Oh, now this is cool: PhotoKeys is a $4 app that lets you drive Photoshop (switching tools, nudging layers, running actions, etc.) from an iPhone.  [Via Jesse Zibble]

I’ve taken it for a spin, and it works as advertised.  Setup proved to be a bit more time-consuming than I’d expected (involving installing a simple free server app, killing off my VPN connection, restarting the iPhone, and assorted trial and error), but all told it wasn’t bad.

It’s funny: thinking about the dearth of unused keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop, a bunch of us were talking about just such an idea the other day.  Cool to see that someone has already beaten us to the punch.

Of course, what’s really in short supply is another modifier key (a la Shift, Cmd/Ctrl, and Opt/Alt) or two.  Having another way to modify commands would open up exponentially more possible combos.  It would be brilliant if an app like PhotoKeys could add such a thing, but I think the bottleneck would be Photoshop.  That is, the app needs to open up a more flexible, general purpose way to accept inputs.  (How about MIDI, so you could hammer saturation with a whammy bar? ;-))

Out of curiosity, if Adobe were to create (or work with a hardware company to create) a simple, inexpensive hardware device, would you be interested in it?  What would it need to do/look like/cost in order to be interesting?  (This is one of those ideas that’s come up for years, so I’m just tossing it out there for consideration, not hinting at anything specific.)

You may well know about "scrubby sliders" in Photoshop–the little finger-with-arrows icon you get when your cursor hovers over the label next to a numerical field, such as "Opacity" on the Layers panel.  (Here’s a screenshot borrowed from Photoshop Essentials.)  With scrubby sliders you can click and drag on the text label, moving left and right to adjust the field’s value up and down.  You may not have discovered a couple of nuances, however:

• Holding Opt/Alt while scrubbing makes the values change 10x more slowly.  This is great for fine-tuning a value.  Conversely, holding Shift while scrubbing makes the values change 10x faster.  This is great for making an audience sick while demoing canvas rotation.  (Open a really big image, zoom out, hit R, and then Shift-drag over the Rotation Angle text on the Options Bar. Entreat your viewers to stare at the center. Watch them become your willing thralls…)
• Some fields don’t have text label next to them, and it therefore seems that you can’t use scrubby sliders with them.  Ah, but that’s where holding down Cmd/Ctrl while mousing over the field comes into play.  By holding the modifier while dragging, you can use a scrubby slider on these fields.  (Adding Opt/Alt or Shift works as you’d expect.)

On a related note, when you put focus on a text field in Photoshop, you can nudge its value up and down by using the up/down arrow keys.  Holding Shift while arrowing naturally makes the increment of change 10x larger.

It’s all these little custom behaviors that help make moving Photoshop from Carbon to Cocoa a rather involved affair.  The app has developed a lot of little tweaks (e.g. holding down Opt/Alt in dialog boxes to turn Cancel into Reset) that don’t just come along for free.  It’s also an illustration of why custom widgets are sometimes desirable.  I’d like to see Photoshop and other CS apps make scrubby sliders much more universal/discoverable via something like the Adobe video apps’ sliders (screenshot). [Update: See also the ones in Flash CS4.]

There’s one other related thing, which I hate to mention as it’s a bug, but I can offer a solution.  In CS4 if you click on a text label to highlight a field, then use a mouse wheel to adjust values, you may notice that the field stops changing.  The workaround is to keep your cursor over the text label, or anywhere outside the field itself.  Sorry about that rough edge.

Based on some recent comments (e.g. “Please add a way to navigate through layers via the keyboard”), I get the impression that many people don’t know some/all of the following:

• Opt/Alt + left/right bracket keys change layer selection, selecting the layer above/below the current one.
• Those shortcuts plus Shift extend the layer selection.  For example, to select the layer above the current one while keeping the current one selected, hit Shift-Opt-]/Shift-Alt-].
• Shift-Opt-,/Shift-Alt-, (comma) selects the the current layer and all those below it.  Shift-Opt-./Shift-Alt-.  (period) selects the current layer and all those above it.
• Opt-,/Alt-, selects the bottom layer.  Opt-./Alt-. selects the top one.
• Cmd-G/Ctrl-G groups layers into a layer group (aka layer set, aka “little folder thing”).  Shift-Cmd-G/Shift-Ctrl-G ungroups layers.
• Cmd-Opt-A/Ctrl-Alt-A selects all layers.
• Shift-Cmd-N/Shift-Ctrl-N makes a new layer. Add Opt/Alt to do so while skipping the layer options dialog box.

