Kevin Goldsmith

Let After Effects know if protecting your Pixel Bender code is important to you. The comments are already very interesting.

here is the link

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be speaking with Paul Steinberg of Intel and Tom Murphy of Contra Costa college about the criticality of understanding parallel programming techniques for industry.

In my previous role on the Adobe Image Foundation, it was an obvious requirement for our hiring candidates. We were building tools for a insanely parallel problem, image and video processing. Now that I’m working on a new product, it would maybe seem that it would not be as important. In fact, our threading models are even more complicated than in my previous group. My expectations around threading knowledge for incoming candidates are just as high.

Even the most modest mobile hardware is going (or has gone) parallel. In addition, the expectations from a user perspective around interactivity with their applications is never higher. A laggy touch interface is death to an application (or a platform). Going to get coffee while your image renders on a desktop is a thing of the past. User’s expectations of the software we write is higher than ever and it is nearly impossible to get this interactivity without taking advantage of multi-threading on today’s multi-core processors.

The tools continue to improve, but the threading models continue to evolve. A fundamental understanding of multi-threading is critical for anyone moving into Software Engineering or looking to stay current in their field.

I always enjoy talking with Paul and Tom, and expect that we’ll have a lively conversation.

Tune in live on May 17, 10:00 AM PDT

Here is Paul’s post on the subject.

I’ve posted a version of the tutorial on using Pixel Bender to animate a particle system that I did at Adobe MAX last year on the Pixel Bender section of the Adobe Developer Network. Take a look and let me know if there are more things around this that you would be interested in.

thanks!

I’ve just posted two new job openings to the Adobe jobs website.

check ‘em out:
Computer Scientist, Quality Engineering – Mobile Photography Products (08478)
Computer Scientist, Quality Engineering – Mobile Photography Products (08481)

This is a really exciting opportunity to build something brand new! here is more info about the gig:

Computer Scientist, Quality Engineering – Mobile Photography Products

Position Summary

A brand new product team in the Professional Digital Imaging group is looking for experienced white box quality engineers with a passion for Photography to help us create an entirely new product family as part of one of the world’s most recognized brand names. Do you have good coding skills and a commitment to the art and science of producing quality products? If you enjoy working with advanced technologies, aren’t intimidated by aggressive goals, and have a proven commitment to delivering great software, this may be the role for you.

Responsibilities

* Ability to work in an agile development environment.
* Interest in developing test tools and infrastructure for new coding models and languages.
* Work closely with developers on the design and specification of features.
* Code and develop comprehensive test media that will test and emulate scenarios for existing and new API’s.
* Create and run automation.
* Perform hands on testing of daily builds on actual devices.
* Critically think about how consumers will interact with the software being tested and turn those thoughts into bugs, action items, and avenues of discussion.
* Work extremely well with others by both leading and following depending on the circumstance.
* Continually research new mobile technologies and incorporate that new knowledge into your ongoing QA process.
* Accurately file and verify comprehensive bug reports.

Requirements

* Minimum of five years software Quality Engineering experience.
* Proficiency writing code and developing test automation.
* Passion for mobile devices and other gadgets.
* Passion for photography.
* Ability to achieve results with little supervision or direction.
* Flexibility to move between tasks.
* Ability to avoid distractions and deliver against deadlines.
* Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
* BS or MS Computer Science degree or equivalent industry experience.

Ideal

* Professional on the job experience using C++, Objective C, Java, or Lua.
* Experience testing on Mobile Operating Systems.

[Updated 3/15/2010 to include direct links to the job postings]

Frequent contributor to the Pixel Bender forums, Royi Avital, has released a new set of After Effects and Photoshop plug-ins written with Pixel Bender under the name Flixel Plugins. The first three are now available on aescripts.com

Flixel Plugins on aescripts.com

ApexVJ is a really beautiful Flash-based music visualizer that uses Pixel Bender

Simo Santavirta, the creator, wrote an article on his blog about it.

I’m looking for a graduating CS, EE or ECE major with an interest in Photography, mobile and good experience with C-based languages to work with my group. This position is for a new graduate only.

Go to Adobe Jobs website and search on job ID 05714.

After many happy and productive years working on Pixel Bender and the Adobe Image Foundation, I’ve decided to take on some new challenges. I’m still at Adobe, but I’m now building a new team and launching a brand new product in the Photoshop family. I can’t say too much yet, but I will have news soon. I’ll still be posting about Pixel Bender stuff here (I’m still a very enthusiastic user!), but for the newest news, you should now also watch the official Pixel Bender blog.

The Pixel Bender team now has an official Pixel Bender blog. I’ll keep posting Pixel Bender stuff here, of course, but that will now be the official and primary location for Pixel Bender news.

As promised, the Pixel Bender 3D Beta for Molehill is now live on Adobe labs! there is still a lot of work to do, but we decided to get you the tools as early as we could so that you could start to play with them. There is also a new Pixel Bender 3D subforum in the Pixel Bender devnet forums for your questions, requests and bug reports.

Enjoy!

We fixed the earlier mac bug and it should now work for everyone. Please download the new build from http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pixelbender.html

Thanks for your patience!