Note to self: "Blog first & ask questions later" is a really bad approach.

On Saturday I posted a blog entry in which I tried to clarify some details of what we’ve been developing in Photoshop.  Unfortunately, looking back, it’s clear I did a poor job of communicating what I intended.  In particular I regret the way I went about pointing out some errors I’d seen in stories.

Let me give you a little context about how things unfolded.  A few weeks ago I demonstrated some "potential future Photoshop technology" (more on what that means in a minute) during Adobe’s meeting with financial analysts.  Some folks at NVIDIA saw that demo and asked whether we’d mind repeating it at a press gathering they’d scheduled for last Thursday.  We said sure, and I got busy testing everything on a system they supplied.

On Friday I saw Theo Valich’s story on TG Daily covering the demo.  One detail jumped out at me: "The package is expected to be released on October 1."  As anyone who’s dealt with Adobe will tell you, we very rarely share details about when most products are expected to ship.  In fact, during my demo I’d noted a number of times that I was just showing some possible future technology, not announcing a new version, timing, etc.

Throughout the next day and a half, I kept getting Google Alerts linking to articles that repeated and amplified the news, occasionally misstating various details.  I started getting mail from colleagues to the effect of, "You said what??"

At that point, watching the story morph and replicate, I decided to try to nip things in the bud by sharing some clarifications.  Given that we were in the middle of a long holiday weekend, I opted to act quickly–too quickly.  I ended up overreacting, and whereas I should have dropped a line to at least some of the various media outlets, I called them out here.  The irony is that I was complaining about people blogging too quickly without checking all their facts, and in the process I was blogging too quickly without checking my facts!

On Sunday I got a quick & courteous note from Jonathan Fingas of Electronista thanking me for the clarifications & noting that they’d updated their story.  Similarly I heard from staff at Gizmodo & TG Daily noting that they’d made updates.  I greatly appreciate that, and in the future I’ll find a much better way of pointing out needed changes.

As for the content of my post, I know there’s been some lingering confusion, so let me try to clarify a few points for the record:

• I didn’t say whether the next version of Photoshop would or would not be called CS4.  Instead, I was simply trying to point out that what I was showing was a technology demonstration that was independent of a particular version.
• Similarly, I didn’t say that GPU-enabled features would or would not ship in the next version of Photoshop.  Think, "I can neither confirm nor deny…"  When developing any product, details are always subject to change, and it’s always possible that some unforeseen roadblock will appear.  That’s why we try so hard to wrap a lot of caution tape around any future-looking statements: we’re excited to be showing you some of what we’re building, and we hope you are, too, but we want to manage expectations & not over-promise anything. Make sense?
• Lastly, I didn’t say that the next version Photoshop would or would not ship on a particular date.  My (badly made) point was that nothing had been announced, so the fact that a date of "October 1" kept getting repeated should be taken with the appropriate grain of salt.

In short, I just meant to say that we weren’t promising any particular features at any particular time–nothing more, nothing less.  Hopefully needless to say, we’ll work as hard as we can to bring you the good stuff sooner rather than later.

According to an FAQ on Adobe.com,

During the month of June 2008, certain product trials that are launched for the first time (regardless of when they were installed) will function for only one day instead of 30 days, due to an error in a line of code that counts down the remaining days in a trial. You will not experience this issue if you have launched your trial before June 1, 2008, or do not launch it until July 1 or thereafter.

Therefore product trials are unavailable for download from Adobe.com at the moment.  Customer Service says, "If you tried to use an Adobe trial in June and it expired after one day, please visit www.adobe.com/go/trialupdate for more information."

The Bridge folks are looking for more input & testing coverage on the next version of the software, so they’ve asked me to pass along the following note:

Bridge Customers,

We are looking for a few interested Adobe Bridge users to join our Prerelease Program. We need customers who use Bridge in their workflow regularly and want to provide constructive feedback to the Bridge team on monthly prerelease builds of Bridge. If you are interested, please complete the prerelease request form.  Be sure to select ‘Adobe Bridge’ from the product list.

Note: A non-disclosure agreement will be required and space is limited, so unfortunately we won’t be able to accept all who apply.

Thanks for your interest in Adobe Bridge!

It seems that news of the demo I did the other day (a repeat of what we’d shown publicly three weeks earlier) is bouncing all around the online tech press.  People are excited that the Photoshop team is exploring ways to make the app feel faster and smoother, and that’s all good.  What’s irritating, though, is just how much bogus info is getting invented, passed around, and swallowed without question.

