My colleague John Dowdell sometimes features “Remaindered Links,” entries that bring together links that may be of interest. So, in that vein, here’s some ephemera I’ve enjoyed over the break:

• Bruno Giussani ponders “the iPod of spin”–i.e., how far one can stretch things to be “the iPod of this” and “the iPod of that”–set off by a newspaper christening “the iPod of toilets.” Okay, it’s a lazy phrase, but product designers & marketing hacks could emulate worse. [Via]
• The Smithsonian Institute has kicked off a new blog called EyeLevel. The blog features thoughtful, detailed posts that mention–among many other things–Malcolm Gladwell, the strangeness of Edward Hopper, and Pennsylvania’s relationship with Cheez Whiz. [Via]
• OpenType, SchmopenType: Levi Hammett takes text design in a new direction with Dairy, a font (of sorts) that spells out your text in milk crates; try it and see. [Via]
• The brilliantly random Found Magazine now offers an RSS feed. Oh yeah. (Looking at the traffic log of blogs.adobe.com feels a bit like browsing these inscrutable found bits. Why would someone keep searching for “subtly knife”…? Is it somehow related to armored bear battles?) [Via]
• The Sundance Channel yesterday featured a fun, 2-minute overview (produced by Athletics) on “China Girl,” a color calibration system used in film. Looking down the row of monitors lining an Airbus on Tuesday, I was reminded of just how much color varies across devices (even those from the same manufacturer, installed at the same time) and how sorely the world needs a solution (the–wait for it–“iPod of color management,” maybe?).
• And finally, since kicking things off in April 2005, PhotoshopNews.com has served more that 1,000,000 unique visitors. Congratulations, guys!
  

In response to yesterday’s post about losing images in the cold, a number of folks have suggested possible remedies for future data loss:

• Nick Wilcox-Brown recommends PhotoRescue, saying “It has saved my skin on more occasions than I care to remember.”
• My fellow Photoshop PM Tom Hogarty mentioned Camera Salvage.
• Peter Krogh suspects that the problem was due to file system corruption, not cold weather–particularly as I’d been sloppy in handling the memory card (removing it from the Mac while it was sleeping, then inserting it with the new shots before waking the machine up). That seems possible, though having lost images in similar weather with a different camera, card, and computer, I remain a bit suspicious.

Whatever the case, you may want to bookmark these sites for a rainy (or snowy) day in the future, and do read up a bit before going shooting in the cold.

• Macworld features some tips on making Adobe Reader launch faster. As Adobe has been saying for some time, launch time is a key area of focus, and overall you should find Reader 7 a good deal quicker to start up than previous versions. Even so, you may want to try these hand-tuning strategies.
• PhotoshopNews features an article and some great photos from the just-completed trip to Antartica. Note to self: Invent galactically successful, category-defining software that becomes verb; continue pushing limits of digital imaging; enjoy fruits of said labor. Tons of great images are here.
• The brand new UX Magazine launched yesterday, “created to deliver a central place to discuss the critical disciplines that all enhance user experience.” The content is necessarily sparse at the moment, but I like the CSS-savvy design, and it could grow into a great resource. This blurb let me know they’re guys after my own heart: “Last but not least, we’re not happy. We never are. Never ever. We look at things and go ‘bah!’—out loud, numerous times a day. We just had to stop being so bloody picky and launch the damn thing.” It’s tough, but real artists ship.

With four months having passed since I started blogging, I could use your help. Are there things about which you’re hearing too much? Too little? I want to make sure this blog is worth a damn (specifically, worth your time to read), so if you have feedback for sorting the killer from the filler, I’d like to hear it.
Thanks,
J.

Well, this takes the whole photo-sharing thing to the next level, eh?: Berkeley robotics professor and sometime-Eraserhead doppelganger Ken Goldberg has developed CONE, a prototype for a portable, solar-powered robotic observatory that can photograph animal activity, then upload the data via satellite connection. Collaborative algorithms manage requests for control from multiple users.
[Via]
On a slightly related note, November’s National Geographic magazine featured some great images of ocelots, captured via remotely triggered cameras. Building on the great stuff in the print edition, the online version features a couple cool shots.

Well, this takes the whole photo-sharing thing to the next level, eh?: Berkeley robotics professor and sometime-Eraserhead doppelganger Ken Goldberg has developed CONE, a prototype for a portable, solar-powered robotic observatory that can photograph animal activity, then upload the data via satellite connection. Collaborative algorithms manage requests for control from multiple users.
[Via]
On a slightly related note, November’s National Geographic magazine featured some great images of ocelots, captured via remotely triggered cameras. Building on the great stuff in the print edition, the online version features a couple cool shots.

