I’m getting back to my Web roots here in Austin, and at today’s Flashforward keynote speech, Flash PM Mike Downey gave a sneak peek of the integration with Photoshop that’s planned for Flash 9. Aral Balkan’s great coverage of the keynote sums up the demo nicely:

One of the new features is importing Photoshop PSD files. Import -> Import to stage. There is precise control over every layer. [Mike] chooses a PSD file and you can see all the layers, layer groups, layer comps and you can make choices about each layer separately. The options include “Make text editable” (so that text imported from PSD files is editable in Flash). He selects a Folder. And asks everything in that folder to be made into a MovieClip and he gives it an instance name and sets its registration point (the crowd loves it – claps!). They’re also supporting layer modes — drop shadows, blurs, etc. — and converting them to the Flash format. [Via]

Mike also noted that Flash plans to replace its vintage JPEG compression code with the library used by ImageReady/Save for Web. Good stuff is afoot at the Cirle A!
By the way, if you’re importing PSDs into Flash today, you might want to check out this video tip from Myke Ninness. He touches on how to convert Photoshop drop shadows into native Flash equivalents.

I’m getting back to my Web roots here in Austin, and at today’s Flashforward keynote speech, Flash PM Mike Downey gave a sneak peek of the integration with Photoshop that’s planned for Flash 9. Aral Balkan’s great coverage of the keynote sums up the demo nicely:

One of the new features is importing Photoshop PSD files. Import -> Import to stage. There is precise control over every layer. [Mike] chooses a PSD file and you can see all the layers, layer groups, layer comps and you can make choices about each layer separately. The options include “Make text editable” (so that text imported from PSD files is editable in Flash). He selects a Folder. And asks everything in that folder to be made into a MovieClip and he gives it an instance name and sets its registration point (the crowd loves it – claps!). They’re also supporting layer modes — drop shadows, blurs, etc. — and converting them to the Flash format. [Via]

Mike also noted that Flash plans to replace its vintage JPEG compression code with the library used by ImageReady/Save for Web. Good stuff is afoot at the Cirle A!
By the way, if you’re importing PSDs into Flash today, you might want to check out this video tip from Myke Ninness. He touches on how to convert Photoshop drop shadows into native Flash equivalents.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I came to Adobe to hijack the brains of people smarter than me, getting them to make crazy technology accessible to regular creative folks. Along those lines, it’s great to see FlashFilterLab, a free project that lets you leverage the Flash Player’s new runtime filter effects by using a drag-and-drop visual system instead of writing code. The FFL gallery encourages sharing & community review. Nice! [Via Mark Baltzegar]
Related: Filter Forge brings a similar approach to creating Photoshop filters. Big ups to the brainiacs who are opening these technologies to broad experimentation.

Having wrestled Illustrator & Flash into playing nice for the past, oh, 8 years (even going so far as to write a bunch of tutorials back in the day), I’m delighted to see that Illustrator dynamo Mordy Golding is tackling the subject head-on in a new set of training videos from Lynda.com. The videos (direct link here) cover everything from symbols in Illustrator (yes, Illustrator has symbols) to blends, styles, text on a path, and 3D effects. If you ever stub a toe when moving between these vector graphics heavyweights, Mordy’s tutorials should come in handy.

LiveMotion, the project that brought me to Adobe, has been dead & buried for more than two years. That said, it was nice this week, at the first Flashforward show since Adobe and Macromedia came together, to close out that chapter with the LM-authored Words at Play site winning the Typography category. Congrats to Steve, Bo, Roberto, Matteo, Whitney, and Alyson.
The whole LM thing was a tough row to hoe, and though we fell short, many of the issues we took on (tight integration with Photoshop/Illustrator/After Effects, rapid extensibility, etc.) remain priorities for designers & developers. It’s great that we now have the chance to work on them together, in the app people already know & love.

