Russell Brown showed off some new “from the labs” painting and warping technology during today’s Photoshop World keynote address, and now he’s posted a recording of the demo on Facebook. Check it out!
[Update: Terry White has posted videos of the keynote itself.]
[Update 2: I’ve belatedly figured out how to embed a Facebook-hosted vid, so it’s now inline in this post. Use the fullscreen option to see it in higher resolution.]

The Photoshop World keynote is going on right now & getting live blogged on the Photoshop World site.
And if you’re attending Adobe MAX, check out the MAX Companion AIR application. It lets you view session info, see your personal schedule, view a map, and tweet session highlights. [Via Kevin Lynch]

Lots of folks are pinging me on this, but I’ve opted to play Mr. Mom this year & will enjoy the proceedings from afar. I’m happy to say that I’ve helped some folks prep a few really cool demos, and I got some news today that has me rocking back and forth (SNL surprise party-style, wishing I could say more. Soon, soon…
Have a ball,
J.

Jason Kottke writes, “Each frame of this 19th century film by the Lumière brothers was hand-colored to create an early color moving picture.”

It would be fun to try something similar using video layers in Photoshop Extended.

I’m a few days late in sharing the news, but I’m delighted to see that Photoshop Elements 8.0 for Mac & Windows has been announced. I’m a little pressed for time at the moment, so I can’t elaborate on the features, so please check out the feature list & videos posted by Adobe evangelist Terry White. Congrats to the team on a great release!

Heh–I love that they worked in the Photoshop app icon.

I hope someday to incorporate that corny stock camera shutter sound into the app itself… p’TCHAAAw!

Wow–very cool news from Washington. According to the Merc,

President Obama Thursday picked Adobe Systems co-founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock to receive one of the nation’s highest honors bestowed on scientists, engineers and inventors — the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Geschke and Warnock were chosen “for their pioneering contributions that spurred the desktop publishing revolution and for changing the way people create and engage with information and entertainment across multiple mediums including print, Web and video,” according to a White House press release.

The pair, who will receive the award at an Oct. 7 White House ceremony, founded Adobe in 1982 and serve as co-chairman of the San Jose software company known for its editing, graphic design and Web development tools, which include its widely used Acrobat and Photoshop products.

Congrats, Drs. Warnock and Geschke! Your many fans will be there in spirit.

• Dig the crazy, viscous, dimensional lettering of Alex Trochut (under the “Works” link; yes, nav is annoying, but don’t let that stop you). [Via]
• Grass-type gets big in Here Lies Street-Art by D.O.C.S.
• Glyphs runneth over in this Typographic Sculpture from Richard J. Evans [Via Marc Pawliger]
• Free fonts:
  • Mårten Nettelbladt heavy-duty MISO is handsome–and gratis. [Via]
  • Designfeed lists Quad & others. (Oh Quad, I have plans for you.)

Are you now, or do you plan to start, designing mobile applications, Web content, etc. using Photoshop? If so, what kinds of changes would streamline the process? Are you looking for templates, better shape/drawing tools, linked file support, automated resizing/output for different screens, better handoff to other apps, etc.?

Note that Adobe’s Device Central application (screenshot) is probably hanging out on your hard drive, and you can use it to display your PS artwork on a variety of handsets. When you’re in the Save For Web and Devices dialog in PS, hit the “Device Central” link in the lower-left corner. I was motivated to ask for info because the Device Central guys in particular are looking for feedback on how to evolve that app.

Thanks,

J.

[Update: If you’re doing this kind of work, you may find this doc on Strategic Mobile Design (PDF) interesting. –J.]

I saw a number of complaints about the CAPTCHA system (i.e. the wavy text used to deter spam-bots) causing problems in the browser. The blogging admins have now switched it to use the more accessible “What’s 2+2” system I previously had installed. If you experience any problems with the new mechanism, please let me know (jnack at adobe.com, in case commenting isn’t working for you). Thanks.

Wow, has it been that long? The tool that started with great hype & some big teething problems has matured into an industry-standard, multi-channel (print, PDF, & Web), automated publishing powerhouse. Congrats, guys! Adobe evangelist Rufus Deuchler and longtime print maven David Blatner share some brief reminiscences.

