Groovy. [Via Jim Geduldick]

The Adobe building & maintenance staff sure keeps busy during company breaks: in the fall they installed more efficient HVAC systems, and over the holiday break they installed 20 Windspire wind turbines at the San José HQ:

Adobe estimates that it can get about 2,500 kWh per year per turbine. Comparatively speaking, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that a typical U.S. home consumes ~11,000 kWh per year. So these turbines, in the aggregate, provide enough electricity to power about 5 typical U.S. homes.

Considering that wind has always made opening & closing the doors leading to the patio/basketball court inordinately difficult*, I predict good things. Here’s more info on the effort.
* Wind strength & the attendant humiliation always correlate to the hotness of whoever is walking by. Too bad we can’t harness that.
[Update: Here’s a rather cool time-lapse video of a wind turbine being assembled. [Via]]

Interesting:

Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr’s company was building a game. eBay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong.

From Ten Rules For Web Startups. [Via]

I’ve heard Drs. Warnock & Geschke talk about how they started Adobe with the intention of selling printing hardware, and how they shopped this idea around and around until they finally agreed to do what customers wanted: just sell them the software. They depict it as something of a forehead-slapping moment that changed everything.

Tangentially related: I’ve mentioned it previously, but I always like this anecdote:

The hands-on nature of the startup was communicated to everyone the company brought onboard. For years, Warnock and Geschke hand-delivered a bottle of champagne or cognac and a dozen roses to a new hire’s house. The employee arrived at work to find hammer, ruler, and screwdriver on a desk, which were to be used for hanging up shelves, pictures, and so on.

“From the start we wanted them to have the mentality that everyone sweeps the floor around here,” says Geschke, adding that while the hand tools may be gone, the ethic persists today.

From Inside the Publishing Revolution.

Moving Photoshop from Apple’s Carbon to Cocoa technologies is an enormously long endeavor with many subtleties. The process makes us consider certain functional changes, and for technical reasons not worth elaborating on here, we’re thinking of dropping the Save for Web sub-dialog that lets one choose which files on disk to replace. (Here’s a screenshot.)
We’re not taking about dropping all of Save for Web, obviously–just about making a file replacement operation all-or-nothing. If you chose to export a sliced PSD, selected “Images And HTML,” and replaced the HTML file Photoshop generates, all the images would be automatically replaced.
If that would be a problem for you (i.e. if you’re slicing up images, then saving & electing to replace only some of the files), please speak up. Otherwise, it’s done.
Thanks,
J.

The next Photoshop User Group meeting is scheduled for next Tuesday evening. According to the event page,

• Jim Tierney from Digital Anarchy will demo a range of their products, such as Primatte Chromakey, Knoll Light Factory, Backdrop Designer, Texture Anarchy, 3D Invigorator and more.
• Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes will show an in-depth presentation of the new Lightroom 3 Beta.

We’ll have pizza and drinks at 6:30, and the meeting will start at 7:00, in the Park Conference Room of Adobe Systems’ East Tower, 321 Park Avenue, San Jose. To park underneath the Adobe building, use the Almaden Avenue entrance, under the East Tower. If the security guard at the parking entrance asks for an Adobe contact, use Bryan O’Neil Hughes’s name. He’s our contact there (as well as a Photoshop PM).

Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you know who might be interested. If they would like to be on our email list, have them respond to dan@weinberg-clark.com.

The Adobe Design Achievement Awards celebrate student achievement in both individual and group projects. As the awards site says, “Higher education students can submit entries created with Adobe software to earn a chance at winning recognition, travel, Adobe software, and winners receive cash prizes.”