And while we’re at it, you can also change blending modes via the keyboard:

• Shift-plus (=) selects the next blending mode.  Shift-minus (-) selects the previous one.  Note that the target of these changes depends on what tool is active.  If you’ve got a painting tool (Brush, Clone Stamp, etc.) selected, the changes apply to the tool’s blending mode.  If you’ve got other tools selected, they’ll apply to the blending mode of the selected layer.  (My rule of thumb is to tap V to make the Move tool active before applying blending changes to a layer via the keyboard.)
• Shift-Opt-letter/Shift-Alt-letter will set the selected tool/layer to a specific blending mode.  For example, M is Multiple, N is Normal, and H is Hard Light.  A fairly complete list is here (scroll down).

If you find this kind of thing useful, check out Trevor Morris’s list of PS shortcuts, or Michael Ninness’s old but useful Photoshop Power Shortcuts book.  (I updated it for PS7.)

[Update: See the comments below for more good suggestions.]

Thanks for all the great feedback regarding ways to manage complex documents.  I should probably toss in the inevitable disclaimer that we’re just gathering feedback, none of this is a promise/hint about future work, void where prohibited, blah blah.

A couple of people have mentioned the idea of expanding Smart Objects back into the layers that formed them initially.  That is, you’d be able to select multiple layers, turn them into an SO, do various things to the SO, and then explode the layers back out into the main layer stack.  It’s a great idea, and of course (you knew this was coming) it’s really hard to make work, which is why it’s not supported today.  In case you’re interested, let me explain why.

Smart Objects let you apply a variety of transformations to the selected object.  You can scale, skew, perspective-transform, warp, and filter them.  The trick is, how would you turn the transformed content back into layers while preserving its appearance?

In some cases the job would be easy.  Let’s say you put four layers into an SO, then scale it up & want to expand the layers back out.  That seems pretty straightforward: apply the same scale factor to each layer, then move it so that the positions match.  The same might go for skewing & distorting, though I may be overlooking some cases.  But what about warping and filtering?  It gets tough, if not impossible, quickly.  I’ve made a little illustration (read it left to right) that may help illuminate the challenges.

The upshot is that expanding Smart Objects back to layers could be made to work some times and not others.  Addressing at least the simpler cases would be a worthwhile effort, though that task would have to jockey for position relative to other SO-related enhancements.

For instance, if PS offered an option not to save the composite data of an SO in a file, the SO wouldn’t add file size above and beyond the layers it contains. That would in turn open the door to PS creating SOs automatically when transforming layers, which is essential to getting more people using this feature.  The consequence would be more time spent opening files, however, as SO composites would have to be rendered on the fly.  That in turn adds new requirements to other PSD-reading apps–e.g. that they be able to run filters on the fly in order to preserve appearance.  The whole thing becomes a quasi-religious argument about format compatibility and trading one kind of performance for another. There are many cans of worms here.

If you’ve read this far, my fellow geek, you may be interested in previous entries about The Secret Life of Smart Filters and the closely related Simplicty vs. Power in Photoshop.  Nobody ever said progress was gonna be easy. 🙂

Designers–and Web designers in particular–create some of the most complex, intricately layered Photoshop compositions possible.  How could we make the management & navigation of these files more efficient? I’d love to get your take on the following ideas:

• Layer panel search/filtering:
  • Photoshop could offer a small search field at the top of the Layers panel.  As you’d type in text, PS would narrow down the display of layers (e.g. typing "b-u-r-r.." would hide everything but the layer called "burrito").  Searching would also find custom tags applied to layers.  Hiding layers in the list would have no effect on the appearance of the document.
  • Separately, PS could offer buttons on Layers that would let you filter the view so that you could, say, show only type layers, or only type layers and bitmap layers, etc.
• Layer sorting: Photoshop would offer the ability to sort the Layers panel by layer type, layer name, etc.
• Symbols (i.e. reusable objects that enable "edit one, update many"): Photoshop already supports this concept to some degree via Smart Objects.  You can convert a layer to be an SO, then duplicate the object, edit one copy, and have both copies update.  The interface could be made clearer, however (e.g. through adding a Symbols panel for managing objects).
• Linked files (place a file, update it externally, and have all placed copies updated in PSDs): Again, Photoshop already supports linked files in a couple of ways.  If you double-click a Smart Object placed from Illustrator, PS will open a copy in AI.  You can also choose Layer->Smart Objects->Replace Contents… to have an SO replace with a file on disk.  Oh, and video layers are always linked to external files.  The raw materials for a traditional linking implementation are there, but PS would need to add things like a Links panel.
• Type styles:  As you can in Illustrator and InDesign, you could assign a style to type layers in Photoshop, and when you changed the style definition, PS would update all layers that have the style attached.
• Other?  Anything I haven’t mentioned?  Anything you like in other apps?

To gather feedback I’ve created a very quick survey, and of course your comments (below) would be most welcome. (And in the interests of sharing ideas freely, you can browse others’ responses, too. Note that I can’t edit/reply inline to suggestions posted via the survey.)

Thanks

J.

“One button. Endless possibilities.”

I look forward to hearing that Adobe is “dragging its feet” for not abandoning keyboard shortcuts and fully embracing The Wheel by noon yesterday. ;->
[Update: Reader Don Tardiff points out that the Simplex typewriter was doing the wheel thing a century ago. (“Notice no screen, hard drive, or battery.”) Reached for comment, Jonathan Ive said, “That’s. How. We. Roll.”]

Being kind of hyped about multitouch user interfaces, I loved seeing Saturday Night Live spoof the TV channels’ infatuation with flashy but often meaningless info displays. Skip ahead to 5:20 or so to check it out:

If for some reason the embedded video isn’t working, you can try it (and see stills) on this Engadget page.
It really is kind of hard to satirize just how dorky people can look when filling live TV time with these things.

A brief note: A number of folks have questioned the XD team’s decision to render their new INSPIRE publication through the Flash Player.  I passed the feedback along to the design team, and now XD manager Ty Lettau has replied.

The Adobe XD (Experience Design) team has launched INSPIRE, a new online publication in which team members can share thoughts on how, why, and what they design; gather feedback; and more.  Among the good bits:

• Julie Baher has posted some thoughts and background on the CS4 user interface overhaul (see previous)
• Julie Meridian discusses challenges faced in designing spinning interfaces (canvas rotation, 3D) for Photoshop CS4.

(Apropos of nothing, both designers are among a similarly named group of "me Julies," which seems like it should be British slang if it isn’t already.)

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ve heard me talk ad nauseam about the need to better manage Photoshop’s complexity.  We need to give you the power to make the app “everything you want, nothing you don’t.”  Last week Stephen Shankland from CNET asked what kind of progress we’re making, especially in the context of the more task-based interface of Ligthroom.  I disclosed some details that appear in his article:

Adobe is taking a page from the Lightroom specialization playbook for Photoshop by trying to make it more customizable to specific users and tasks. But in contrast with Lightroom, company is trying to do so without sacrificing the software’s general-purpose nature, said John Nack, [principal] product manager for Photoshop.

 

“We want to make it possible to be everything you want and nothing you don’t,” Nack said. “One of the tough things has been dealing with the enormous breadth of Photoshop. We end up presenting same interface to architects as we do to Web designers as radiologists as prepress folks.”

 

To achieve that goal, Photoshop’s interface will become more open-ended and even programmable, he said.

 

“You’ll see some of the things we’ve learned about Lightroom–making things browsable and less modal–come into Photoshop,” Nack said. In other words, it’ll be easier to shift Photoshop from one task to another.

 

With a “Configurator” application that should be released by Adobe Labs within a month or two of release the next version of Photoshop, Adobe will let users create and share their own Photoshop control panels written in Adobe’s Flash programming language, Nack added. “Our goal is to make it possible for expert users to reconfigure the environment on a task-by-task basis and share those workspaces with other people. You don’t have to write code. You can knock together an interface and make it sharable.”