Adobe’s own inimitable Russell Brown has begun delivering audio and video podcasts. To check them out, search for “Russell Brown” via iTunes. Russell says he plans to post new content over the next few weeks. (See also: links to other Photoshop podcasts.) [Update: Thanks to Jeff Tranberry for supplying the direct link to Russell’s podcasts.]

I just got a heads up on a little promotion from the Adobe Store: if you buy or upgrade Photoshop CS2 and enter coupon number 8m11ja05 just prior to checking out, you’ll get a copy of the beautiful America 24/7 coffee table book for free. From the publisher:

America 24/7 reunites the team that started the popular A Day in the Life series of photography books, Rick Smolan and David Elliot Cohen. More than 25,000 amateur and professional photographers snapped photos accross America during a one-week time period with digital cameras. From the million-plus photos submitted, 25,000 were chosen and compiled in this book. The result is an amazing array of subjects, but all shot with a consistency of tone.

This coupon will expire January 31, 2006, and is only valid in the US and Canada only.

I’m trying to put the Carmen Sandiego in “CS” this week, visiting Adobe offices and customers in Europe. Now, fond as I am of watching the planes land at SJC, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the Adobe Paris office has a bit better view, no? (The NY office has it pretty good, too, with the Empire State Building looming off one side and Bryant Park below on the other.) The mood in the office is upbeat, and folks are looking forward to meeting their new, former-Macromedia colleagues (with whom some had already collaborated to show Flash-Premiere-After Effects integration).

Direct upload to PhotoStamps.com has gone live in Photoshop Elements and the free Photoshop Album Starter Edition, with Bridge integration to follow. I had a great experience with the service this summer, creating a stamp for use on wedding thank-you notes. People were amazed, and several clipped and saved the cancelled stamps. (I finally convinced them that the stamps were legit, though I’m not sure they’ll ever believe that I didn’t fake the rainbow. ;-))

I had to smile at this paragraph in a Slate article on Charles Schwab’s new Waking Life-style ads:

These spots aim to stand apart from the muddled crowd. “We actually made a ‘clutter reel,’ ” says Ben Stuart, VP of Brand Strategy and Advertising for Schwab, “to show how the category was filled with all these stock clichés of wealth. Adirondack chairs. Sailing. Burled walnut paneling. Not only are these images tired, they also lack both credibility and relevance with most consumers.”

Is it just me, or could one create just such a reel with all the clichés being used for digital photography tools? Yes, the underlying concepts are enormously important, but if I hear or (wince) have to say workflow one more time–much less non-destructive, seamless, integrated, efficient, broad, archival, etc.–I may burst into flames. 😉
Yours in seamlessnondestructiveintegratedefficientworkflows,
J.

They say a watched pot never boils, and I was starting to wonder if this day would ever arrive, but it looks like Adobe and Macromedia are now one, with the Macromedia and Adobe sites being updated accordingly (including the Adobe Store offering new bundles). At this point not a lot of info has been communicated internally, so I’ll be brief until we know more. I think this is an extremely exciting time, and I can’t wait to start collaborating with folks from Flash, Dreamweaver, and all the other great Macromedia teams. Welcome to the Big Red A, guys; it’s going to be a great ride.

Adobe Bridge has received some pretty extensive coverage in CS2 books, focusing largely on the photography workflow aspects. Now Adobe’s own Terry White has written Secrets of Adobe Bridge, devoted entirely to this application and its role in the Suite (e.g. browsing multi-page PDFs and InDesign docs, tracking font and color usage through metadata, collaborating via Version Cue, etc.).

The Education team is now accepting entries for the 2006 Adobe Design Achievement Awards. Each winner gets 5g’s, seven Adobe apps, a trip to Toronto, and no trip to San Jose (a reward unto itself ;-)). Here’s the downloadable poster and the press release.

Photographer Peter Krogh has just published The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers. I haven’t seen a finished copy yet, but I’ve attended Peter’s lectures & can vouch for his insight into how new technologies like DNG facilitate open workflows (e.g. batch-adjusting color in Camera Raw, then passing DNGs with embedded previews and metadata to iView Media Pro).
[See also: Peter’s related DAMUseful.com and the publisher’s site for the book.]