Individuals and groups may win in one of a dozen categories from three media areas:

• Interactive Media: Browser-Based Design, Non-Browser Based Design, Application Development, Mobile Design, Installation Design
• Motion and Video: Animation, Live Action, Motion Graphics
• Traditional Media: Illustration, Packaging, Photography, Print Communications

Individual category winners receive:

• US$3,000 cash, a winner’s certificate, and a 3D award
• Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Master Collection education version
• Complimentary round-trip economy class airfare to Los Angeles and two nights’ accommodation in lodgings.
• Access to Adobe MAX for the duration of the ADAA ceremony and related ADAA events in Los Angeles, California.
• A one-year mentorship with a design leader.
• Be appointed to an Icograda Youth Advisory Panel.

Check out the prizes page for more info. You can also access ADAA Live! to view previous entries and currently submitted student projects in real-time. [Via]

Photoshop engineer John Peterson (creator of Photomerge, among other things) made an interesting observation today:

In the CES hype, I noticed that 64GB SD Cards are now available, for $600 a pop.

For comparison:

A SD Card weighs about 2 grams. Gold is currently about $36/gram, so the 64GB cards cost eight times their weight in gold.

The card has a volume of about 1.5 cc. Gold has a density of 19.32 g/cc, so a solid gold SD card would take almost 29g of gold, or about $1,000 worth. Of course, the gold card would probably hold its value better over time.

Having returned to work after nearly two weeks off, I walked by a new Greek place yesterday with my friend Hughes and his wife Alex. We each took a sample bit of shoe leather (er, gyro) on a toothpick. Maybe 60 seconds later, we’d walked into a difference restaurant, and I noticed that I was idly picking my teeth. When I saw that Alex also had a toothpick, I started to freak out a little. Where the hell did I get this toothpick, I thought, and how come she has one, too??

Cripes. I was very much in the Office Space “I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it…” zone. I’m on the mend, but remind me not to make any big personal/product decisions for a while.

Man, I can’t tell you the last time I parted with $20 so quickly: Irradiated Software’s Cinch and SizeUp are companion Mac utilities that facilitate common window-resizing tasks:

• Cinch ($7) lets you “drag any standard window to the left or right edge of a screen to resize it to fill that half of the screen, or drag to the top of the screen to zoom it full-screen.” [Via]
• SizeUp ($13) lets you perform similar operations via the keyboard.

Done and done. Just yesterday I was playing with CSS Edit, experimenting with some new kid-blog tweaks (a work in progress, but coming right along) and wished I had an easy way to tile the windows. Bingo; cash on the barrel.

Mostly unrelated note: I can’t begin to imagine how or why people use Macs without Default Folder installed. Also, yes, I realize that Windows 7 offers built-in functionality like what Cinch provides. Good for everybody.

The San Jose Creative Suite User Group is meeting this evening at Adobe HQ starting at 6pm. Group organizer Sally Cox writes,

Park in the Adobe Garage on the Park Avenue side and tell the security guard you are there for the Creative Suite User Group meeting. Our Adobe contact is Sarah Fiedor, if they ask. Our meeting is in the same room as last month, “Park”.

We are having a HUGE turnout, so the guest list was submitted yesterday to make it easier on Adobe Security. We are providing a sandwich bar and of course, baked goods.

• Jeffrey Martin has created what’s billed as the largest spherical panorama in the world–an 18-gigapixel whopper shot high above Prague. [Via Jeff Tranberry]
• Bernard Custard Gascó passes along some 360º panoramas from Ethiopia, featuring the monolithic Church of St. George and the people of the Mursi Tribe.
• Andreas Hollstroem points out this whopping 26-gigapixel panorama of Dresden.

There’s an eternal misconception that if you buy an upgrade to Photoshop (or other Adobe software) and get a new computer, you must first install your older version(s) before installing the new upgrade. That’s not necessary. The upgrade will look for a valid previous installation, but that’s just a convenience feature meant to spare you having to type in your old serial number alongside your new one.
One other tip, as long as I’m boring you with minutiae: You can paste your serial number into the installer. That might not be obvious as the serial number field is comprised of several small text fields, but the installer is smart enough to spread digits across the fields when pasted. Therefore when getting a new version, I take a moment to type the serial first into a text document, after which I copy it & paste it into the installer. The extra steps may be worthwhile later in case you need to re-install, etc.