Gizmodo is repeating info found on a site called TG Daily, stating that "Photoshop CS4" (a term that I’ve never heard anyone from Adobe use publicly) "is expected to be released on October 1."  Uhh… expected by whom?  And based on what?

I didn’t say anything about schedule.  In fact, I never said that any of this stuff is promised to go into any particular version of Photoshop.  Rather, as with previous installments, it’s a technology demonstration of some things we’ve got cooking–nothing more.

Doesn’t matter, though: Someone pulled a date apparently out of thin air, and now everyone who can copy & paste is dutifully repeating it.  The fish story grows with the telling, too.  In addition to repeating the date, Electronista is inventing new details (e.g. "CS3 has already had limited support for graphics processing units (GPUs) for certain filters"; sorry, no; "An upcoming wave of video cards with special physics processing will also help, Adobe explains"; nope, didn’t say that; and more).  Where do people get this stuff?  It’s particularly annoying to see made-up info presented as a response from Adobe–to questions that were never asked. (Contacting Adobe PR, or me directly, to confirm some detail isn’t exactly tough.)

I’m not feeling a lot of confidence in the tech press these days.  People just make up whatever they want, creating a bunch of expectations & misperceptions that people like me have to try to unravel.  There’s no disincentive to doing so: the sites still get their ad impressions, and clearly bloggers and readers are all too happy to take what they read at face value.

I don’t know what to tell you, as the quest for ad bucks is eroding journalistic standards across the board.  "Caveat lector," and I’ll keep trying to share actually legitimate information here.

J.

PS–I found this warez link kind of hilarious.  Not only are people inventing product info in order to entice you to download a bunch of unknown executable code onto your machine (something from the Eliot Spitzer Memorial Hall Of Unprotected Terrible Ideas); now they’re actually using Photoshop to design fake Photoshop packaging! (Screenshot here in case the shady server disappears.)

• Spectra is an interactive 3D news presentation from MSNBC.  Although I’m not convinced that putting news onto flying postcards will boost anyone’s concentration or retention, I dig the aesthetics and the attention to detail.  I couldn’t get the Web cam access to work with Flash Player 10 on my system, and the inability to click on stories of interest is annoying, but maybe you’ll have better luck.  Here’s the direct link.
• Steven Wood’s Tag Galaxy uses the Papervision3D library for Flash to explore Flickr photos via virtual planetary systems.
• I’ve mentioned the very cool, very fast, and free PicLens browser plug-in a number of times.  In addition to working with Flickr, Google Images, etc., it’s been upgraded to search YouTube.  Check out the video demo.
• TimeTube visualizes YouTube content via a timeline, list view, flipbook and map view. [Via]

• Spectra is an interactive 3D news presentation from MSNBC.  Although I’m not convinced that putting news onto flying postcards will boost anyone’s concentration or retention, I dig the aesthetics and the attention to detail.  I couldn’t get the Web cam access to work with Flash Player 10 on my system, and the inability to click on stories of interest is annoying, but maybe you’ll have better luck.  Here’s the direct link.
• Steven Wood’s Tag Galaxy uses the Papervision3D library for Flash to explore Flickr photos via virtual planetary systems.
• I’ve mentioned the very cool, very fast, and free PicLens browser plug-in a number of times.  In addition to working with Flickr, Google Images, etc., it’s been upgraded to search YouTube.  Check out the video demo.
• TimeTube visualizes YouTube content via a timeline, list view, flipbook and map view. [Via]

The subject of copyright is always high in photographers’ minds, especially in light of Orphan Works legislation & rampant image “borrowing” online. Consequently there’s an ongoing burning desire for secure metadata that can’t be stripped away from images.

Last summer I posted a guest blog entry from Russell Williams on why Photoshop doesn’t provide secure metadata.  Now Adobe metadata expert Gunar Penikis has posted about the Economics of Trust and Permanent Metadata.  If this subject is of interest to you, check out Gunar’s thoughts & the comments that follow (and feel free to add your own perspective).

The subject of copyright is always high in photographers’ minds, especially in light of Orphan Works legislation & rampant image “borrowing” online. Consequently there’s an ongoing burning desire for secure metadata that can’t be stripped away from images.