Maybe I’m addled from downing too much of the turkey fixings (and it’s barely even noon), but I’ve been thinking about restaurants’ penchant for adding absurd descriptors to otherwise ordinary food. On a roadtrip out east last week, I noted menus offering:

• Pan-Seared Chilean Sea Bass
• Lamb Lettuce with Toasted Goat Cheese
• Iowa Caramel Custard

Okay, the fish may be neither Chilean nor bass (discuss!); I have no idea what lambs have to do with lettuce; and having gone to high school in Iowa, I can tell you it’s not synonymous with gourmet desserts. But now that Photoshop CS2 supports menu customization, I’m thinking we should take a cue from restaurateurs. How about:

• Puréed Liquify filter
• Vector Confit on a Bed of Merged Layers
• Braised Shank of Smart Object
• Dodged & Burned Creme Brulée
• CCD-Fresh Megapixels in a Chromatic Noise Reduction

Or perhaps not. 😉 Really I just wanted to say thanks for reading, and to wish you and yours an extraordinarily happy Thanksgiving.
Fondly,
El Tryptophan (master of the Sleeper Hold)

The LayerMatch 2005 site takes a novel approach to depicting the evolution of Photoshop Tennis matches. A Flash interface makes it possible to shuttle back and forth through the evolution of a PSD (sort of like clicking among states in the History palette, or switching among Layer Comps).
And if this kind of collaborative design exercise is up your alley, see also Designologue.com, a site that combines written & visual dialog.

I’d heard Todor and Jeff talk about plenoptic camera research, but it wasn’t until reader Joe Lencioni mentioned this Stanford work that I followed up. Wow. If nothing else, check out this video demonstrating how images can be refocused after the fact. (For background, Todor notes the word “plenoptic” was coined by Ted Adelson in this 1992 paper.) Wired News coverage is here.
Being more an Arts & Letters guy (read: math Cro-Mag), I tend to dwell on the social aspects of technology, and I wonder how photographers might react to these developments. There’s already a vocal minority of strident anti-raw shooters who say, “Raw is for when you plan to get the shot wrong.” That is, the post-processing flexibility that raw enables lets bad photographers sweep ever more mistakes under the carpet. What would they say about something that forgave flaws in focusing? It’s also funny to note that as technology like this makes it possible to keep more items in focus, technology like Photoshop’s Lens Blur works in the opposite direction, letting you add a “Bokeh” effect to otherwise crisp shots.
Personally, I’d love to see the concept of taking multiple captures in single pass used to enable greater dynamic range. Wouldn’t it be great to effectively auto-bracket shots simultaneously, instead of in quick succession?

I’d heard Todor and Jeff talk about plenoptic camera research, but it wasn’t until reader Joe Lencioni mentioned this Stanford work that I followed up. Wow. If nothing else, check out this video demonstrating how images can be refocused after the fact. (For background, Todor notes the word “plenoptic” was coined by Ted Adelson in this 1992 paper.) Wired News coverage is here.
Being more an Arts & Letters guy (read: math Cro-Mag), I tend to dwell on the social aspects of technology, and I wonder how photographers might react to these developments. There’s already a vocal minority of strident anti-raw shooters who say, “Raw is for when you plan to get the shot wrong.” That is, the post-processing flexibility that raw enables lets bad photographers sweep ever more mistakes under the carpet. What would they say about something that forgave flaws in focusing? It’s also funny to note that as technology like this makes it possible to keep more items in focus, technology like Photoshop’s Lens Blur works in the opposite direction, letting you add a “Bokeh” effect to otherwise crisp shots.
Personally, I’d love to see the concept of taking multiple captures in single pass used to enable greater dynamic range. Wouldn’t it be great to effectively auto-bracket shots simultaneously, instead of in quick succession?

Among other fixes and improvements, this update adds a check to confirm that Camera Raw is correctly installed (something that had been a source of confusion). Go to Adobe.com to grab the installer for Mac and Windows. Let us know via the Bridge forum how it goes.