As I’ve written previously, using Flash in the Suite isn’t about slathering the UI in a bunch of blinky banner ads; rather, it’s about giving people an easy way to connect, tune, & extend their work environments.  The AIR-based Configurator app is just one way to build these UI elements–one that lets you Lego-together functionality without writing code, then easily share the output.  The tool isn’t ready to take a bow yet, but it’s coming along really nicely & I’m looking forward to showing what it can do.

[Related/previous: Future Photoshop UI changes]

[Note: I’m motivated to write the following as I’m hearing increasing speculation about future Adobe UI changes based on what’s appeared in screenshots, the Fireworks beta, etc.  That topic deserves its own post, and I’ll work on publishing one in the next couple of days.  Until then I won’t be tackling any of those specific issues/questions.]

I had a rather eye-opening experience the other day.  I over heard an Adobe employee using Photoshop exclaim, “No way… they overloaded Cmd-H!”  In other words, he was surprised that pressing Cmd-H didn’t hide the application.  He was obviously A) a Mac user, B) relatively unfamiliar with Photoshop, and C) assuming that Photoshop had made a decision to go against Mac OS conventions.

Er, no. 🙂

The actual history is that Photoshop has used the Cmd-H shortcut since something close to the dawn of time (at least as far back as 1993, when I started using the app) to hide/show the current selection (the “marching ants” that go around a selection).  This convention (like essentially all PS shortcuts) is consistent between Mac and Windows, and it’s worked the same way in Illustrator for a similarly long time.

When Apple introduced OS X, they decided to implement some new conventions for shortcuts.  Notably, Cmd-H hides apps; Cmd-M minimizes docs to the Dock; and Cmd-~ (technically Cmd-`) cycles among open documents.  Over time the OS has appropriated more and more shortcuts that have been used by Photoshop (F9-F12 were for actions, Cmd-Space/Cmd-Opt-Space was for zooming, etc.).

This puts us in a tough position.  On the one hand, I totally appreciate Apple’s efforts to drive consistency across the platform.  On the other, we have to tread very carefully around keyboard shortcut changes.  Pros’ fingers dance over Adobe apps like musicians’ on instruments.  When certain things have worked a certain way for 10 or 15 years across multiple Adobe apps, you don’t just toss out those conventions and all the associated muscle memory.

My colleague’s comment reminded me, though, that new users don’t know or care about the history here.  For them, it just looks like Adobe is blowing off useful, consistent shortcuts, going its own way for no reason.

So, what do we do?  “Let me customize shortcuts,” you might say–but of course we do already (and have for years), and that doesn’t affect the default experience.  No matter what we do–change or sit tight–someone is going to be P.O.’d.

I think we have to take things case-by-case.  As it happens, I expect we’ll change Photoshop to use Cmd-~ to cycle among document windows.  PS already supports the Windows-standard Ctrl-Tab for this function on both platforms, and by honoring both conventions we can offer cross-platform consistency.  This move will undoubtedly frustrate people who rely on Cmd-~ for displaying the composite channel, but we’ll do our best to ease the pain.  Remapping Cmd-H and Cmd-M are a progressively tougher sell for me, given the importance of selections & Curves in PS.  Note, however, that on the Mac by default Photoshop assigns Cmd-Ctrl-H to hiding & Cmd-Ctrl-M to minimizing–i.e. the standard conventions + the Ctrl key.

I mention all this in order to shed some light on the tricky issues we face with the Photoshop & other Adobe tools.  No one I know here views OS conventions as unimportant; on the contrary, they’re always among the first issues considered.  It’s just that we have to weigh them against possible disruptions to user habits and workflows, and against the user benefits of consistency between applications and platforms.

[PS–I know people are eager to hear more & to discuss the application frame idea, etc. As I say, I plan to post plenty of detail shortly. (In other words, please don’t fill the comments with tons of questions/rants just yet. :-)) More to come… –J.]

Photographer* Mike Hill passed along a link to crafty hacker Johnny Lee’s hacks to enable, among other things, whiteboarding on the cheap in Photoshop, thanks to a modified Nintendo Wii controller.  PS is shown only in passing, but it’s still fun to see.

This of course makes me think of the Flash-based, Wiimote-powered multi-user painting system created by BLITZ Agency for Adobe MAX last year (details).  It may sound frivolous, but I still like to get my little wheels turning about how to cross-pollinate this kind of Web-flavored coolness with our desktop apps.  I still want creation experiences that can feel more like this, and less like poking sliders and knobs.