I’m kind of astonished at the amount of digital compositing that now goes on, as shown in this set of clips. Sure, in many of these cases it makes obvious sense, but in others, was it really easier/more cost-effective to do a composite than just to have the crew walk outside? Apparently so.

[Via]

Wherever you are, and whatever holidays you may celebrate this time of year, I wish you great peace and happiness. Thanks for reading & for making it possible for me to do this fascinating, frustrating, often greatly rewarding job.
Oh, and our toddler Finn just walked up and would like you to know:

bvvdddgr xzxgm//jgzzzzzzzzzzzzafhh hmmm/k;/;’\dsamnnnnn .mvbj. wq

I’d like to think he’s working on a highly sophisticated encryption algorithm, but somehow I doubt it. 🙂 (Note to self: Time to fire up AlphaBaby.)
All the best for the rest of ’09 and a great start to 2010,
J.

• India: One billion+ people, one 11 ft. mustache. (Yes, but will it bring all the girls to the yard?)
• Funky animated stereo photos of old Japan. [Via Russell Brown]
• Dig the beautiful, sometimes dark, photography & portfolio from Ville Varumo. [Via]
• Splash downs:
  • Mark Mawson drops paint in water & beautifully photographs the results.
  • More lovely high-speed fluids photography. [Via] @petapixel)

• Speaking of high speeds, here’s an interesting short read on “Rapatronic Nuclear Photographs“–capturing nanosecond fireballs (in the 1940s!). [Via]
• The free Gorillacam app for iPhone looks great. It offers time lapse, burst mode, a bubble level, & more. [Via]

During the screening of Avatar yesterday, the Photoshop team burst into spontaneous laughter when a character uttered the magic word:

At least I did get to give the on-screen effects crew behind CSI some good-natured grief a couple of years back.
[Via Stu Maschwitz & everyone ever]

Our friend Deke McClelland has been posting a series of videos counting down the Top 40 Features in Photoshop, and now he’s kicked off a related contest:

Create a magnificent piece of artwork that celebrates your favorite features of Photoshop. But you must do so using not fewer than three of the Top 40 Features I’ve posted so far. (Note that you’ll need to be a member of dekeOnline to participate so that you can post your artwork and include comments.)

DEADLINE: December 22, 2009, 5p.m. Pacific

Prizes include an Olympus E-620, a free premium subscription to lynda.com, signed copies of all three CS4 One-on-One books, and more. Check out Deke’s site for more information.

Previously: Me on Deke’s Martini Hour podcast.

If you use Photoshop in conjunction with mobile development (iPhone or otherwise) and have ideas on how we could streamline your workflow, please let us know. It’s not as if we lack ideas, but rather than risk biasing your responses, I’ll leave the query open-ended. If there’s feedback you’d prefer to send directly, I’m jnack at adobe.
Thanks,
J.

• Mmm–Ampersandwich! Fun shirt for type geeks. [Via]
• “Truth Sucks“: Love the crazy attention to detail, if not the message, in this typography.
• Ouch: a simple, funny remix of the new AOL (er, Aol) logo.
• “COMPUTEA FOAMS“: Vintage type. Stu Maschwitz says, “Lid of a box in my parents’ attic. Font Of Win.”
• I dig the clever, minimalist type on a self-promo tee for a personal trainer.

Here’s a small but potentially useful bit of info: you can download a PDF copy of the help for Photoshop CS4 by clicking the “View Help PDF” link in the top-left corner of the app help page. (And, what the heck, here’s the direct link.) The same is be true for other Adobe applications.

This is obviously handy if you’re frequently working offline. In the future, you’ll be able to download help content right from within the new Adobe desktop help app, currently available for testing via Adobe Labs.

PS–You can redistribute the content & more as it’s tagged with a Creative Commons license.