If you ever find yourself living in a post-apocalypic, Mad Max-style hellscape *and* needing a new macro lens–or if you just like to tinker–know that evidently a Dremel, a can of Pringles, and some elbow grease are all that stand between you and that sweet new glass. No word, however, on the efficacy of Jalapeño vs. Spicy Cajun flavor… (Going to these lengths somehow reminds me of Jack Handey’s observation, “Most people don’t realize that large pieces of coral, which have been painted brown and attached to the skull by common wood screws, can make a child look like a deer.”) [via Tobias Hoellrich]

If you ever find yourself living in a post-apocalypic, Mad Max-style hellscape *and* needing a new macro lens–or if you just like to tinker–know that evidently a Dremel, a can of Pringles, and some elbow grease are all that stand between you and that sweet new glass. No word, however, on the efficacy of Jalapeño vs. Spicy Cajun flavor… (Going to these lengths somehow reminds me of Jack Handey’s observation, “Most people don’t realize that large pieces of coral, which have been painted brown and attached to the skull by common wood screws, can make a child look like a deer.”) [via Tobias Hoellrich]

I’d heard long-time author David Biedny, creator of the Attention Photoshoppers podcast, mention that his out-of-print work was commanding a premium, but it wasn’t until today that I saw what he meant. A photographer on the ProDig list noted that Photoshop Channel Chops is selling for $495 at a used book store. Some quick Googling reveals that the title commands $199 and up on Amazon. Dang; I haven’t read the book myself, but it must be quite the resource.
Of course, this sets my mind in motion. I tend to accumulate samples from lots of publishers, so I wonder what gems linger on my bookshelf. Psst, buddy, how much’ll you give me for this sweet Illustrator 6 Visual QuickStart Guide? Flash 4 Magic, maybe? Or how about a vintage LiveMotion Classroom in a Book? (Anyone, anyone? Bueller…?)
Not quitting my day job,
J.

Print designer humor by the numbers :-). (Me, I need my jokes in multiples of 51–as in, I’m so pale & pasty I’m 255/255/255, with a little checkerboard in the background.)

Author Ben Long has posted a major update to his Photoshop Action Pack, a set of 56 actions for Photoshop CS and CS2. Leveraging Mac OS X 10.4’s Automator technology, these actions build upon Photoshop’s built-in batching & can integrate with other applications (FTP upload, CD/DVD burning, etc.). Newly added actions include Add Watermark & Bleach Bypass, as well as a variety of bug fixes.

If you happen to be in the Bay Area on Saturday and like comics and/or retro design (or if you’re just a giant NPR dork like me), you may want to check out Chris Ware and Ira Glass speaking at Berkeley this Saturday. I’m looking forward to it. [More links to Chris’s work are here and here.]

Our friends over at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals are keeping plenty busy these days:

• At PhotoPlus Expo in New York they announced the 2006 Digital Canvas Awards, “the first worldwide competition exclusively for Adobe® Photoshop® users.” Check out the contest site here.
• Photoshop Radio, we hardly knew ye: the broadcasts have already been upgraded to be Photoshop TV, now streaming as Flash Video and downloadable via iTunes.
• And sometime in the wee hours this morning, my boss Kevin Connor touched down in Tokyo. He’ll be giving the keynote address in the first ever Photoshop World Japan. Good luck to the whole crew. Maybe next year we can get Jeff Schewe to fly over and meet speaker Hiroyuki Hayakawa for an Intercontinental Battle of the Beards. 😉

I should no doubt preface this bit with the “[OT]” disclaimer, but as there’s a design/photography angle, let’s pretend it’s all germane to this blog.

• The absurdly talented Yugo Nakamura has produced Honda Sweet Mission, “a kind of enhanced podcasting site.” Yugo writes, “We made an experimental interface system for a program broadcast by
  TokyoFM. Posted MP3 data is analyzed in the server and its volume history is visualized to Avatar motion. I’m sorry that all language is Japanese, you will not able to know what they
  are speaking.” No, but it sure looks cool, and the groovy pixel-globe is another idea on burrowing through a large set of images.

• Liz Hickock sculpts San Francisco out of Jello. Yes. (Take that, Richard Dreyfuss ;-)) Stunning.

Our friends at Wacom have announced a new, wide-format member of their professional tablet line. The new 6×11″ Intuos3 looks like a great match for the aspect ratios of modern monitors.
We’ve been adding features to Photoshop to improve the experience for tablet users. The Intuos 3 offers touch strips for two-handed input, so in Photoshop CS2 we changed zooming to center on the mouse cursor. Now you can be painting with one hand, and zoom in on those pixels using your other hand. (Tip: You can also zoom using a mouse wheel, or the two-finger input on a PowerBook trackpad; hold Opt/Alt while using the wheel to zoom. To make this behavior the default (instead of panning), enable the new preference “Zoom with Scroll Wheel.”)
The painting engines in Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2 also support the barrel rotation properties of the new 6D Art Pen. And to make things better for those using a Cintiq or TabletPC, we made it possible on Windows to move the menu bar to the bottom of the screen. That way menus pop up, rather than down, meaning your hand is less likely to get in the way.
If you’re using a tablet and have ideas on where we should take things from here, please let us know.

