Hydra is an awesome name for a language like the one we created. At the very beginning, Jonathan Shekter came up with it as a code name for this cool language that could run on different kinds of hardware efficiently. The problem is that it's a great name for any kind of technology that does multiple things, so it is pretty popular. We didn't want to confuse folks, so we worked with the Adobe branding team to come up with a new name that we could use moving forward. That name is Pixel Bender™.
As someone whose mind was blown by the original MacPaint, I was pushing for "Phat Bits"--a fun way to combine a reference to the old-school "Fat bits" display mode with an equally dated bit of 90's slang. But hey, they don't pay me to come up with the marvels of Adobe branding.
Developers wanting to take Hyd--er, Pixel Bender--for a spin can grab the coding & preview environment from Adobe Labs.
[Semi-irrelevant personal aside: After so many years of consulting Chris to learn about HDR imaging, color management, GPUs vs. CPUs, and so on, I'm taking some pleasure in sharing my meager (yet superior) knowledge of CSS with him, hipping him to groovy tools like Xyle scope. I've gotta enjoy the moment while it lasts!]
Check out the Connect webcast to see the goods in action. (Scrub ahead to 18 minutes or so--about one third of the way through--to catch the demos.) I show off some new performance tuning in Photoshop by playing with a 650 megapixel image on a Mac Pro. It's too bad that the low frame rate of recording hides the fluidity of panning, zooming, and rotating via OpenGL hardware acceleration. I also demonstrate automated merging of images to extend depth of field, as well as a 360-degree panorama mapped onto an interactive 3D sphere on which I can paint directly. (Painting directly onto 3D models--mmm, yes.) Steve demos Adobe's new "Thermo" RIA design tool while Karl shows off inverse kinematics in Flash and more.
You can check out the rest of the executive presentations & their slides here.
I've encountered only a little strangeness so far:
Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions below. The Letterbox add-on for Apple Mail seems to do a great job enabling Entourage-style three-pane viewing, but I haven't tried it extensively. I'm really torn about leaving my old friend Entourage, especially as Mail apparently doesn't offer the ability to accept/decline meetings sent through the Exchange server. Efficient incremental backups sound pretty appealing, however.
I'm now going to try using Time Machine with a Drobo. It seems that it'll be possible to store a large photo collection (which wouldn't fit onto the laptop drive) alongside the Time Machine data file. If anything interesting develops, I'll pass along the info.
]]>Today the hard drive on my inordinately hard-working MacBook Pro bit the dust. I'd had no signs of trouble whatsoever, but I admit the machine did take a spill from several feet up a few months ago. (Let's just say the Slingbox is working out better than the idea of perching a laptop on a music stand.) That jolt didn't cause it to skip a beat, however--not even to disrupt the show that was streaming.
This morning, however, my apps started running really slowly, with the Mac beachballing so hard that I finally had to hold down the power button. After that, no más: just an endless gray startup screen. The guys at the local Mac "genius bar" (not geniuses, but not bad) confirmed that this critter is toast.
Thus far the Time Capsule (acquired in the nick of time, evidently) has been a bit of a mixed bag. For my tastes it's a little off the mark from "As simple as possible, but no simpler"--omitting the second half of that phrase. I haven't found a way to set backups to be nightly, not hourly, so I have to do them manually. (Otherwise the system would presumably be trying to copy my multi-gigabyte Entourage data file over wireless every hour--not a good use of CPU and bandwidth.) I also don't see a way to store a superset of data on the Time Capsule (i.e. keeping a large image collection there but not on my local Mac). Overcoming the latter obstacle may not be that hard, as it seems possible to mount the disk as a normal server, but I haven't had a chance to test it out. And finally, like just about every Apple networking system I've tried (AirTunes, Apple TV, iChat AV, etc.), the Time Capsule doesn't get along with my Cisco VPN connection, meaning I have to shut it down before connecting.
All of these little beefs will melt away, of course, if the TC saves my bacon. I guess we'll see once I get a new HD or a new machine. (This post comes to you from my wife's MacBook.) I'm really curious to see whether it'll be possible to restore things like the list of tabs and clippings I have in NetNewsWire, as that plus my Adobe Contribute drafts constitute all my pending blogfodder. (Without all that stuff, expect a dry period here for a while.)
Crossing fingers,
J.
"Our philosophy on this from the beginning, sort of my personal belief," continues Connor, "is that eventually the proprietary system is just going to break. When we came out with the first camera RAW plug-in, we were supporting around 25 cameras. We’re now supporting more than 175 cameras—in other words, more than 175 different file formats. And when you’re talking about images, people don’t want to keep those images for just five or 10 years. Professional photographers want to know those images will be fine for 50 years—100 years—from now. If you think about the rate of new-camera introductions, how many new file formats will there be? A hundred thousand? It just seems that it’s going to reach a point when it becomes unmanageable."
