984. [...]

Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today. [...]

Before we release a new version of Flash Player we run more than 100,000 test cases and have built an automated system that has scanned over 1 million SWFs that we use for testing from across the web. Our QA lab has a very large variety of machines to represent the machines in real use on the web.

Addressing crash issues is a top priority in the engineering team, and currently there are open reports we are researching in Flash Player 10. From the comments across the web there may either be an upswing in incidents or there is a general piling on happening -- we are looking into this actively and will work to resolve any real issues. If you are experiencing issues please report them directly to the Flash engineering team via the public bug database and the team will investigate and resolve each. [...]

Now regarding performance, given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.

Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on -- for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8 Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34% of CPU on Mac versus 16% on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.

iPhone icon PSD template; SF meeting tomorrow

Sebastiaan de With has created a pixel-perfect icon template for iPhone/iPad development. "It's made up entirely of shape layers and layer effects," he writes, "and should be completely pixel-accurate." [Via]

Speaking of using Photoshop & iPhone development, the San Francisco Photoshop User Group is meeting tomorrow (Thursday) night starting at 6:30, with a focus on mobile development:

Marine Leroux of Bamboudesign Inc. will showcase how easy it is to design iPhone apps efficiently with Photoshop. Through a step by step method combined with tips for smart user experience design, she'll guide you from sketching an app interface to designing it in Photoshop, building libraries and template files to expedite the design process. She'll define Apple's design requirements and the workflow between design, development, and publishing of an iPhone app to the App Store.

Interesting time lapse panorama

"Stop motion tilt-shift meets tracking," says the creator of this video. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's kind of intriguing.

[Via]

(rt) Random Interestingness Redux

• Six Revisions rounds up 22 Awesome Adobe AIR Applications for Designers. [Via]
• Mobile telephony:
  • Brilliant: Mobile phone history as nesting dolls. (Gordon Gekko just called again.)
  • Here's a stylish concept for a solar-powered iPhone charger.
  • The $0.99, "recession-style" cardboard iPhone case is my speed.
• Photoshop:
  • Photoshop* around your neck: Icon as neckwear (neckware?). (*or MacPaint) [Via Marc Pawliger]
  • A lightweight, $129 mini monitor to house your Photoshop panels? It even offers touch sensitivity (for a bit more dough). [Via]
  • Speaking of monitors, as I recall the first color Mac 640x480 display cost $3,000. Now that resolution can be smaller than a dime. (Similarly old school: A 15MB hard drive for $2495. Go, march of progress, go!
• Check out the trippy, Tim Burton-esque metal sculptures from Stephane Halleux.
• Apropos of nothing, here's the actual speech that would have been given if Apollo 11 had not returned. [Via]

February 1, 2010

Adobe isn't in the Flash business

Seriously.

It isn't in the Photoshop business, or the Acrobat business, or the [take-your-pick product name] business, either.

It's in the helping people communicate business.

We'd all do well to remember that, because it means that the company's fortunes are tied to building great tools for solving problems. If we do that well, we prosper; if we do it poorly, we fail. When we get too wrapped up in this technology or that, we lose touch with the problems that we (and more importantly our customers) are trying to solve.

John Gruber wrote the other day that "Hulu isn't a Flash site, it's a video site. Developers go where the users are." Well sure, of course they do. Flash is a means to an end for Adobe, too, not the end unto itself.

The equation is simple. Adobe wants to make money selling tools, so it needs our customers' clients to pay for work done with the tools. Clients won't pay if their customers can't see the work made with the tools. Therefore customers, clients, and by extension Adobe need a way to see the work, be that videos, interactive pieces, or anything else.

Flash has stepped in to fill some gaps heretofore left by other technologies. It is, however, just one possible means to an end--always has been. Adobe will of course continue to invest in making Flash better, and it'll keep investing in other ways to help creative people reach customer eyeballs. It's not a zero-sum game.

You'd think this stuff would be pretty obvious, but as I've already noted, the world likes either-or, winner-loser, good guy/bad guy, Jane-you're-an-ignorant-slut narratives. They make for easy blogging, but mainly they're a simpleminded distraction from solving real problems.

January 31, 2010

Kuler Killers? New color-picking/sharing panels for Photoshop

ColoRotate is a new color picker panel for Photoshop. The project comes from IDEA, a nonprofit organization that helps improve scientific and artistic literacy. Here's a quick demo:

The plug-in costs $39. For $49/year, you can also link your plugin to your online account, sync palettes between multiple computers, and share palettes with colleagues, collaborators, or clients.

In a related vein, developer Anastasiy Safari has created MagicPicker, a $7 non-modal color picker/color wheel that builds on his free ColorPicker panel (see my earlier post for details). Here's a screenshot:

January 30, 2010

(rt) Random interestingness

• Spacey:
  • From '77: The Making of the Computer Graphics for Star Wars. (LaaaaaaBORIOUS.)
  • A helpful note for those attaching a Space Shuttle to a 747.
  • "Burning corpses sold separately": Star Wars toys that never made it. [Via]
• Sculpture: "Fossils" of now-outdated tech (cassettes, GameBoys, etc.). [Via]
• This '72 BMW supercar is flatter than my mom's Chicago "A's."
• Objects:
  • Slick, if slightly obvious, maple syrup bottle design. [Via]
  • "What would Jesus read by?" The Jesus Lamp offers a "saint-like halo."
• New term for "OK" on too-frequent "Are you sure...?" dialog boxes: "The 'yeah, whatever' button."

January 29, 2010

If Adobe made an iPad app...

...or apps for other tablets and/or smartphones, for that matter, what would you want it to be?

Believe me, there's no shortage of ideas here, nor is this something we just started thinking about (quite the contrary). We're just curious about what you think, need, and want. Any feedback is most welcome.

Thanks,
J.

Photoshop.com iPhone app adds features

After being downloaded a whopping 6.5 million times since October, Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone (App Store link) now features a number of new features, including:

• A new sharpen tool
• Support for a variety of photo borders
• Playback of video hosted on Photoshop.com

The update is, as you'd expect, a free download.

January 28, 2010

Steve Jobs vs. Gordon Gekko

iPad/Wall Street 2 tie-in FTW!

["There's no reason you couldn't use it to make calls using Skype... Then again, you might look a little bizarre walking through the airport holding this giant clipboard up to your ear." -- David Pogue]