The quality of Adobe customer service has really taken a dive lately (I know: I end up fielding/escalating a lot of cases that come in through blog comments). Now company VP Lambert Walsh has posted an open letter to customers (PDF), saying in part

Our customers have experienced a level of service that is inconsistent with what they expect and deserve. This is unacceptable and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused. We are working diligently to resolve these issues.

Lambert provides a little background on what happened & offers some email addresses for getting help while the system gets fixed.

• The Evolution Of Photoshop: 1988 – 2009: Splash screens, toolbars, & more.
• iPhone:
  • This augmented reality subway/tube app looks amazing. Check out a quick video demo.
  • iPhone apps for designers, listed by CreativePro.com. Tools for color palettes, billing, information architecture, & more.

• Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies (Did you know: Quick Mask in Photoshop is red to be like rubylith.)
• Gaussian Goat: “…if human vision could perceive all of an object’s possible quantum mechanical states” at once.
• This workstation “looks… designed to kill the occupant using the monitor, gravity, and some kind of release switch.”
• Slightly disturbing:
  • A 3,000-year-old Michael Jackson statue? (via @MediaStorm)
  • Most unnerving track lighting ever? (“I got a feeling/Someone is watching meeee…”)
• Neat: Google uses Flash to add perspective to maps. (via @jdowdell)

A little Friday comedic brilliance from Colin Nissan at McSweeney’s: It’s Weird To Think That One Day I’ll Photoshop You Out Of These Very Vacation Photos:

I feel like you and I are entering such a fun, playful phase of our relationship − I really love getting close to you like this. Speaking of which, you’ve been pressing our faces together in a lot of shots, which is so sweet. The thing is, you have no idea how many more hours of clean-up that generates…

[Via Craig Ferroggiaro]

• Mad Men returns Sunday! Dyna Moe’s killer illustrations are worth another look. You can also make your own Mad Men avatar. (Mine kinda looks like my dad.)
• Odosketch is a fun little “natural media” Flash drawing toy. [Via Dave Dobish]
• I couldn’t believe this optical illusion until I took it apart in Photoshop. Dang… still can’t really believe it.
• Mona Lisa from cups of coffee. (via @MediaStorm)

It’ll probably come as no surprise that Adobe is following Apple’s lead & going Intel-only with the next generation of the Creative Suite. That is, CS4 is the last version that’ll run on PowerPC-based Macs. You can read the details in the FAQ on Adobe.com.

By the time the next version of the Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They’re still great systems, but if you haven’t upgraded your workstation in four years, you’re probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either. Bottom line: Time & resources are finite, and with big transitions underway (going 64-bit-native, switching from Carbon to Cocoa), you want Adobe building for the future, not for the past.

[Previously: My fond reminiscences on PowerPC.]

PS–More info about other Adobe apps (Flash Player, Adobe Reader, etc.) will be available soon. [Update: The Lightroom team has confirmed that the next Mac version of LR will be Intel-only.]

• I’ve now gotten threaded commenting enabled, so it’s possible to reply to a specific comment & have your remarks appear right below the target comment. (Here’s an example.) I haven’t gotten to fool with any formatting options, so suggestions from CSS/Movable Type ninjas is more welcome. Thanks to Pavel Ushakov from Firmdot for getting me this far.

• I’ve started experimenting with Twitterfeed, using it to auto-tweet titles & links when I post an entry here. I’m still finding my way, so I hope you find this practice useful, not obnoxious. Comments & suggestions are always welcome.

Geoff Badner, the art director to whom I owe the start of my career, recently asked a good question:

I know I can do multiple iterations of the same Smart Object within the SAME document and have it change all instances, but what about Smart Objects placed across DIFFERENT documents? That would be pimp.

I ask because I’m designing an iPhone app and it uses the same modules over and over across different screens. There are dozens of screens and each time I needs to change a button or text field in a module, I need to fix it one at a time in each file. Sucks!

I know. My quick advice: You can convert any layer to being a Smart Object (or place a file as one), then choose “Layer->Smart Objects->Replace Contents…” That way you can suck in another file as an update/replacement. If it’s a command you perform frequently, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to it.

Upshot: Edit your external file, then hit Shift-Cmd-R (or whatever) once per Smart Object instance to replace each. Kinda clunky, I know, but depending on the edits you do per SO, this approach may be more efficient.

