I’m delighted to see that our globetrotting colleague & friend Julieanne Kost, Adobe Evangelist, is #67* on Fast Company’s list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. Congrats, Julieanne! They could not have picked a nicer, harder working, more down-to-earth person to honor. Check out Julieanne’s photography, tips on Photoshop & Lightroom, her book Window Seat, and her blog (available inside PS CS4) for more info.

* “So, according to this, do you know who she’s more creative than?” my boss Kevin started to ask in his staff meeting, meaning to mention Brian Eno (#83), Zaha Hadid (#68) and other luminaries. “You mean besides all of us in this room?,” I asked.

For years now The Onion has been running their “Ask A {So-And-So}” series of articles (e.g. “Ask A Navy SEAL“), in which a bizarre choice for an advice columnist replies to every inquiry with complete non-sequiturs. Last night my fellow PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes asked me a family-related question that I somehow turned into a discussion of a planned Photoshop feature. “You know,” he said, “this whole thread is straight from the Onion’s ‘Ask a Photoshop Product Manager'”:

Dear PS PM, I’m having trouble choosing a good gift for Valentine’s Day. I just want to do something special for my boyfriend. Do you have any ideas?

PS PM: So, you want to start through Camera Raw or Lightroom, making sure you’re converting to DNG. I really recommend that you preserve the fidelity of your image’s 16-bit data and embrace a Smart Object workflow….once in Photoshop….

Brief notes on upcoming events:

• Scott Kelby & his crew have announced their Second Annual Worldwide Photowalk. The event is set for Saturday, July 18th, and plenty of details are on the site, including a list of the ~200 cities already signed up. Check out Scott’s brief FAQ for more.
• RetouchPro.com is launching RetouchPRO LIVE, a two hour real-time retouching demonstration and Q/A event. Chris Tarantino is slated to present the first installment on Wednesday, May 27, at 8pm CDT (0200 GMT on the 28th). Doug Nelson of RetouchPro writes “Tickets are only $10, and attendees will watch Chris Tarantino do a beauty retouch in real time using PS CS4. I’ll be along as host and interviewer. If there’s enough time afterwards, Chris will answer questions from the audience about his technique or working as a professional retoucher.”

In the past I’ve enthused about “PicLens,” a Web browser plug-in that enables crazy-fast 3D slideshows for Flickr, Facebook, and more. PicLens was renamed Cooliris, and the team behind it keeps adding slick features. I was delighted to see that the plug-in now supports the Safari 4 beta, can browse local files, display image metadata, and more. Check out the features page for more info.

The fact that you’re reading this text indicates that this weekend’s blog server upgrade has gone according to plan. If you experience any weirdness (e.g. problems posting comments), please drop me a line (jnack at adobe); thanks.

A couple of senior Photoshop engineers have offered sometimes colorful perspectives on the challenges inherent in tapping into graphics processors’ great potential.

• TGDaily spoke to Photoshop architect Russell Williams and me about Photoshop and the GPU. To illustrate the bottleneck of reading data back from the GPU, Russell “compared this scenario to a company that would like to print local papers in San Jose, but decides to go with a printer in New York. ‘You will have to fly the data to New York, and it’s returned on a bi-plane.'”
• Imaging Resource conducted a similarly themed interview with Jerry Harris. “It’s hard to actually achieve that theoretical goal when running in parallel,” he said. “So it’s sort of like working with a bunch of mules. You might work with two of them but four or five, forget it. They don’t want to behave. Where a GPU is more like a stream of fish you see in the ocean or a flock of birds. They just seem to do better with more of them. More naturally suited.”

PS: I should reiterate that we’re quite actively engaged with the GPU makers. We’re working together to tune both the hardware & the software sides of the equation, and I see encouraging signs.

Cue Neil Young warbling “Tonight’s the ni-iiiight…”
Well, after many years of discussion, planning, and pauses, Adobe’s blogging infrastructure team is due to push us live to a new system (based on Movable Type 4.25) tonight. Much goodness should result (at a minimum not having the server crap out when you’re trying to post a comment), though from about 10pm Pacific time (0600 GMT) I won’t be able to post anything for a while. More importantly:

Commenting will be disabled until the transition is complete, and you’ll experience errors if you try to post a comment.

