What a week it’s been. Sunday through Tuesday I was experiencing the energy and excitement of the Macromedia developer community at MAX, soon (we hope) to be part of the Adobe world (come on, EU commissioners! :-)). Then on Tuesday I got the call that Apple wanted to give us a demo of their new photo-centric application. We’d been hearing about this thing for three and a half years, so I headed to NY a day early.

And, well…?

Aperture is a cool product, no question. Apple’s designers have a great aesthetic, and their marketing is second-to-none. (This is the company, after all, that can sell the iPod Shuffle’s lack of screen as a lifestyle choice.) Aperture zips around on quad G5’s with four GPUs, and I’m looking forward to getting it onto my PowerBook 17″ to see how it might run in the field.
As Apple is the first to say, Aperture is not designed to be a Photoshop competitor. It has a number of very slick features (I dig the Web gallery creator in particular), but if you’re looking to do something as simple as make a selection and sharpen someone’s eyes, you’re out of luck. That’s not a knock–just a reflection of what Aperture is and is not. Fortunately Apple has a one-click method of sending a PSD to Photoshop for further editing.

I’m obviously downplaying competition between these apps because, as I’ve written previously, inventing death-matches where none exist does us all a disservice. Having said that, however, I’d be blowing smoke not to acknowledge that Aperture does compete with Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. The capabilities of Photoshop (of which Bridge and ACR are a part) are vast, so there’s bound to be some overlap, and Aperture joins a long list of products (Capture One, RawShooter Essentials, Nikon Capture, Canon Digital Photo Pro, etc.) that also offer raw browsing and editing. Bridge and ACR aim to provide the best possible workflow in conjunction with Photoshop, but you’re free to mix and match.

And you know, to the degree that Aperture stirs things up, I’m excited. CS2 wouldn’t be all it is today without the apps I mentioned keeping us on our toes, and the more tools offer solutions for photographers, the better off customers will be. So in the spirit of the Apple of yore, I say Welcome Apple. Seriously.
J.

The first day of the Macromedia MAX show is nearly in the bag, and man, it’s pretty exciting. Just sitting amidst 3,000 enthusiastic, animated designers and developers in the keynote presentation opens your eyes to the passion of this user community. As Macromedia folks and partners from SAP and elsewhere unveiled a range of new solutions and concepts (tons of coverage tracked here), the people around me were audibly buzzing with ideas. I’m eagerly looking forward to the deal being finalized so that we can start working together more closely.

As you probably know, Photoshop CS2 and the other Creative Suite apps ship with Adobe Bridge, the browsing and workflow management hub of the Suite. What you may not know is that Bridge has been designed with extensibility in mind. The app’s JavaScript extensibility layer enables everything from tiny widgets to services like Adobe Stock Photos. So, I thought it would be useful to link to some resources and examples:

• The
  Bridge scripting guide documents the app’s JavaScript extensibility layer. You can write and debug these scripts using the ExtendScript toolkit that ships with all the CS2 apps, and you can discuss script development with others on the Bridge scripting forum.

• Adobe Studio Exchange features a set of Bridge scripts, including Import from Camera. You can of course upload your own scripts to share with community.
• The Adobe Solutions Network (ASN) offers a variety of Bridge extensions. For various accounting reasons, we can’t just give these away (believe me, we’ve looked into it), but paying ASN developers can incorporate this code into their own scripts, then redistribute them.
• Peter Krogh’s DAMUseful.com (from which I stole the title of this entry) features the Pimp My Bridge page, as well as Peter’s Rank and File script for facilitating interoperability with iView Media Pro and other apps.
• BarredRock Software offers a variety of scripts, including one that offers much-requested extraction of metadata to a spreadsheet.
• PhotoshopNews.com offers a favorite to display PhotoshopNews in Bridge using the on-board Opera browser engine. Other developers have used this capability to tie Bridge into asset management systems.
• Jakub Kozniewski offers the Flash-based CS UI builder, a visual way to assemble JavaScript interfaces for Bridge and the other CS2 apps. [via Jeff Tranberry]

I plan to update the list as more examples and resources become available. In the meantime, if you have others to share, please send ’em our way.