Someday Photoshop needs to support proper linked files, period. (Dirty-ish little secret: it already does, in the form of video layers; your MOV, etc. source files are never embedded in a PSD.) For that to happen, it needs the right infrastructure–a Links panel, the ability to resolve broken links, etc. None of that is rocket science, but it’s worth taking the time to get right.

• The Lightroom team is working on a series of videos that briefly introduce team members & share a bit of their history and perspectives. First up is Web module developer Andy Rahn. To meet more team members, check out Jeff Schewe’s visit with the Lightroom engineers.
• From all accounts, the recent Worldwide Photowalk was a great success. Lightroom PM Tom Hogarty led the SF walk while Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes led the one in San Jose. Here’s a brief taste of what went on. (Hope to see you there in person next year.)

Our old friend & true Photoshop guru Deke McClelland has begun posting his list of the top 40 features in Photoshop–beginning with #40 and working up to #1–one weekly video at a time. The Lynda.com folks write, “Some are tools, others are commands, still others are conceptual. All are invaluable. Learn these 40 features and you’ll know Photoshop.”

Deke posts a new video each Tuesday. Check out this page for an updated list of everything that’s gone live so far.

When you’re using Smart (re-editable) Filters in Photoshop, you can apply a single mask to all the filters on an object. Why, then, doesn’t the app let you mask each one independently? This question came to mind when photographer Ellen Anon said,

But my main request is that each Smart Filter needs its own mask. PLEASE!!!!

I know. There’s no question about the desirability of this support. The details are tricky, however.

The fundamental problem here is how to make filters live-update as you alter their source data. If you’ve read my post on The Secret Life of Smart Filters, you know that we purposefully chose to impose some indirection, making it harder to feel like you should be seeing filters updating in real time as you paint.

Let’s say you’ve created a Smart Object, and you’ve applied Filter A & then Filter B. The source data that B will process depends on the results of A (including A’s mask, if one existed). If each filter had its own mask, then painting on A’s mask would demand one of two things:

• B either has to keep running/updating as you paint (read: slow, at least in a lot of cases) or
• B must be shut off while you’re painting, then later re-enabled (when?).

The more filters you stack, the more demanding they are, and bigger your brush and/or file, the more processing wallop would be required to keep things interactive. And even if it were all infinitely fast, there’s the big challenge of how to deal with filters that transform/offset pixels (see aforementioned post).

These aren’t impossible problems, but they aren’t easy to solve, either. We don’t want to set you up for a crappy experience.

Brent Simmons, developer of the excellent NetNewsWire (my tool for finding all this ephemera), offers his take on the Anatomy of a Feature. If you’re at all curious about the sausage-making process of software development, you might be interested in just how much thought goes into even the most trivial-sounding changes.

I’d kind of shudder to read/write an equivalent essay set inside a big company, where affecting something like one’s own app installer can require petitioning a dozen people–often without success. The phrase “up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about” comes to mind.

Just yesterday I found myself calmly declaring that if getting Future Feature X into PS.next requires slapping down my credit card and building the Web hosting myself*, so be it. (Know this, suckaz: We. Shall. Prevail.)

* Enabling Configurator for CS4 involved my getting a six pack of Negra Modelo and recording each menu item in Photoshop, then copying/pasting/reformatting/commenting the code, one at a time, 800 times over the course of several evenings. Elegant, pleasurable? Not so much. But no one ever said it was gonna be easy.

Damn… Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me, but apparently spammers can defeat Movable Type’s built-in CAPTCHA system. Because I’d set comments to auto-publish after they passed that checkpoint, a few spams (now deleted) snuck past the goalie. Sorry about that.
I’m now experimenting with “trusted commenters” in MT, and I just flagged the last 2000 or so commenters (going back as far as March) as trusted. Hopefully if you’re a regular reader/commenter, your remarks can appear right away. We shall see.
Note that you can subscribe to a comments feed via RSS. As for threaded comments, I’ll tackle the needed mods soon, bambinos permitting.

• Tom Wrigglesworth and Matthew Robinson take a bunch of HP printers clubbing. [Via]
• In A Wolf Loves Pork, Taijin Takeuchi sends 2D frames scampering all around 3D space. [Via]
• Inspired by that effort, The PEN Story celebrates 50 years of Olympus’s groundbreaking Pen cameras.

