May 05, 2010

My Decade at Adobe

Looking out on the Lake Washington Ship Canal & drawbridge outside of Adobe’s Seattle office today, I’m hit by a profound sense of déjà vu: I looked at the same scene exactly 10 years ago, my first day at Adobe & working in this office.

I’d given up my Flash & HTML design gig, moved out from New York, and joined a team that set out to make a great new Web animation product.

• Back then the open-standard SVG was just about to take over the world (for real!), and we were getting set to support it. We’d export Flash SWF files, too, but fundamentally we wanted to support open standards.
• The browser wars were still blazing away, bringing rapid innovation in HTML.
• We were starting to see hardware-accelerated Web content, and it seemed inevitable that such support would soon be widespread.

Well, you know, funny stuff happens… But here we are, exactly 10 years later, and I’m looking at today’s headlines:

• Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch: We’re Going To Make The Best Tools In The World For HTML5.
• Microsoft is supporting SVG and talking open standards. (Hey, it’s only a decade late; but so it goes…)
• Browser innovation is once again red hot, with Google showing off Chrome speed, and MSFT, Apple, and others leveraging GPUs.
• Flash Player is being optimized for GPUs on mobile & desktop systems.

Interesting times, to say the least.

In the intervening decade I moved coast-to-coast two more times with Adobe, hung up my flamed shoes & the flamed Volvo I bought in Seattle, met & married a great Seattle girl, had two most excellent boys, and got to help design, build, and support five versions of perhaps the most important graphics application in the world.

And now I’m about to take on some brand new challenges. More details to come, soon.

Video: Creating 3D shapes in Photoshop Extended CS5

Artist Scott Valentine has created a short, interesting demonstration of how to create & style abstract shapes using the new Repoussé feature in Photoshop Extended:

Free online Photoshop eSeminar tomorrow

My fellow PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes is presenting a couple of free one-hour eSeminars covering what’s new in Photoshop CS5. According to the event registration page, “This series is specifically designed to help professional photographers and design professionals who use photography and digital imaging in their work.”

What’s New in Photoshop CS5 ›
Thursday, May 6, 2010
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM US/Pacific

Photoshop CS5 for Photographers ›
Thursday, May 27, 2010
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM US/Pacific

Imagenomic plans free plug-in updates for CS5

Good to know:

Imagenomic will be providing FREE compatibility updates of its Plug-in Products (Portraiture, Noiseware and RealGrain) for Adobe Photoshop CS5. Furthermore, we will be providing a FREE update for registered users of the Portraiture Plug-in for Lightroom to ensure compatibility with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3… For Mac OS X: We will be releasing compatibility updates to make sure our Plug-in products are fully compatible with Photoshop CS5 in both 64 and 32 bit mode.

[Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]