I’ll post the all-clear when things are back to normal. And if that doesn’t happen & you never hear from me again, well, it’s been real!

Let’s hear it for flood fill! [Via]
I lusted after an Amiga or a Mac back then. It took several years to talk my folks into getting an Apple IIgs (2.8 MHz, suckkaz!). I’m reminded of a tweet I saw yesterday: “Going to take some pictures that will blow your mind today. With an Apple Quicktake. Oh yeah, 0.3 Megapixels of pure digital SEX.”
In other news, David Hockney now draws with an iPhone. I mostly dig the tiny easel that supports it.

I have the attention span of… wait, hang on… uh… {spinning beachball pupils}… shiny thing shiny thing, start two emails, open three tabs… ah yes–the attention span of a sugar-smacked third grader. Therefore I’ve tried to keep Twitter at arm’s length, to say the least. I’ve felt like Old Man (Jon) Stewart shaking his fist at the technology, digging how McSweeny’s has characterized it:

Twitter seems to be, first and foremost, an online haven where teenagers making drugs can telegraph secret code words to arrange gang fights and orgies. It also functions as a vehicle for teasing peers until they commit suicide.

As my friend Hughes says, “It’s like reading someone’s life in fortune cookies–and about as nutritious*.”

Ah, but now, for whatever reason, I’ve taken the plunge and am on Twitter as jnack. It’s a little like a dog catching a car, though: now what does he do with it? People seem happy I’m there, but I’m not quite sure what they’re expecting.

I’m curious what you, as a reader of this blog, would like to see.

• Should I create separate profiles in order to separate kid-related stuff from Adobe-related stuff? Or do you actually want to hear about our toddler celebrating bacon?
• Should I post content on Twitter first (offering immediacy without context), then take the time to group things here as I always have? (I’ve structured this blog as one I’d want to read. I’d generally prefer to have fewer, better links than to have more random ones, and I’d prefer to have a sense of what to expect before clicking.)
• Should I look into pulling my feed onto the blog as some sort of sidebar? (I have no idea what’s possible, just that it’s gotta be doable.)
• Are there tools that you’d recommend to make Twitter more useful? So far Tweetie seems good, and I’m playing with Birdhouse and Twitterific on my iPhone.

I don’t just want to hear myself talk. It’ll be worth tweeting only if people are actually getting something useful out of the effort, so I welcome any thoughts or advice you’d like to share.

Thanks,

J.

*What a perfect tweet, say I, having immediately become the pusher-man.

Nothing groundbreaking here, just an anecdote & observation.

Yesterday I bumped into Bill Hensler, Adobe’s VP of engineering for video products, and somehow conversation turned to his time as a Motorola intern back in the ’80s–back before even Gordon Gekko was rockin’ a mobile phone. “We did a lot of focus group research,” said Bill. “You know who wanted a mobile phone back then? Nobody. People would say, ‘Why would I want to be interrupted at a restaurant or a ball game? It’s bad enough when people call during dinner.'”

It’s easy to want customers to gift-wrap directions, and Adobe certainly puts rigor into its data-gathering process. (For example, teams go on the road & present customers with a list of potential features, then ask them to stack-rank the ideas, allocate $100 of engineering effort among them, etc.). That approach helps affirm one’s next couple of steps, but it’s obviously not a recipe for bold leaps. (“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse,” noted Henry Ford.)

I mention this as someone who’s been advancing a few “crazy” ideas for some time, often to the sound of crickets. Sometimes, though, you’ve gotta say, “They’ll like us when we win.”

Thanks for the quick and detailed feedback on whether to drop support for PICT files in Photoshop. Going forward our plan (at least for the foreseeable future) is to keep reading these files, but not to keep writing them.
For the sake of completeness, I’ll mention that I don’t think Photoshop will continue to read QuickDraw-based PICT files (as QuickDraw is unsupported in Cocoa/64-bit). I don’t expect that to matter, thought: Photoshop CS4 dropped QuickDraw PICT support on Windows & no one has mentioned it. Additionally, no one who commented in response to my query talked about using this flavor of PICT; rather, people talked about using raster PICTs, and Photoshop will still support opening those.

Here’s what I think people want to know: Is Photoshop’s PSD format a goofy, antiquated piece of crap, and by extension is Photoshop slow, clumsy, and/or outdated?

No. (Read on for details.)

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