Well, that didn’t take so long, did it? 🙂

After 17 years on the Photoshop & Lightroom teams, Mark Hamburg left Adobe last year to join Microsoft and work on improving the Windows user experience (as he found it “really annoying”). I’m happy to say that after that brief sojourn, he’s returning to the Adobe Digital Imaging team. Welcome back, Mark! [Via]

Oh, and to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, who wrote at the time of Mark’s departure:

Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Lightroom gets another champion… My bet is Hamburg will be instrumental in helping Microsoft bring to market its Photoshop Lightroom competitor.

Er, not so much.

• Lettercult has assembled an awesome collection of hand-lettered type. (Here’s my fave.)
• The taste of what? Oh boy–Deeply unfortunate can re-design from Tango. (via @Coleran)
• Geekery to go: Typography manual for iPhone. (via @kottkedotorg)
• “It’s a medium, not a grande.” Fun coffee-related type from Brooklyn. (via @daringfireball)
• Helveticons: Vector icons intended to complement Helvetica Bold. About a buck per icon. (via @jcroft/@tdominey)
• Artists & technicians used a Toyota to draw each letter of a font, then made it freely downloadable. (via @therealmikewong)

Housekeeping note: This blog’s commenting system remains a work in progress. As you may have noticed, we’ve moved to a new CAPTCHA system, and valid comments now publish immediately after you submit them. I’m hoping that the latter, taken together with threaded commenting (still working on that one), will make it easier for people to talk back and forth without waiting on me.
If you encounter any problems posting comments, please let me know.
Update: Dammit, something is apparently busted, and if you’ve submitted a comment in the last ~24 hours (and don’t see it published), it hasn’t reached me. I’ve asked the admins for an update ASAP.
Okay, it seems things are working again, Please do let me know if you experience problems commenting.

The Adobe Update Manager has been a source of grief & ridicule for too long. The good news is that a bunch of folks are working hard to fix it. Check out the details if you’re interested, and feel free to send the team feedback on their plans.

The blogging infrastructure folks are pushing another big update live this weekend, so my ability to post & your ability to comment are likely to be restricted for a while (up to 72 hours). I’ll post a note when things are supposed to be working properly.
I’m looking forward to using the new platform, and in particular to enabling threaded commenting (should be good for those spirited back-and-forth debates). We shall see.

Interesting observation from Daring Fireball the other day:

“So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the ‘Uncanny Valley.’ By establishing a conceptual framework that mimics Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different.”

It’s kind of a drag to see other image-editing apps just imitate Photoshop. I certainly understand the rationale for doing so, but their creators are tying their own hands. Why not break some really new ground? That’s what Mark Hamburg & the Lightroom team did, rethinking a lot of problems from the bottom up.

The Adobe Learning Resources (documentation) team has created Phosphors, a new blog focused on help & tutorial content for Photoshop, Camera Raw, Lightroom, and Bridge. They’ve just posted some tips on backing up a Lightroom catalog.

• Reminder: The San Jose Photoshop User Group is meeting this Tuesday, July 14, at Adobe HQ. Please see the event page for agenda details & other info.

• The Society of News Design is holding a free event at Adobe SF next Saturday, July 18. Stamen Design, IDEO, Story4 and others will be presenting. Here’s the 411. [Via Terry Hemphill]

Enjoy!

For more stop-motion goodness from PES, see previous. [Via]

A little housekeeping note: I’ve been taking advantage of vacation + the wait for baby “El Segundo,” using the time to queue up lots of links & scheduling them to auto-publish. So, if

1. you happen to see me publish big news in what looks like quick succession with the usual doses of ephemera, and/or
2. it appears I’m blogging instead of caring for a newborn,

please don’t think it makes me a terrible dad! (I’ve got that latter part covered through things like indulging play with a rusty, severed car antenna. ;-))
Autopilot, engage,
J.

The next meeting of the San Jose Photoshop User Group is scheduled for July 14. Group organizer Dan Clark writes,

Photoshop questions? Samples of your Photoshop work? Bring either to our next meeting. We’ll have an evening of Photoshop show and tell, as well as answers to your questions. Let’s see some tough questions and nice work! Please send questions and sample files ahead of time to: dan at weinberg-clark.com

For complete info & directions, check out the event page.