You know, I’ve heard that Ugg boots can let us warm and comfortable. So If you want to buy some gifts to you lovers or friends.I think is a right choose.
Ugh. Apparently spammers now know the answer to “2+2.” Unfortunately it seems that Movable Type’s* anti-spam features (at least as we’re using them) are completely ineffective. When I try to batch-delete these messages, the server times out with an error.
Anyway, if you’re subscribing to the blog’s comment feed, sorry about this.
*No need to tell me to use some other blog software, thanks; that’s not my call.

The team at Sports Illustrated has created an interesting mockup of how the magazine could be made interactive on a tablet. It’s worth hitting the fullscreen button:

Here’s more info on the project.
I’ll admit, when I’ve seen InDesign adding interactive authoring features, integration with Flash, placement of video content, etc., I’ve raised my eyebrows a touch. Seeing how publishers would like to evolve their offerings, however, the logic & direction seem much more clear. (As I’ve heard InDesign PM Michael Ninness remark, “Print isn’t dead, but print only is dying.)

“Somewhere a Kindle is ashamed…” Check out Going West from Maurice Gee:

[Via]

• Check out this excellent 8-foot illustration featuring Guy Shields’s hidden message. [Via]
• It reminds me of how our friend Matthew (of Chopping Block fame) popped the question a few years back. (Their later, wordless baby announcement was pretty inspired, too.)
• “Watch her surname change before your eyes!” Here’s a pretty great save the date postcard from Josh Korwin and Alyssa Zukas.

Should you encounter someone who doubts the importance of context in color perception, you might try whipping out this little demonstration:

[Via]

If you’re in the Bay Area on Tuesday, you might want to check out this gathering at Adobe HQ:

We will have a short but info-packed ColdFusion demo by Sid Maestre, manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group. Then our panel experts will each show you some cool tricks for each of the Creative Suite Design Premium apps. We will take your questions and comments after the presentation.
So many of you have responded “yes” to attending, so we have moved to a larger meeting room – “Park”. Remember: parking is free in the Adobe garage. Jot down Sarah Fiedor’s name, as she is our Adobe contact. Let the Security Guard know you are there for the CS user group meeting.

More info is on the group meeting page.

It’s $169.99 on Amazon right now (US only) instead of $299; just thought you’d want to know. 🙂
[Update: I’m told the deal may not last long, so I suggest pulling the trigger quickly if you’re so inclined.]

Adobe video specialist Dennis Radeke shares quite a few details about how Adobe is leveraging graphics processors (GPUs) to greatly accelerate common operations in Adobe video apps. Taking this together with After Effects & Premiere Pro going 64-bit, I think a lot of Adobe video customers will be very happy. Check out his post for more info.
Inevitably this news will raise questions about what’ll happen with Photoshop. I can’t get into a lot of details, but here are a few points offhand:

• We’re working together with other Adobe teams, including the video & Flash teams, on core GPU & multicore acceleration technology. That’s how we’ve started delivering GPU-based features, including Pixel Bender in Photoshop.
• It’s a long and tricky road, as folks who ran into driver incompatibilities, etc. in CS4 can attest.
• To that point, we think technologies like OpenCL are exciting, but they’re young. Dennis notes that some new features are NVIDIA-only right now and points out, “Given a choice between doing it with CUDA or not doing it for a while [while waiting for] OpenCL, we chose the former.”
• Obviously we want Adobe apps to run as well as possible regardless of your configuration. Just as they used to optimize for both PowerPC and Intel/AMD chips, Adobe engineers continue to work closely with multiple manufacturers (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and others) to wring the most out of their hardware. Again, this is where standardization will help, but it does take time.

We’ve heard a number of requests (e.g. here, here) for the ability to make Photoshop stop adding the word “copy” to layer names when duplicating layers. Out of curiosity, does anyone actually like this behavior? If not, it should be easy enough simply to stop adding “copy.” If some people really like the existing behavior, however, we’d do well to add a preference.
Therefore please speak up if you like the existing behavior. If you’d be happy with “copy” going away, great, but no need to speak up.
Thanks,
J.