What a week it’s been. Sunday through Tuesday I was experiencing the energy and excitement of the Macromedia developer community at MAX, soon (we hope) to be part of the Adobe world (come on, EU commissioners! :-)). Then on Tuesday I got the call that Apple wanted to give us a demo of their new photo-centric application. We’d been hearing about this thing for three and a half years, so I headed to NY a day early.

And, well…?

Aperture is a cool product, no question. Apple’s designers have a great aesthetic, and their marketing is second-to-none. (This is the company, after all, that can sell the iPod Shuffle’s lack of screen as a lifestyle choice.) Aperture zips around on quad G5’s with four GPUs, and I’m looking forward to getting it onto my PowerBook 17″ to see how it might run in the field.
As Apple is the first to say, Aperture is not designed to be a Photoshop competitor. It has a number of very slick features (I dig the Web gallery creator in particular), but if you’re looking to do something as simple as make a selection and sharpen someone’s eyes, you’re out of luck. That’s not a knock–just a reflection of what Aperture is and is not. Fortunately Apple has a one-click method of sending a PSD to Photoshop for further editing.

I’m obviously downplaying competition between these apps because, as I’ve written previously, inventing death-matches where none exist does us all a disservice. Having said that, however, I’d be blowing smoke not to acknowledge that Aperture does compete with Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. The capabilities of Photoshop (of which Bridge and ACR are a part) are vast, so there’s bound to be some overlap, and Aperture joins a long list of products (Capture One, RawShooter Essentials, Nikon Capture, Canon Digital Photo Pro, etc.) that also offer raw browsing and editing. Bridge and ACR aim to provide the best possible workflow in conjunction with Photoshop, but you’re free to mix and match.

And you know, to the degree that Aperture stirs things up, I’m excited. CS2 wouldn’t be all it is today without the apps I mentioned keeping us on our toes, and the more tools offer solutions for photographers, the better off customers will be. So in the spirit of the Apple of yore, I say Welcome Apple. Seriously.
J.

The first day of the Macromedia MAX show is nearly in the bag, and man, it’s pretty exciting. Just sitting amidst 3,000 enthusiastic, animated designers and developers in the keynote presentation opens your eyes to the passion of this user community. As Macromedia folks and partners from SAP and elsewhere unveiled a range of new solutions and concepts (tons of coverage tracked here), the people around me were audibly buzzing with ideas. I’m eagerly looking forward to the deal being finalized so that we can start working together more closely.

As you probably know, Photoshop CS2 and the other Creative Suite apps ship with Adobe Bridge, the browsing and workflow management hub of the Suite. What you may not know is that Bridge has been designed with extensibility in mind. The app’s JavaScript extensibility layer enables everything from tiny widgets to services like Adobe Stock Photos. So, I thought it would be useful to link to some resources and examples:

• The
  Bridge scripting guide documents the app’s JavaScript extensibility layer. You can write and debug these scripts using the ExtendScript toolkit that ships with all the CS2 apps, and you can discuss script development with others on the Bridge scripting forum.

• Adobe Studio Exchange features a set of Bridge scripts, including Import from Camera. You can of course upload your own scripts to share with community.
• The Adobe Solutions Network (ASN) offers a variety of Bridge extensions. For various accounting reasons, we can’t just give these away (believe me, we’ve looked into it), but paying ASN developers can incorporate this code into their own scripts, then redistribute them.
• Peter Krogh’s DAMUseful.com (from which I stole the title of this entry) features the Pimp My Bridge page, as well as Peter’s Rank and File script for facilitating interoperability with iView Media Pro and other apps.
• BarredRock Software offers a variety of scripts, including one that offers much-requested extraction of metadata to a spreadsheet.
• PhotoshopNews.com offers a favorite to display PhotoshopNews in Bridge using the on-board Opera browser engine. Other developers have used this capability to tie Bridge into asset management systems.
• Jakub Kozniewski offers the Flash-based CS UI builder, a visual way to assemble JavaScript interfaces for Bridge and the other CS2 apps. [via Jeff Tranberry]

I plan to update the list as more examples and resources become available. In the meantime, if you have others to share, please send ’em our way.