…but how about this thing^*? Rogue genius-types at MIT Media Lab have developed the I/O Brush, “a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by ‘picking up’ and drawing with them.” The ability to sample and apply a short video sequence is particularly brilliant. [link via K10K.net]
If you like that, check out the Pixel Roller, a “paint roller that paints pixels, designed… to print digital information such as imagery or text onto a great range of surfaces.”
On a personal note, it was the chance to work with alpha geeks like this that drew me to Adobe. When I first encountered the LiveMotion team, I heard that engineer Chris Prosser had built himself a car MP3 player (this was a couple of years before the iPod). Evidently he’d disassembled an old Pentium 90, stuck it in his trunk, connected it to the glovebox with some Ethernet cable, added a little LCD track readout, and written a Java Telnet app for synching the machine with his laptop. Okay, I thought, I don’t want to do that, but I’d like to hijack the brains of someone who could. Chris has now moved on to After Effects, and I get to pester the likes of Thomas Knoll, Chris Cox, Arno Gourdol, and the rest of the team, trying to get some pet idea or other implemented.
* Caution: Features the most grating soundtrack since that Canon 20D video.

A few weeks ago we got to spend time with the team behind the scenes at Fox’s 24, as well as the folks at CSI, Without a Trace, Scrubs, and other shows. Art departments have to be endlessly resourceful, and we got a kick out of hearing about some of the creative ways they put Photoshop to use. I don’t want to risk giving anything away, but I did get clearance to mention something from a past episode of 24.
A scene called for the crew to put a burned-out car down in a ravine, but they couldn’t get the necessary permits from the city. So, production designer Joseph Hodges took a picture of the car, brought it into Photoshop, gave it a good beating (burning the paint, removing a door), and then printed it on a large piece of cardboard. The next day he stuck it down in the ravine where the actual car was to go. When the rest of the crew arrived they started to flip out, saying, “Hey, they told us not to put the car down there!” The illusion was clearly good enough to fool people standing on the site, and it worked perfectly for the scene.
Thanks to Rodney Charters, Director of Photography, Joseph Hodges, and the rest of the crew who let us be flies on the wall as they rehearsed, shot, and designed components of the upcoming season.

Continuing my recent megapixel fixation, check out this insane, 19200 x 2400 monitor [link via Airtight Interactive]. Aside from the obvious expense and physical demands of this kind of configuration, such a wide layout would impose some new UI challenges (e.g. look at the control elements spread all the way to the right and left). Of course, with higher DPI displays coming and resolution-independent UI support coming from Microsoft and Apple, there’s plenty of work ahead (if nothing else, so that your Photoshop toolbar doesn’t end up being 8mm wide on screen).

On Sunday a number of us are headed to LA for the Macromedia MAX show, and on Wednesday I’ll be flying to NY to meet up with a large Adobe contingent at PhotoPlus Expo. If you’ll be attending either show and feel like saying hello, please do. At MAX I’ll be just a fly on the wall, soaking up info in various sessions. At PPE I’m slated to be at the Adobe booth each day roughly 10-1:30. Hope to see you there. (For reference, I look like this. And yes, this is what happens if you let a bunch of product managers screw around with nice camera equipment. It willget cheesy.)

Mac developer plasq has released an updated version of their slick, fun, and super easy Comic Life application. The tool makes it a cinch to create layouts, add text and photos, and publish results to the Web.
If Adobe apps tend to be grand organs, Comic Life is a flute. Now, I would never want to give up any of the range and flexibility of our tools, but it’s refreshing to see a light, elegant solution for a very specific task. This question keeps gnawing at me: As our tools grow ever more capable, do they have to keep getting more complex? If each app’s main environment needs to strive for letting you do anything at any time, are there areas where we could focus on specific tasks? Hmm–this deserves an entry of its own. In the meantime, if you have ideas, please let us know.

Counterpoint to the megapixel wars: what if you could alter only one pixel per day? Cameron Adams has developed Pixelfest, a collaborative effort to create “art/design/garbage” through numerous people making tiny contributions. Give it a whirl, or check out a time lapse movie of the project’s development.
(link via Guerrilla Innovation)

Photoshop was big in pop culture last weekend: on both The West Wing and Desperate Housewives, I’m told, characters mentioned Photoshop by name. Right on. The only catch: the West Wing character asked someone to “Photoshop” something out of picture.
You might think Adobe would be all for the verbing of “Photoshop,” but that’s not the case. It turns out that if a company doesn’t actively protect a trademarked name, it can lose the rights to it. That’s why you see TiVo and many others having to advocate mouth-twisting usages like, “Honey, would you record ‘Extreme Deathmatch 9000’ on the TiVo® DVR?” (You’re not even supposed to call the beloved plastic things “Legos.”)
I’ve been asked several times for the technical term for the process of a product name getting, er, generified, and it seems there isn’t a proper one. That said, “Genericide” seems reasonable.
On a related note, see if you can guess what’s indicated by this infographic. (Where I grew up in Illinois, it was pronounced “paahp.”)
Oh, and one last thing: Friends don’t let friends put a capital “S” in the middle of “Photoshop.” That usage really waves the nitwit flag, you know? :-).