Thanks for all the feedback in response to the survey I posted earlier today. I feel I should clarify a few things.

• I’m touchy about hearing things like “As soon as Adobe bought Fireworks, the PS guys would be trying to kill it. Good job, mission accomplished.” To set the record straight, Adobe bought and revived Fireworks. To the best of my knowledge the app hadn’t gotten much love, to say the least, in its last couple of years with Macromedia. (Did they add anything in Studio 8?) And when Adobe was in the process of acquiring Macromedia, I spoke up strongly in support of Fireworks. Just thought you should know.
• The list I posted isn’t a promise or a hint that the Photoshop team will undertake any–much less all–of this work. As I say, it’s just my aggregation of some of the suggestions I’ve heard a number of times. I thought it would be handy to collect them for your input.
• Likewise, it isn’t a hint about the future of Fireworks or anything else. Sometimes a survey is just a survey.
• Believe me, we’re sensitive to the subject of “bloat,” and I’m actively pitching ideas (here’s one) for how the apps can better integrate without just duplicating one another. Having said that, we can’t err too far in the other direction, saying that if one app does something, no others can do it (or do it well). It’s possible for apps to have different core missions and yet have tools & capabilities in common. (To that end, people flamed us for not moving animated GIF import from ImageReady to Photoshop, feeling it was a conspiracy to force them to buy Fireworks. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.)
• People have always complained that Photoshop does too many things. I guarantee that whoever added text for the first time got an earful about it not being a “photographic” feature, and probably caught static from other Adobe teams. So it goes. Of course, people always say, “Stop adding anything new… except this handful of things for me, personally.” And they always push us to “simplify” and “just reduce” the application, yet they flip out if you take away their cherished anachronism. I always think of the Onion article, “98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others.”
• We have serious ideas about how to break this logjam, but there are no silver bullets, and it’s not going to happen overnight. But it is happening.
• Finally, a couple of practical tips: Here’s a Lorem Ipsum generator for PS, and here’s the GridMaker panel.

I am, at heart, a Web designer, and I came to Adobe to improve the ways software could help design and build Web content. Therefore I’m keenly interested in advancing Photoshop’s graphic & Web design chops.

Below you’ll find some of the ideas that have bubbled up in discussions on this blog and elsewhere. The list isn’t exhaustive (I tried to keep the length reasonable), and it’s not a promise or a hint about what might be in development. Think of it as just a quick straw poll to gauge temperature.

DRAWING

• Better vector drawing tools
• Better control over strokes and fills, including dashed lines
• Better Illustrator integration (e.g. make using Illustrator inside Photoshop as easy as double-clicking to edit a symbol in Flash or Illustrator)

RICHER/SMARTER OBJECTS

• Buttons with states (editable Up, Down, Over, etc.)
• Intelligent widgets (e.g. buttons that resize smartly (a la 9-Slice); button bars that automatically scale/add buttons when resized; arrows with variable heads that orient themselves to path direction; etc.)
• Ability to edit widget skins & to switch among skins (e.g. flip a button from Mac to Windows, or iPhone to Android)
• Intelligent, skinnable charts (including ones with live data feeds)

FILE ORGANIZATION/MGMT.

• Linked files (edit one document & have the change reflected in several documents that link to it)
• Symbols (reusable objects that can be dragged in from a Library panel)
• Type styles (edit a style definition in order to update multiple type layers at once)

OUTPUT & INTEGRATION

• High fidelity Web output (e.g. dashed lines that convert to CSS definitions)
• Pixel-accurate Web rendering (i.e. text and objects that appear exactly as they would in a browser)
• Better integration with Flash and Web authoring tools (e.g. components that translate with code & behaviors intact)

To help measure your interest, I’ve put these ideas into a quick survey. Please take a minute to let us know which ones are most interesting, and feel free to add comments via this post.