…but how about this thing^*? Rogue genius-types at MIT Media Lab have developed the I/O Brush, “a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by ‘picking up’ and drawing with them.” The ability to sample and apply a short video sequence is particularly brilliant. [link via K10K.net]
If you like that, check out the Pixel Roller, a “paint roller that paints pixels, designed… to print digital information such as imagery or text onto a great range of surfaces.”
On a personal note, it was the chance to work with alpha geeks like this that drew me to Adobe. When I first encountered the LiveMotion team, I heard that engineer Chris Prosser had built himself a car MP3 player (this was a couple of years before the iPod). Evidently he’d disassembled an old Pentium 90, stuck it in his trunk, connected it to the glovebox with some Ethernet cable, added a little LCD track readout, and written a Java Telnet app for synching the machine with his laptop. Okay, I thought, I don’t want to do that, but I’d like to hijack the brains of someone who could. Chris has now moved on to After Effects, and I get to pester the likes of Thomas Knoll, Chris Cox, Arno Gourdol, and the rest of the team, trying to get some pet idea or other implemented.
* Caution: Features the most grating soundtrack since that Canon 20D video.

A few weeks ago we got to spend time with the team behind the scenes at Fox’s 24, as well as the folks at CSI, Without a Trace, Scrubs, and other shows. Art departments have to be endlessly resourceful, and we got a kick out of hearing about some of the creative ways they put Photoshop to use. I don’t want to risk giving anything away, but I did get clearance to mention something from a past episode of 24.
A scene called for the crew to put a burned-out car down in a ravine, but they couldn’t get the necessary permits from the city. So, production designer Joseph Hodges took a picture of the car, brought it into Photoshop, gave it a good beating (burning the paint, removing a door), and then printed it on a large piece of cardboard. The next day he stuck it down in the ravine where the actual car was to go. When the rest of the crew arrived they started to flip out, saying, “Hey, they told us not to put the car down there!” The illusion was clearly good enough to fool people standing on the site, and it worked perfectly for the scene.
Thanks to Rodney Charters, Director of Photography, Joseph Hodges, and the rest of the crew who let us be flies on the wall as they rehearsed, shot, and designed components of the upcoming season.

Continuing my recent megapixel fixation, check out this insane, 19200 x 2400 monitor [link via Airtight Interactive]. Aside from the obvious expense and physical demands of this kind of configuration, such a wide layout would impose some new UI challenges (e.g. look at the control elements spread all the way to the right and left). Of course, with higher DPI displays coming and resolution-independent UI support coming from Microsoft and Apple, there’s plenty of work ahead (if nothing else, so that your Photoshop toolbar doesn’t end up being 8mm wide on screen).

On Sunday a number of us are headed to LA for the Macromedia MAX show, and on Wednesday I’ll be flying to NY to meet up with a large Adobe contingent at PhotoPlus Expo. If you’ll be attending either show and feel like saying hello, please do. At MAX I’ll be just a fly on the wall, soaking up info in various sessions. At PPE I’m slated to be at the Adobe booth each day roughly 10-1:30. Hope to see you there. (For reference, I look like this. And yes, this is what happens if you let a bunch of product managers screw around with nice camera equipment. It willget cheesy.)

Mac developer plasq has released an updated version of their slick, fun, and super easy Comic Life application. The tool makes it a cinch to create layouts, add text and photos, and publish results to the Web.
If Adobe apps tend to be grand organs, Comic Life is a flute. Now, I would never want to give up any of the range and flexibility of our tools, but it’s refreshing to see a light, elegant solution for a very specific task. This question keeps gnawing at me: As our tools grow ever more capable, do they have to keep getting more complex? If each app’s main environment needs to strive for letting you do anything at any time, are there areas where we could focus on specific tasks? Hmm–this deserves an entry of its own. In the meantime, if you have ideas, please let us know.

Counterpoint to the megapixel wars: what if you could alter only one pixel per day? Cameron Adams has developed Pixelfest, a collaborative effort to create “art/design/garbage” through numerous people making tiny contributions. Give it a whirl, or check out a time lapse movie of the project’s development.
(link via Guerrilla Innovation)

Photoshop was big in pop culture last weekend: on both The West Wing and Desperate Housewives, I’m told, characters mentioned Photoshop by name. Right on. The only catch: the West Wing character asked someone to “Photoshop” something out of picture.
You might think Adobe would be all for the verbing of “Photoshop,” but that’s not the case. It turns out that if a company doesn’t actively protect a trademarked name, it can lose the rights to it. That’s why you see TiVo and many others having to advocate mouth-twisting usages like, “Honey, would you record ‘Extreme Deathmatch 9000’ on the TiVo® DVR?” (You’re not even supposed to call the beloved plastic things “Legos.”)
I’ve been asked several times for the technical term for the process of a product name getting, er, generified, and it seems there isn’t a proper one. That said, “Genericide” seems reasonable.
On a related note, see if you can guess what’s indicated by this infographic. (Where I grew up in Illinois, it was pronounced “paahp.”)
Oh, and one last thing: Friends don’t let friends put a capital “S” in the middle of “Photoshop.” That usage really waves the nitwit flag, you know? :-).