Last summer I posted a guest blog entry from Russell Williams on why Photoshop doesn’t provide secure metadata.  Now Adobe metadata expert Gunar Penikis has posted about the Economics of Trust and Permanent Metadata.  If this subject is of interest to you, check out Gunar’s thoughts & the comments that follow (and feel free to add your own perspective).

Via Daring Fireball I caught this little blurb from Panic‘s Cabel Sasser:

A company like Adobe, which has hundreds of engineers working on
Photoshop, releases ONE version every two or three years, and maybe a
single bug fix release in the interim. For the most part, we’re all
cool with that, myself included! 🙂

I’m glad to hear the last bit, especially as I love Panic’s Transmit and Unison software–models of simplicity and refinement.  The rest is kind of funny, though: in reality we have only a couple dozen engineers working on Photoshop.  (If you added in every person who tests Photoshop and Bridge, localizes them, builds the installers, manages the process, etc., you could get to more than a hundred people–but only with some effort.)  Relative to our feature set and code base, the team runs very lean.

As for the shipping schedule, it’s been 18-24 months between major releases for quite some time.  I don’t mean to take a casual comment in a forum overly seriously.  It’s just that I’ve been thinking about the Photoshop (and Suite) shipping schedule, wondering whether it’s too long, too short, or both.

On the one hand, the richer Suite apps get and the more of them there are, the more time people would like to settle into using them.  It’s generally easier to absorb upgrading a number of applications at once, then living with them for a while, than it was to handle continual unsynchronized updates (the pre-Suites world).  Through this lens, 18 months looks short.

On the other hand, we’re increasingly living in a world where "software is a relationship, not an artifact" (as I think Tim O’Reilly put it).  An application like Google Maps or Photoshop Express could be updated seamlessly, simultaneously for all users, every hour if desired.  Through that lens, 18 months looks awfully long.

I’d like to get to a point where we can have it both ways.  I’d like the core team to be able to go off and spend several years retooling essential pieces of plumbing, making changes that won’t become visible for a few versions.  At the same time, I want to wake up in the morning and have Photoshop be smarter & more feature-rich than when I went to bed.  Some things should be updated every 5 years; others, every five minutes.

Obviously this isn’t the kind of change a team makes overnight, but we’re getting there.  Building on what we’ve got percolating, functionality like peer-to-peer help will become possible.  More on that foundation soon.

PS–Re: people banging on Panic for more frequent updates to their inexpensive tools, I’m reminded of an observation attributed to Edward Tufte: "The sense of entitlement increases as the price of the service or product decreases."

If it’s in Photoshop and it goes fast, there’s a very good chance that Chris Cox has had something to do with it.  Chris is, among a great many other things, the go-to guy for optimizing many functions in the app.  (At various times we’ve known there’s some kind of crazy-exotic Apple hardware in Chris’s office–something that would emerge many months later as the G5, etc.–and that he’s busily tuning the app for it but can’t tell us any of the details.)  In any case, he has started a blog on C++ performance.  If that’s up your alley, I recommend subscribing to the feed.

[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!]

Hats off to all the Apple folks responsible for Time Machine: I’m pleased to report that restoring my Mac from the data stored on my Time Capsule went off without a hitch. Performing a synch with the drive was easy, and after a couple of hours everything was just where I left it–right down to my Dock icons, desktop picture, and app preferences. (James Duncan Davidson provides more detail on a similar (albeit planned) experience.) I was especially pleased to see that all my NetNewsWire clippings & tabs came back in place.
I’ve encountered only a little strangeness so far:

• In Adobe Contribute, my local drafts are present, but the app preferences seem to have gotten partially lost. I’ll pass my info along to the CT team. I did lose some material I’d worked on over the weekend (as Saturday night’s Time Machine backup failed for unspecified reasons), but the rest of the drafts look recoverable.
• Photoshop held onto my serial number, but it asked to be reactivated (which transpired successfully)
• Update: iTunes lost my authorization info. Hopefully I haven’t now burned another authorization. Also, Ambrosia’s iSeek and Snapz Pro have lost their registration info. QuickTime Pro seems unaffected.

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.

I hope never to verify the effectiveness of an airbag using my face, or the completeness of my life insurance at the cost of my life. I guess I won’t get a pass on testing the promise of my new Time Capsule, however.
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.

I’m pleased to see that this Tuesday marks the first San Francisco meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area Photoshop Users Group.  According to the Evite, here’s what’s planned:

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.