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing your thoughts,

J.

[Update: I’ve posted some clarifications in response to comments below.]

This is your head.
This is your camera.
This is your head & camera inside the mouth of a giant leopard seal…
Paul Nicklen gives new meaning to “stay frosty“:

Amazing (even more so when viewed in high def). [Via]

Girls will be boys and boys will be girls through this funky facial mapping/animation software. NPR’s Science Friday writes:

“Like a digital video puppet, the facial expressions of one person can be cloned in real time and mapped onto the digital face of another person. Barry-John Theobald, computer scientist at the University of East Anglia, explains the technique and Steven Boker, of the University of Virginia, explains what facial cloning can reveal about human nature.”

Check it out:

[Update: The embedding code seems to be spazzing out at the moment, so I suggest watching the video on the SciFri site.]

It’s easy (especially for me) to get hung up on digital tools, so I found it refreshing to spend 4 minutes listening to Milton Glaser talk about drawing–especially about how, in his opinion, art schools have let digital training compromise the fundamentals.

[Via]

• Vintage posters:
  • Neat Russian posters from the ’70s.
  • Cool 60’s-style posters celebrating the International Year of Astronomy.
• Offbeat:
  • Killer! Big-Headed Papercraft Self Portrait using Photoshop + 3D. [Via]
  • View the source of this page for a bizarre Easter egg.
  • Creepy & excellent: The skeletons of Charlie Brown, Hello Kitty, & others. [Via]
  • “We did it for the show.” (“America’s dream family” indeed…) The shirt is now available for purchase. [Via]
• Excellent pixelated Halloween costume (“Low Resolution”). [Via]

Tomorrow evening (Thursday), all-around smart/interesting guy Adam Jerugim from the Photoshop team will be speaking at the San Francisco Photoshop User Group meeting:

The talk will focus on Photoshop performance best practices to help enable users to get the most out of Photoshop with their current hardware setup. In addition, there will be guidance provided for users that plan on buying new hardware or upgrading their existing Photoshop & Lightroom systems. Information will also be provided about tools you can use to optimize your specific workflow, GPUs, and running 64-bit applications.

Our speaker, Adam Jerugim, has been part of the Photoshop engineering team for the last 10 years and is mainly responsible for performance and hardware compatibility testing. In addition to being an avid photographer, he is also working to complete his MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz.

See the event page for more info. For a slide deck from Adam & co. on the subject of optimizing Photoshop performance, see previous.

Wow–what an amazing online community: I’m overwhelmed by all the detailed & generous feedback I’ve been receiving in response to yesterday’s query. Yes, there’s plenty of brain-dead self parody out there, but I’m really pleased by the number of people eager to help make things better.
I’m kind of buried in the resulting mail just now, so sorry if it takes me a little while to reply.

Illustrator PM David Macy points out a couple examples of converting static graphics into dynamic and interactive experiences bound with data and published through Flash. He writes, “These were created using an Illustrator plugin called MAPublisher that can import GIS data and export interactive SWF.

• First is an interactive map of US unemployment published on Forbes.com.
• The second, simpler example is a map of The Who’s 1997 Quadrophenia Tour in Europe.”

• Who’s a tender little death’s head, then? ‘Till Death Do Us Part. [Via]
• The Lions & Lambs* logo nicely pairs these moral foes.

Utterly tangential: In March, Stephen Colbert said, “I’m coming in like a lion, and going out like a lamb-fed lion.”

The San José Photoshop User Group is meeting next Tuesday, Nov. 10, at the Adobe SJ office (map). Pizza and drinks kick off at 6:30pm, with talks beginning at 7. The meeting will feature two speakers. As group organizer Dan Clark writes,

Jim Tierney is from plug-in maker Digital Anarchy. He will demo a range of their products, such as Primatte Chromakey, Knoll Light Factory, Backdrop Designer, Texture Anarchy, 3D Invigorator and more.