Recently an iMac user asked about ways to speed up large scan & print jobs in Photoshop:

In your opinion, would a Mac Pro significantly accelerate the processing [while printing]? Is the printing engine in Photoshop multiprocessor aware?

I put the question to Photoshop printing engineer Dave Polaschek, and here’s his reply:

While Photoshop’s printing code isn’t multi-threaded & is mostly disk-bound*, another core may be used by the OS for color management if you’re printing in “Printer Manages Color” mode. More cores won’t hurt.
That said, the disk (or better, disks) in a Mac Pro are significantly faster than the disk in an iMac, which will help since every printed job is spooled to disk. Plus you can put more RAM in a Mac Pro, which will help in preparing the image for printing.
As with most things in Photoshop, the two biggest gains you can get in speed are:
1 – Put in as much RAM as you can afford and the machine can hold. When friends are buying new Macs, I tell them they should have an absolute minimum of 1G of RAM per core, and 2G per core will still be a noticeable improvement over that. For running Photoshop with big images, I’ve found some operations which run over 10x faster since I moved from 4GB to 8GB of RAM in my quad-core Mac Pro just because it keeps all the images and intermediate data in memory.
2 – Put in the fastest disk (or RAID array – four 500GB disks in a RAID array are cheaper and faster than a 2TB disk, and the default controller in my Mac Pro could do RAID with no new hardware) you can afford after you’re done buying RAM. When we do have to read or save a file, or spool something to disk, that fast disk will mean less time spent looking at progress bars.

[Question via Colin Smith]
* In other words, the speed of printing depends on how quickly data can be moved to/from your hard drive.

Designer/Twitter crazy person Sam Potts made what I thought was a good suggestion earlier today:

The Copy Color as HTML in the color panel is awesome. Everyone uses it all the time. However, times have changed and my guess is that most of the people who use this are writing their colors in CSS. So you always have to delete the color=”” part after you paste it into a style sheet.

It would be awesome to simply have a “Copy Color Hex Code” option and get #CCFF00 instead of the full color=”#CCFF00″ tag.

Or, to cover both bases, add to the panel menu:

Copy Color as HTML —> color=”#CCFF00″ as it is now

AND

Copy Color as CSS —> color:#CCFF00

I know it’s a tweaky query, but if you have a preference, please chime in.

I just saw Daring Fireball point to an SJ Merc story relaying the rather banal news that most Adobe offices are closed this week. So they are*. I’m no expert on company expense management, nor am I a corporate spokesperson (see blurb at right), but I feel like sharing a little perspective.

Let me first mention that these Adobe shutdowns are nothing new. I’ve worked here for 9 years, and the company has done the shutdowns off and on throughout that time–at least since ’01 or ’02. I didn’t hear the news of this one and say (as DF does) “Uh-oh.”

Mr. Gruber reasonably asks, “At a software company, shouldn’t every week be a productive week?” Sure, but I’ll bet you know what it’s like to work near holidays: it’s harder to make progress when lots of your colleagues are out of the office. If that’s going to be the case, why not just schedule a break & save a bunch of money on facilities, security, and so forth?**

I’d rather have everyone be gone at once (and thus more likely back at once) than to run at reduced strength for weeks on end.

Gruber also writes,

And I can only guess that on some, if not most, teams, there is subtle (or even not so subtle) pressure to keep working from home on whatever your current project is.

Nope. As I understand it, a few teams with time-sensitive projects may get permission to work through the break, but everyone else is taking the time off. Because the breaks aren’t a surprise, most teams built them into their schedules a long time ago (just as they do with holidays). Adobe offers very generous PTO benefits, to the point that people don’t use up enough time off. A week-long shutdown is a way of saying, “No, seriously, guys–we want you to take some vacation. Get the hell out of here, enjoy yourself, and come back refreshed.”

Anyway, my inbox for Monday shows 70 mails, vs. 300+ for a typical day. Clearly somebody is taking vacation seriously. Collectively we’re taking it all in stride.

* So why am I continuing to blog? For one thing, I’m drumming my fingers with nervous energy, waiting for a baby to arrive, and I need the distraction.