We’ve just announced the new Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. As you’d expect, it offers numerous crafty new features, and in early reviews people seem impressed.
So, what about the Mac version? In short, we’ve said that it’s in development (e.g. see the last line in the first paragraph here). We haven’t been any more specific than that, largely because as a public company Adobe has to be very careful about forward-looking statements. (Technically speaking, if you asked me whether we were going to start selling garden gnomes tomorrow, I don’t think I could say yes or no.)
And so, fellow Mac users, please don’t jump to any conclusions. We don’t have a new Mac version to announce, nor can we provide details on when we might have one or what it would contain. That said, Elements Mac development continues, and in the meantime the great Photoshop Elements 3.0 for Mac is available now.

The always-entertaining Worth1000.com features a great frog-modification contest. I’m humbled by these folks’ skills.
These contests remind me of the Photoshop tennis matches that people started playing a few years ago (tossing a PSD back and forth, adding layers to riff on your partner’s work). The original site is taking a break, but many fun matches are documented in the rather generically named Photoshop: Secrets of the Pros.
Along similar lines, Adobe and Aquent are sponsoring Studio Smackdown 2, which puts designers head to head using Flash and the Creative Suite. Should be good.

As things get easier and faster, do they have to get crummier? No, but if we’re not careful, it’s easy to sacrifice depth and craft for breadth.
Ten years ago, print designers couldn’t understand why I couldn’t replicate their leading and kerning in HTML. Ten years later, I wonder how many designers bother to kern at all.
But beyond resurrecting these fundamentals, new technology lets us do better. OpenType technology allows for much richer character sets, and numerous faces in the Adobe Type Library support this new functionality. Access to alternate characters can help put an end to the kind of blunder I saw in a national magazine several weeks back, where supposedly handwritten parchment featured three identical “g”‘s in a single word.
To see the benefits in action, check out this tutorial from Russell Brown, and this one from Deke McClelland.
(On related fronts, the new Flash Player features much improved text display. Also, Typetester is a little online utility for comparing screen fonts [link via Newsight]. And Linotype has released FontExplorer X, with an iTunes-like ability to organize, preview, and purchase fonts.)

Wow–now this you don’t see every day. A small company called Tactiva has unveiled a rather eye-popping demo of a device that lets you use both hands while working in design software.
The appeal of using two hands at once (instead of essentially pointing with a stick and grunting, as is done with a mouse) isn’t new; the latest Wacom tablets feature touch strips for non-dominant hand work, and Logitech and others sell a variety of pucks and other devices for the same purpose. But the Tactiva device takes things to a new level by displaying a ghosted image of your actual hands overlaid on the UI, as well as providing force feedback when you interact with on-screen objects.
The device faces plenty of obstacles to adoption (no manufacturers yet, potential $1000 price point, need for support in applications that assume a single input control). Yet I keep thinking about it.
What do you think? Just a neat parlor trick, or the future of computing, or something in between?

Think you’ve got a lot of digital photos to manage? National Geographic photographer Mike Fay & crew flew some 60,000 miles at low levels over Africa, snapping a high-res digital photo every 20 seconds. The tiny Cessna contained more than 2 terabytes of storage for capturing the GPS-stamped data. You can read more here and check out the interactive features, including Flash videos and a high-res PDF map. And if you happen to be on Windows, you can check out the way this content has been
integrated into Google Earth.

Okay, you know you’re spending too much time at work, or on computers, or both when you get excited about something like this. I discovered this morning that the elevators in the new Adobe tower support undo. That is, if you’ve pressed a floor button by mistake, you can press it again to deselect the floor. Who knew? This reminds me of Photoshop quality engineer Pete du Fosse realizing that he was working too much when he found himself holding a hand over his microwave’s keypad, getting frustrated when no tool tip appeared.
[This is probably also the time when my bosses question the value of letting me blog on work hours. ;-)]

Last week, Photoshop engineer Scott Byer mentioned some great resources for Photoshop-related info, including Photoshop News and Rob Galbraith’s site. I subscribe to those sites and wanted to highlight some others:

• Photoshop author and trainer Jan Kabili frequently highlights techniques, new books, and articles at The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog.
• Long-time author David Biedny has started the first (to my knowledge) Photoshop-centric podcast. (For those new to subscribing to downloadable audio programs, David points that in iTunes you can choose Advanced->Subscribe to Podcast, then paste the URL “attentionphotoshoppers.libsyn.com/rss”.) [Update: I’ve learned that Photoshop User magazine is also podcasting, as is Inside Mac Radio. I’ve recorded segments for both this week.]
• We haven’t yet gotten her blogging, but Julieanne Kost, along with Daniel Brown and Tim Cole, maintains a wealth of info at AdobeEvangelists.com.