Jim McCrary was Chief Photographer at the A&M Records photo studio for many years. He shot over 300 album covers along with related publicity and advertising work. Among his many classic album covers are Carole King’s “Tapestry”, Lee Michaels’ “5th” and Joe Cocker’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and many others. From 1974 through 1990 he operated his own studio on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, specializing in technically difficult photographic still-life problems, as well as difficult personality portraits.

The meeting will start at 7:00, in the Park Conference Room of Adobe Systems’ East Tower, 321 Park Avenue, San Jose. To park underneath the Adobe building, use the Almaden Avenue entrance, under the East Tower. If the security guard at the parking entrance asks for an Adobe contact, use Bryan O’Neil Hughes’s name. Please RSVP to Dan Clark. See you there.

Filter Forge, the node-based tool for visually creating Photoshop filters, has announced a beta of version 2.0. According to lead developer Vladimir Golovin, new features include:

• Support for unlimited HDR colors (including negative colors!) across the entire rendering pipeline.
• Bomber component for spraying image particles in a controlled manner.
• Gamma correction options — our first step towards a gamma-aware workflow.
• Instant filter search for people with large filter collections.
• Median, Maximum, Minimum and Percentile components — the latter allows custom-percentile filtering.
• Polygon and Ellipse components (“sounds boring but they are very flexible”).

A brief video from CNN shows how the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children uses Photoshop as part of their age-progression efforts (where reference photos of missing kids are digitally altered to reflect the passage of time). The video is light on specifics, but it’s great to be reminded of the positive uses of technology:
Embedded video from CNN Video
I had the chance to visit the NCMEC folks in Virginia a couple of years ago, and I came away deeply impressed with the thoroughness & passion they bring to their mission. Photoshop team members like John Penn continue to work closely with them in hopes of improving how Photoshop for their needs. [Via Adam Pratt]
[Tangentially related: a tutorial on performing age progression in Photoshop.]

The new Adobe Community Help AIR application is a preview of Adobe’s next-generation product help experience. According to the download page on Adobe Labs,

This beta release is configured to work with Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst content. The Community Help AIR application lets you:

• Access up-to-date definitive reference content online and offline
• Find the most relevant content contributed by experts from the Adobe community
• Comment on, rate, and contribute to content in the Adobe community
• Locate code examples with integrated code search
• Download Help content directly to your desktop to use and search offline
• Use dynamic navigation based on search results to find related content
• Enjoy content updates and feature enhancements without reinstalling the AIR app

Check out the Community Help beta and send us your feedback. Please keep in mind that this is a beta release and it contains bugs and incomplete features. For known bugs, please see the release notes. We suggest that you use it for testing and exploratory purposes only.

Despite essentially never taking vacations ever (heck, despite barely leaving throbbing San José*), I’m actually getting out of the house for once and am headed to Death Valley with my buddy/fellow PM Hughes**. Laden with heavy artillery (photographic & otherwise), we’re off to shoot Bodie, the racetrack playa, and other sites; four-wheel through the infamous Goler Wash; make stuff blow up real good; and generally consume mass quantities of meat, propane, beer, and road flares. Last time I caught some shrapnel in the lip; this time, who knows?

I’ve scheduled a few posts during my absence, and provided we’re not kidnapped by hillbilly cannibals/ex-hippies/black helicopters, I’ll be back next week. Provided we are kidnapped by hillbilly cannibals/ex-hippies/black helicopters, well, so long & thanks for all the pixels.

