In a bit of synchronicity, two Adobe-related podcasters just announced their new offerings:

• The NAPP‘s Matt Kloskowski has introduced Photoshop Killer Tips (Web/iTunes), described by its creator as “short and sweet–just a quick 60-90 second video tip each day (Monday through Friday).” It’s been running (‘casting?) for three weeks, so the site already features a number of tips.
• InDesign Secrets (Web/iTunes) is a new resource from authors David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción, covering all aspects of page layout and production in Adobe InDesign.

These new programs join the growing ranks of design-oriented podcasts, alongside The Russell Brown Show (Web/iTunes), Photoshop TV (Web/iTunes), Attention Photoshoppers (Web/iTunes), and more. If you’ve found related podcasts useful, feel free to pass along their info via the comments.

There’s a new Generic Image Library available for download from Adobe Open Source page. The developers write, “It is a library that abstracts image representations from algorithms on images and allows one to write the algorithm once and have it work for image in any color space, channel depth, interleaved/planar pixel organization, etc., with performance similar to hand-coding for a specific image type.” If image science is your bag, this might be worth a look.

[Low news value here, but I’ve got to say it] If you’re reading this via RSS, great; if not & you’ve stumbled across the main page of my blog, my apologies for the Indiana Jones-style eyeball-melting that ensued. Changes to the CSS shared among several Adobe blogs have made the site look, uh, not so good. The IS folks are investigating, and hopefully the proper appearance (if not a better one) will be restored soon. [Update: Thanks to Tobias Hoellrich for settings things right. Now, I need to find something the Dreamweaver team needs so that I can swap it for some CSS-wrangling help…]

Photographer Peter Krogh, author of The DAM Book and various scripts for Adobe Bridge, has released RapidFixer, a powerful Bridge add-on that lets you modify Camera Raw settings directly in Bridge, without stepping into the CR dialog box. According to Peter the script is particularly useful for large shoots of images shot in changing light, and you can see it in operation on DAMUseful.com.

Oh boy–yet another reason to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s ubiquitous Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Canadian researchers report that Web site visitors draw conclusions about the quality of a site in the first twentieth of a second. Among other things, Gladwell posits that more information is not always better, that rapid assessments are sometimes more accurate than the fruits of months of study. Maybe our well-trained consumer subconscious can keep us out of trouble–away from a phishing site, say.
I found myself thinking about my customary reaction to the usability work of Jakob Nielsen–i.e., some amount of distrust & desire to pick it apart. Mr. Nielsen is of course a sharp and insightful guy, so why am I likely to approach articles on less familiar sites like UX Magazine, Airbag Industries, and WeBreakStuff with a more open mind? I think it’s that after all these years, I still can’t see Nielsen’s willfully undesigned UseIt.com, with its Windows 3.1 color scheme & unhelpfully wide paragraphs, without thinking, in that first blink of an eye, “This guy doesn’t care about aesthetics, about style.” And thus, “Not my people.”
There’s an Adobe angle here, I think, insofar as this kind of phenomenon applies to software. Typically, given a choice between putting resources into flashy UI vs. putting them towards a specific solution (a new tool, format supported, etc.), I and many others will favor the latter. In doing so, however, we risk playing all the notes but missing the music. Whether an app keeps pace with contemporary style gives immediate, sometimes unconscious cues about its quality, freshness, and relevance.
In CS2 the palettes have been subtly modernized (okay, very subtly), but that’s the tip of the iceberg. The newly announced Production Studio features a significantly smartened UI (here it is in action in After Effects), and Project Lightroom breaks new ground for Adobe, making use of animation and transparency.
So, suffice it to say that we’re moving in the right direction, prioritizing visual polish alongside refined interaction, and I’m looking forward to working more with the Experience Design (XD) team from the former Macromedia. Now, if we can just work on that new “junkyard wars” bundle packaging of ours… 😉
[Study links via Style Gala and CF Journal]

Names to memorize, names hypnotize, names to make your mouth ex-er-cise…
At last, the secret of Photoshop’s staying power can be revealed: it’s the hypnotic power of those interesting names on the splash screen as the app boots up. Seetharaman Narayanan, Seetharaman Narayanan… Just his name alone has inspired all kinds of madness. I remember on my first visit to Adobe walking past offices and thinking, “I’lam Mougy… Grace Ge… why do I know these names?,” not realizing the extent to which the splash screens had bored into my brain. One look & you’re hooked. [Of course, customers’ names can hypnotize right back: my wife is transfixed by “Martin Evening.”]
The practice of listing team members’ names on the splash screen goes way back, but in recent years it’s fallen on hard times. Officially, the names just don’t fit anymore, as modern apps rely on armies of engineers, QE’s, researchers, designers, translators, and (yes) us marketing schmoes, among many others. But it’s a bit deadening, I think, not to see the connection to real folks. Photoshop has defied the trend, adding randomization so that everyone’s name can be listed at least some of the time. And I smiled seeing that Lightroom proudly lists its crew at launch.
Without pulling the curtain too far back (Jeff Schewe’s penchant for posting photos of well-known engineers in Speedos notwithstanding), I’m all for helping connect names and faces to the tools they create. I hope this blog helps in that effort, as have Jeff’s stories about Photoshop, Bridge, and Lightroom development. Similarly, the Flash team’s making of Flash 8 video gives insight into their process, and the app itself even includes pictures of the team. Let’s keep this trend alive.

At Macworld this week I met a developer named Joshua Distler, creator of LiveSurface, a cool set of templates designed for use with Photoshop CS2’s Vanishing Point tool. The image library includes Illustrator templates plus VP-savvy images. You can see it in action, or download a sample by joining the email update list.

I’d seen a variety of Photoshop-tuned keyboards, but Artemy Lebedev’s Optimus keyboard takes things to a new level. It uses OLED technology to change the display of keys on the fly (even allowing for animation, according to the witty FAQ). Check out keys tuned for Photoshop. Too cool. [Link via James Michaelsen]
PS–Elsewhere on the site I spotted an interesting bit about the printing origins of “cliché” and “stereotype”. Heh–I had no idea, and I do enjoy the occasional cliché (see “takes things to a new level,” above). (More from Wikipedia here and here.)

If you’ll be at the Macworld show in SF next week, please swing by the Adobe booth and say hi. Members of the new, improved, grand-unified Adobe will be staffing the pods as well as giving theater presentations on using Studio 8, Creative Suite 2, Flash with After Effects and Illustrator, and more. Some points of possible interest:

• Creative nutjob Russell Brown will be on hand to give out copies of his new & improved Russell Brown Show CDs. He’s due to present in the Adobe theater Tuesday-Thursday at 11:15 and Friday at 1:15, so get there early. And fellow evangelist Julieanne Kost will be showing something interesting at 3:45 each afternoon. [Update: Yes, that would be Lightroom]
• Come network with (other) InDesign experts on Wednesday evening, 6:30-9pm at the Adobe SF office (formerly Macromedia HQ), 601 Townsend St. Author Sandee Cohen will be there, along with (I’m told) “Amazing raffle prizes and free pizza.”
• The User Research team invites you to stop by their pod (located behind the information booth) to learn more about their work and, if you’d like, to sign up to participate in upcoming research. If you won’t be at the show, you can always sign up at www.adobe.com/usability.
• The Apple User Group Advisory Board is having a meeting on Monday at the Argent hotel where Adobe’s Terry White will be speaking.
• On Wednesday morning there’s an Adobe Professional Association & User Group Leader Breakfast, 7-10am in the Argent Hotel. Terry White, Dave Helmly & Kurt Zevas will be presenting.