It's true that we haven't yet seen big camera vendors like Canon and Nikon adopt DNG, though maybe we'll see more progress now that DNG has been submitted to the ISO as a vendor-independent standard. In any case, the format is providing real-world benefits today:
[Via]
Photoshop Power Users with Kelly McCathran: In this session we will wow you with some new hot features and double wow you with some little known and under utilized tools... Adobe Bridge: Batch renaming multiple files; The Image Processor to batch convert to different file formats; Photomerge for building Panoramics. Creating and Batching Actions; Vanishing Point Filter; Placing Smart Objects; Image Warping; Patch & Spot Healing Brush Tools; Red Eye Removal Tool; History palette and painting with snapshots; Layer Masks; Setting the best Preferences Tips & Tricks as well as Keyboard Shortcuts.
Kelly McCathran is the Service Provider Evangelist for Adobe. Her mission is to maintain relationships with the top print shops in North America. To fulfill that roll, she is the primary contact for printers to get the support, training and information they need to successfully work with Adobe's line of products. In addition Kelly is a Certified Technical Trainer and an Adobe Certified Expert in InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, GoLive and PageMaker. Kelly has traveled North America and abroad teaching applications to the largest print shops in the world.
The meeting starts at 5:30pm at the Adobe SF office (601 Townsend St.). If you plan to attend, please RSVP to info@photoshopusers.org so that they can get the right amount of pizza and drinks.
This podcast was recorded on Wednesday March 12, 2008 at Martin’s home in London. It gives us a rare glimpse into the inner thinking of this talented fashion and beauty photographer, as he gives us a shot-by-shot evaluation of a recent session. This video footage was taken during a photo session to create assets both for an upcoming Lightroom book, as well as for demo purposes for Adobe Systems. In it Martin describes his approach to every element of the shoot, from the model selection, the hair, the makeup, the lighting and camera angles, all the way through to the final edit.
This video podcast can be downloaded from my iDisk. It can also be viewed by downloading it directly into iTunes (if you are accessing it by subscribing via the Music Store), or by copying it into iTunes on either a Mac or a PC (if you’ve downloaded the iPod version from my iDisk). Once copied into iTunes, the small version can be transferred to a Video iPod or iPhone, and viewed that way as well.
The podcast (labeled "20080310 Video Podcast - Martin Evening Fashion Shoot") is in the Public directory of George's iDisk. [Via]
A few months ago Michael dropped by Adobe to visit with Tom Hogarty and me. He brought with him his "newest baby," Eyes Over Africa XXL. He's not kidding about that suffix: "It will be the largest coffee table book ever that was purely shot digitally. Almost 50 (!) lbs and definitely huge." Just for fun, he used his iPhone to call up a satellite image of the same coordinates displayed on one of the pages, then laid the phone on the book. For further weirdness points, I then snapped a couple of shots of the layout using my iPhone. (At this point there was a great disturbance in the Force.)
For more Earth from above:
* Coincidentally the elder brother of GoLive founder Andreas Poliza
Mark is not going to go work on other digital imaging tools. After 17+ years of driving Photoshop & subsequently Lightroom, he's looking for a complete change of pace & wants to work on operating system technologies related to user experience. Given that Mark has always been a huge Mac guy (developing Lightroom first on the Mac, etc.), it's kind of a Nixon-goes-to-China moment. He says,
Now, given that I find the current Windows experience really annoying and yet I keep having to deal with it, this opportunity was a little too interesting to turn down. I can’t imagine doing serious imaging anywhere other than Adobe, but, I needed to do something other than imaging for a while.
The cool thing is that having recently launched the Lightroom 2.0 beta, Mark leaves the product in excellent shape & excellent hands. We're really just getting warmed up.
PS--I probably shouldn't swing at a pitch in the dirt, but I was disappointed by ZDNet's inaccurate, typo-strewn coverage of the news. When did major news outlets decide that labeling something a "blog" means that fact-checking no longer applies? How sloppy do you have to be to fail to copy and paste Martin (not "Mark") Evening's name correctly, or to notice that there's no capital R in Lightroom or capital S in Photoshop (errors the article doesn't even make consistently)? At least it's a good reminder not to believe everything you read.
Time Online's got the answer, along with plenty of other background on the the guys behind You Suck At Photoshop. Says series co-creator Matt Bledsoe,
"We had both been in the agency business so long that after a while we'd seen every kind of person in the advertising world." One of those stereotypes, he said, was the "insane designer, basically. He has horrible social skills and horrible things going on in his life and the only thing he has going for him is he can out-Photoshop the guy in the cube next to him."
Matt & Troy Hitch are now back in action with Snatchbuckler's Second Chance, picking up with Donnie's tastefully named WoW comrade. [Via Scott Valentine]
Tangentially related, as it's Photoshop-based humor: depending on political leanings you might get a kick out of this. [Via Adolfo Rozenfeld]
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