* The Hose/The Ho’

** Couldn’t get Hogarty from Lightroom this time as he’s busy pounding the app

I’m pleased to see that Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone has gone live on the App Store (see screenshots).
[Update: Don’t be confused by the name: the app is useful for on-phone editing, not just uploading/sharing.]
According to the product page, with the app you can:

• Transform your photos with essential edits like crop, rotate and flip.
• Correct and play with color by adjusting the saturation and tint, enhancing the exposure and vibrancy, and converting images to black and white.
• Use the Sketch tool to make photos look like drawings, and Soft Focus to give photos a subtle blur for artistic effect.
• Apply dramatic changes with effects such as Warm Vintage, Vignette and Pop. Edits or changes can be undone or redone so you can experiment without the worry of losing your original photo.
• Upload photos to Photoshop.com. The app provides the ultimate digital photo wallet, providing access to your entire Photoshop.com library. Photoshop.com offers 2GB of free online photo storage (equal to more than 1,500 photos).

The app is free. Happy shooting!

As was announced a couple of weeks ago, Adobe co-founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock have been honored with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Though adding my two cents is obviously just a bit anticlimactic, congrats & thanks again, gentlemen.

Thanks to Andrew Keith Strauss for the inspired photo illustration (see larger, or see the untouched original).

Let me be possibly the first person ever to ask, What’s up with all the mustachioed, middle-aged Indian dudes + lens flares? 😉
Adobe engineering heavy hitter Seetharaman Narayanan was honored last week at Photoshop World, becoming the newest member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame. Congrats, Seetha! (Somewhere in the depths of the PS code base, his hands caked with Cocoa, he nods a quick acknowledgement.)
I like to imagine Seetha walking through the show floor in slow mo, firing double finger-guns like the engineer featured in this Intel ad*. I couldn’t help but notice the similarity between the lens flares added in the video and in “Seetha’s fan club,” juxtaposed here (slightly larger version). And no, I didn’t touch either image besides resizing them.
Well, whether it’s old-school filters, Don Julio, or something else that keeps Seetha’s mojo flowing, we’re grateful for his efforts & wish him more success.
* I’m a little sad to learn (via Wikipedia) that the “Ajay Bhatt” featured in the Intel spot is an actor. Here’s the real guy. Perhaps someone should set to work lens-flaring (and mustache-ifying) him. [Update: And, what do you know, 20 minutes after I posted this, John Eakin sent me this image. Nice.]

It’s certainly not the flashiest (no pun intended) application, but I’m happy to see that LiveCycle Workspace Mobile for iPhone is available via the iPhone App Store. This simple app gives customers an easy way to review & approve items (expense reports, purchase orders, loan applications, etc.).

Now that the ice has been broken, look for more iPhone apps from Adobe to show up soon.

The folks from Adobe Press have introduced Adobe Photoshop CS4: Learn By Video. The application introduces the most essential topics in Photoshop CS4. Users can:

• Take a quick tour of the Photoshop CS4 interface

• Mark any movie for later viewing

• Share tips and comments with others
• Quizzes: Test yourself! Track your progress and review problem topics.

• Stay up-to-date on Adobe Press news through the Twitter group

The companion video package features 19 hours of training from Gabriel Powell and Mikkel Aaland, as well as quizzes & review materials.
In a similar vein, Richard Harrington’s Understanding Photoshop: Quick Fixes (iTunes link) offers the following:

• Includes 17 training videos edited specifically for the iPhone or iPod Touch.
• Offers easily viewable screens, with zooms and close-ups of the action.
• Includes hands-on files & interactive quizzes.
• Includes search, a quick reference guide, commenting, and a Twitter client.

These are just the apps I’ve encountered so far. If you know of other good ones, please mention them via comments.

At risk of driving you criminally insane via ceaseless MAX/PSW references, let me plug the live streaming of the MAX keynotes. I’m not kidding when I tell you there’ll be some very interesting news.

Join 10 minutes early and participate in the backstage behind the scenes action. Seats/connections are limited, so registration is required. Participants will also be able to connect with the community during the webcast through Twitter at #adobemaxgs

• Monday, October 5, 9:20 A.M -11:00 A.M. PST–Technology as the Engine of Reinvention
• Tuesday, October 6, 10:20 A.M.-12:00 P.M. PST–The Flash Platform and the Community