** For a company of ~7,400 employees, saving a week’s worth of summertime energy & other infrastructure expenses translates to real money. Meanwhile Adobe HQ (already the first existing LEED Platinum-rated green building) is upgrading this week to even more energy-efficient HVAC. The 20-story yellow crane I saw yesterday can’t do its thing while people are inside/below.

It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve been getting a ridiculous amount of enjoyment this week from this episode of “Auto-Tune the News”:

I’ve gotta meet these guys & learn more about how they manipulate video to create their little mash-ups.

As part of Scott Kelby’s Second Annual Worldwide Photowalk, Adobe folks are leading four walks, hosted and joined by members of the Photoshop, Lightroom, Bridge and/or Camera Raw teams. Lightroom PM Tom Hogarty writes,

Space is limited, so sign up quickly to walk and shoot with Adobe’s digital imaging team:

• San Francisco, CA (Led by Tom Hogarty, Lightroom/ACR Product Manager)
• San Jose, CA (Led by Bryan Hughes, Photoshop Product Manager)
• Seattle, WA (Led by Tina Carter, Digital Imaging Support Engineer)
• Stillwater, MN (Led by Melissa Gaul, Lightroom Technical Evangelist)
• Hamburg, Germany (Led by Sven Doelle)

Enjoy!

• My friend & fellow PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes recently sat in with the Photoshop TV guys, and you can see him in the current episode (starting around the 11-minute mark). Bryan discusses Configurator, some future directions for Photoshop, and more.
• If you’re not yet subscribing to Julieanne Kost‘s great Photoshop blog, you might want to check it out. She provides bite-sized sets of tips each day (or thereabouts), and the tips are nicely categorized. You can also read her blog right inside Photoshop CS4 if you’d like.

If a wee bit of the old Copland* doesn’t get your juices flowing on a Monday morning, then you might want to check yourself for a pulse, my friend. Check out the following (clicking the full screen button highly recommended):

Of this very cool project, creator Eleanor Stewart writes, “I created a music video for the classical music work ‘Hoedown’ from the Rodeo Suite by Aaron Copland. It is a stop motion animation in which various characters, inspired by Cowboy and Western films, come to life from the musical score. It was made for my final year degree in Visual Communication at the Glasgow School of Art.” [Via]

* Extremely tangential, ostensibly bonus info: The Photoshop team includes a few veterans of Apple’s mid-90’s Copland OS effort & the subsequent switch to OS X. In talking about “demoware,” I recently asked engineer Russell Williams, “Didn’t you guys do Mac OS Copland in Director? ;-P (That was always the half-joking rumor, anyway.)” He replied, “No, it would have been much smaller and faster if we had. 🙂 Also, the early developer releases of ‘Rhapsody’ (roughly OS X minus Carbon, or Classic plus Cocoa) were shipped on the Copland kernel, so it actually worked.”

I’m experimenting with a new RSS feed that should enable you to follow comments on this blog via your news reader of choice. The feed appears to be rolling along, and I welcome feedback and advice. (And please tell me if you experience any problems with it!)

My eventual goal is to facilitate more conversation via blog comments. Right now you have to wait for me to approve each comment, and tracking conversations is hard. Through threaded commenting (due soon), RSS, and eventually site membership (a bit farther off), non-spammers should be able to talk back and forth more quickly & freely.

Incidentally, if you have a recommendation for a good way to track outbound clicks, please let me know. Right now I have no idea how many people click the various random links I provide, and I’d like to get a better sense of what content is popular. Google Analytics doesn’t seem to offer a solution, and I haven’t yet moved my main RSS feed to FeedBurner, so I’m not sure whether it can help.

A couple of weekends ago, in the course of reviewing/culling hundreds of JDI feature suggestions, I was getting a little crispy. Amidst lots of good suggestions and the occasional chunks of profanity & ignorance, I saw the following:
“Ask Tog.”
Tog, in case you’re unaware, is Bruce Tognazzini, the pioneering interface designer who’s worked at Apple, Sun, and other companies. He largely defined what it means for a UI to be “Mac-like.”
Without more info, I can only guess at the commenter’s tone & intention. For all I know it was breezy & trying to be helpful. In the context of some other remarks from Mac users*, however, I read it as lazy shorthand for “You suck. Be more like Apple” (without any useful, actionable details, of course).
As it happened, I’d been reading AskTog.com earlier in the day and saw the following:

20 years ago, there was a simple application on the Mac for doing basic edits on photos. It was called Photoshop. Today, Photoshop is a powerhouse of sophistication, capable of working miracles in the hands of a professional. Adobe has been in lock-step with their users, increasing Photoshop’s sophistication even as their users increased in theirs… A new user can become productive in Photoshop in 10 minutes, even if it takes another 10 years to learn everything.