I’m still recovering (in a good way) from spending the week at Flashforward & hope to have some notes up soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in hearing some of my (slightly breathless) thoughts from the show floor, check out this podcast from Scott Sheppard’s Inside Mac Radio. The segment runs about 15 minutes, and author/blogger Jan Kabili has done an amazing job of transcribing the talk on The Unofficial Photoshop Blog. (Thanks, Jan!) Notes to self: Supply less cornball press photo. And stop being so word-dependent on “really.” I mean, really…

Webmonkey lists 10 great Flickr mashups, including Retrievr for Flash-enabled visual search and Tagnautica for visual tag browsing. You know people have been up to some good stuff when rad projects like Felix Turner’s Related Tag Browser and Mario Klingemann’s Flickeur don’t even get into the honoroable mentions! All this work keeps our juices flowing when thinking of ways to more effectively burrow through images via our desktop tools. [Link via Marc Pawliger]

Why is it that when you design an image in Photoshop, then move it to Flash (or Dreamweaver, or the Web in general), the appearance can totally change? If this issue has bitten you, spend ten minutes (9:19, actually) watching this new tutorial from our friend Michael Ninness. Myke explains the right color management switches to flip to change the out-of-the-box setup (geared towards a camera-to-print pipeline) to one that better suits Web output.
On a related note, if you’re frequently working between Photoshop and Flash (as evidently lots of people are), check out Myke’s full set of tutorials on the subject, and/or his Photoshop + Flash session at next week’s Flashforward conference in Seattle.
Of course, the fact that this stuff requires classes & tutorials gives us plenty of motivation to make it just work. More on that soon.

It’s been noted on other blogs throughout the week, but I wanted to mention Retrievr, Yet Another Clever Flickr Interface (YACFI?), as it relates to the problem of burrowing through large sets of images. A Flash interface lets you make simple sketches, the color palettes of which Retrievr then attempts to match with images from Flickr (details from the developer here). See also comments from ResearchBuzz (“[E]ven if it doesn’t work very well it makes an awesome toy and you should go play with it right now”).
We’ve experimented with visual search for image retrieval, adding technology from Idée to the organizer component of Photoshop Elements. Elements lets you choose as many as four source photos in the browser window, then automatically find other photos similar in appearance. Elements 4 also introduces some new face-tagging features created by Adobe’s Advanced Technology Group.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering why we sometimes introduce new technology in Elements before bringing it to Photoshop proper, think of it as similar to, say, the Foo Fighters dropping in to play an out-of-the-way club. It’s a chance to introduce promising, useful work without immediately subjecting it to the full glare of hardcore pro workflows.
[Thanks for the Retrievr link to Mark Kawano, formerly the UI designer for Camera Raw, now at frog design until we can steal him back. ;-)]

In the same vein as earlier posts about burrowing through large data sets and visualizing flight data, check out VisualComplexity.com. The site describes itself as “a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks.” Examples range from voice network traffic to a 1940’s budget chart to the tendrils of political networks. Edward Tufte, your meal is served. [Via]

Random interesting design bits I’ve encountered while shirking my actual job duties:

• Best. Animated GIF. Ever. With a perfect soundtrack to boot. (I knew there was a reason we brought animated GIF creation into Photoshop CS2.) [via]
• Director Michel Gondry and the White Stripes team up again to make your head hurt & make you like it. (This is timely if you were losing sleep wondering what a mash-up of Conan, Terry Gilliam, and those weird WEFAIL puppets would look like.) [via] (Previous Gondry/Stripes brilliance here and here.)
• Coudal Partners, original proponents of Photoshop Tennis, have produced the clever short film Copy Goes Here. The mellow pace means you can’t jam in a screening while waiting for, say, your online banking to refresh, but it’s good for a laugh when you have 10 minutes or so. [via]
• Here’s a zoom interface you don’t see every day: Justin Everett-Church has skinned the new Yahoo Maps in a pirate theme, complete with extending spyglass. (He’s also done a radar theme). [via]

Great news for anyone wanting to integrate Photoshop and other imagery into Flash (and judging from the crowds drawn by my old boss, Myke Ninness, when he lectures on this at conferences, that’s a lot of people): Macromedia engineer Tinic Uro reports that they’ve made some solid improvements in how bitmaps are drawn in the recently announced Flash 8. This should provide smoother, faster drawing of images, such as those displayed in Photoshop CS2’s new Flash Web Photo Gallery templates (example | download).
This reminds me a bit of when we launched Photoshop 7. The eye-popping Healing Brush got the big wows, but the feature battling it for applause was the simplest thing in the world: when you’d rename a layer, you could now type right into the layers palette, rather than into a dialog box. Sure, it would save you just a couple of seconds, but multiply that by number of layers, across days, weeks, months… It’s a simple lesson but one that’s easy to forget: to really make the experience better, spare some cycles for the spit and polish. It’s cool to see the Flash team doing the little things that make a big difference.
[Disclaimer: Adobe and Macromedia have announced their intention to join forces, but until that’s a done deal, we’re required to operate as separate entities. So, just to be clear, I’ll point out that I’m simply relaying publicly available information.]