The links below aren’t Photoshop-specific, but I enjoy them as well:

• Digital Photography Review is frequently updated with news of digital cameras, in-depth reviews, and more
• Macromedia’s indefatigable John Dowdell covers wide-ranging developments related to Flash and Web technologies.
• Dynamite designer Jon Hicks (known for the Firefox logo, among other things) makes me wish I knew CSS. He also blogs periodically about design and Web technologies. (And if you’re on a Mac, check out his beautiful and useful PimpMySafari.com.)
  

The good folks at The Chopping Block are doing their part to help victims of the hurricane by starting DisplacedDesigner.com:

“… Many of the displaced–-creative people like us–-will have to start from scratch. We wish to help by offering these people a space from which to earn a living, to re-establish self-sufficience… to get back on their feet. With this in mind, we have started this resource–a place where displaced individuals can be matched with those of us with some extra studio/office space, a desk (or table), a computer/phone/internet connection, or a handful of square feet from which they can start to work and continue to earn a living…”

Please do what you can to help & to spread the word.
Thanks,
J.

Okay, my turn: for some reason we haven’t been able to explain the deal when people are considering upgrading to the Creative Suite. I’ve seen lots of confusion in forums, emails, etc. lately, so, here goes:
Q. Can I upgrade from Photoshop to the Creative Suite?
A. Yes.
Q. Which versions?
A. All versions.
Q. If I upgrade Photoshop to the Suite, and later I decide I want to upgrade just Photoshop, can I do that?
A. Yes. As long as you still own that earlier copy (say, PS7) and have the serial number, you’re golden.
Q. What if I get an application (say, InDesign) for the first time as part of the Suite, and later I want to upgrade just that application (not the whole Suite). Can I do that?
A. No. For various legal reasons, a Suite isn’t a collection. So, you can’t upgrade just one piece of it.
To recap, if you owned Photoshop previously and want to upgrade to the Suite, you will have a choice of upgrades in the future. And if you owned InDesign, Illustrator, etc. on their own, you could upgrade them on their own in the future, even after upgrading the Suite. It’s only apps that you didn’t own outside of the Suite that need a Suite upgrade to move forward. Make sense?
If you have further questions or hear conflicting info, please let me know: jnack [at] adobe [dot] com.

Someone smarter than I should devise a “Law” (call it “Carlito’s Last Theorem” or something) that says that as you throw more marketing weenies (like me) at the task of communicating, the message becomes logarithmically more bloated and impenetrable. We can’t just spit it out.
So, I had to smile when I read this warning dialog that accompanies Google Desktop 2.0:

Please read this carefully. It’s not the usual yada yada.
When you use Advanced Features, you may be sending non-personal usage information and information about websites you visit to Google.
For example, Google Desktop sends Google information about the news pages you visit in order to personalize the news you see in Sidebar. We use other non-personal usage data, including crash reports, to help improve Desktop’s performance. Please note that none of this data actually tells us who you are; we use it merely to improve Desktop’s ability to give you the information that’s most relevant to you.

Ah, nice. So even while they’re busy taking over the world, Google manages to keep it real & respect its users’ intelligence. I can dig it.

John Watson has crafted a very cool magazine cover generator that combines photos from Flickr with text you enter. Give it a spin, or check out some examples. [Link via MAKE Magazine]
I have a special affinitiy for this kind of thing. I managed to talk my way into AGENCY.COM as a designer, but having no formal training, I often found myself slinging GIFs in menial graphics production. Having determined that creating the same graphical text 200 times in a row does, indeed, kind of suck, I built a graphics engine using Macromedia Generator. It let teammates or even clients themselves enter text into an HTML form, then get back a GIF. Upshot: Let the creative folks spend their time creating, instead of being a bottleneck for production. That’s the idea behind the new Variables feature in Photoshop CS2, as well as Adobe Graphics Server and Adobe InDesign Server.