Now, I’m sure Bruce could point out plenty of shortcomings in the Photoshop UI–as I often do–but it was still nice to read his observations. I don’t take them as some kind of absolution, and of course we’ll keep grinding away at usability issues (more details on that soon), but hearing some recent props from the original Mac interface guy felt good.
* Personal fave: “Make the mac version look like a mother f______ macintosh program. Jesus f___.” Classy, constructive, and specific, just like I like ’em.

Registration for the Adobe MAX 2009 conference (October 4–7 in Los Angeles) is now open. From the site:

We are in a software revolution fueled by social computing, client and cloud, and the spread of rich media across screens and devices. For four unforgettable days this October, MAX 2009 will bring together thousands of designers, developers, and decision-makers to shape the future. Join us.

One highlight is our friend Dr. Brown’s RussellBrown@MAX three-day, hands-on course. Check out his site for more info.

You can save $200 by registering now. The MAX site features an interactive session listing & much more.

Short story: It’s a free information backup that can help us help you later.
People periodically send me all kinds of customer service-oriented questions (inquiries about pricing, upgrade eligibility, lost discs, etc.). I do my best to get these things sorted out, and often the customer service folks need to ask for proof of ownership. Even if you’re twice as organized as I am, digging up a receipt or credit card record from several years back can be difficult, if not impossible.
Things tend to go much more smoothly if you’ve first registered your software with Adobe, as you serial number & other info are then on file. You’re ensuring that your proof of ownership doesn’t get lost.
Oh, and you tend to get some nice freebies in the bargain. (Here’s what’s available when registering CS4.)

The PS icon makes a cameo in Bang-Yao Liu’s awesome “Deadline” stop-motion Post-It extravaganza:

If that’s up your alley, see also Yellow Sticky Notes, in which Jeff Chiba Stearns chronicles his life through the little squares. [Via]

For the last four years, Adobe Blogs ran atop a sputtering ColecoVision powered by toejam biomass–or at least that’s what it felt like. Everyone who experienced timeouts while commenting & other weirdness knows a bit about that.
Now, however, we’re finally running on a modern setup. We’ll move shortly to Movable Type 4.25, and I’m looking forward to some nice upgrades. In particular, it should be possible to enable threaded commenting, making it much easier to track back-and-forth conversations. (I’ve never liked jamming my replies into the middle of others’ words, so hopefully this’ll offer a better way.) It’ll also be possible to subscribe to comments via RSS, and I’m looking into spam-resistant ways to enable immediate comment publishing.
I’m thinking of moving Feedburner so that I can gauge how many people subscribe via RSS (would you believe I’ve never had any idea?). I won’t pull the trigger on that, though, until I’m sure you won’t be asked to change your feed subscription more than once.
If you have any requests or suggestions about this whole process, please let me know.
Thanks,
J.

Just a quick note: BrowserLab, Adobe’s cool hosted app for comparing the rendering of HTML pages across browsers, is currently open for more testers to join. (Because the service is being tested right now, membership is limited to a fixed number of members.) If you’re interested, sign in now.
[Update: Well, that didn’t take long: they’re closed again. In case you didn’t make it in now, don’t worry: more slots will open up in July. Thanks to everyone for their interest.]

• The art for Frito Lay’s “Made for Each Other” spots seems way too good for (and almost entirely related to) chips n’ dips. Check out the companion site for more.
• I know the Panic Sale! is over, but video lives on in hilarity. (From the echo to the green-screen spill, that’s some serious A2detail, all simulating inattention to detail.)
• Bloopy things undulating in space:
  • Jorinna Scherle makes some interesting “audioreactive 3d-environments.”
  • “Bubblegum” signifies… what, I’m not exactly sure–but it’s fun to watch. [Via]
• From the ongoing tilt-shift chronicles:
  • Dig Keith Loutit’s “Bathtub IV.”
  • Codebreaker’s used the technique to create a music video.