* and creepily faithful Michael McDonald imitator

Ah, Vegas: It’s like the whole town just coughs into your mouth.  Everything about this place makes me feel dirty, strung-out, and used.

I mention it because just now I was impressed to find a Coke machine that featured a credit card swipe-strip for payment.  Kind of convenient, I thought–though of course it means that the prices have been jacked out of the range of the small bills you’re likely to be carrying.

Speaking of price… It’s displayed only intermittently, when the words “Coca-Cola” aren’t crawling by.  (I’m sure that text is very helpful to the people confused about the nature of this giant red machine that sells only Coca-Cola.)  Terrible info presentation, but whatever, I’m thirsty.

Swipe, pause… card authorized, press soda button.  Wait several seconds… nothing.  Did it hear me?  I press again.  Wait… [rumble] Coke arrives.  And then another.  And then a third.  Suddenly I’ve paid nearly eight bucks for 60oz. of sugar water–about 10x more than I actually wanted.

Genius!  I’m serious, actually: by tossing out the most basic interface principle of providing prompt user feedback, these guys just tripled their income.  How many times a day must this happen, and who’s going to spend time sweating these guys for $5?  The house wins again.

PS–I know that in posting this little bit of whining I’m really unleashing the power of the blog, so to speak.  Maybe the anti-consumer UI beatings that happen in Vegas should, in fact, stay in Vegas.

Adobe’s Terry White has created a 45-minute video podcast offering a "‘First Look’ At Photoshop Elements 6 for the Macintosh."  Check it out to see the new interface & new tools in action.  And if you happen to be at Macworld this week, drop by the Adobe booth to see it in person.  (I’ll be lurking a bit this afternoon.)  [Via]

While we’re waiting for Photoshop to connect with Martian ocular implants, researchers have been busy building crafty new interface tech.  Photoshop engineer John Peterson writes, "Some folks at the Georgia Institute of Technology have
found a way to do cursor control/selection by blowing on the
screen. The amazing part is it needs no extra hardware, they just
use the microphone already built in to your laptop."  Check out the video, as well as the team’s research paper (PDF).

Apparently others have had the same idea.  Photoshop UI designer Julie Meridian reports, "The Nintendo DS has a built-in microphone and does something similar for
games, like WarioWare Touched! where the goals are things like blowing
up balloons, flying a kite, etc."  And we’ve joked about enabling blowing on natural media simulations in order to do things like moving or drying ink.

Elsewhere on the New UI front, Bryan Hughes points out that all new Volkswagens are due to get touch screens.  If I ever upgrade my Jetta (damn 1.8 mi commute making that unlikely), maybe I can look forward to doing an iPhone style pinch to zoom in on a map–as I zoom into a ravine.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come
back to us with a certain alienated majesty. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe that when you get to a certain number of objects, search trumps categorization, and as I’ve detailed previously, a number of Adobe apps (InDesign, After Effects, Illustrator) feature built-in methods for searching the interface (applying commands, finding help).  We haven’t quite gotten to the point of rolling out a unified, cross-product way to drive the applications via search, however.

To meet the need, many Mac power users dig Quicksilver–a powerful little utility that enables searching, app launching, car-waxing, and more.  Try as I might, though, I’ve never gotten into QS.  It’s not that it doesn’t do enough; it’s that it can do so much, and I get totally bewildered by setting a 747 cockpit’s worth of switches.

That’s why I’m intrigued by Leopard’s Spotlight-style searching of application menus (a weirdly unheralded feature, I think).  As you type, related terms pop up, and as you arrow through the list of results, Leopard highlights the results.  Here’s an animated screenshot of the feature running in Photoshop.

I’ve found that by assigning a global keyboard shortcut ("Cmd-?") to Help->Search via system preferences, I can now drive any Mac app’s menus via the keyboard.  That’s pretty powerful: instead of having to memorize (or assign) lots of keyboard shortcuts, or having to hunt and peck through rarely-used apps’ menus, it’s now possible just to hit Cmd-?, then start typing.

Yes, I know that Quicksilver can do much more, and there’s all kinds of room to improve on the Leopard feature.  That said, the latter’s simplicity makes it really appealing.  I’ll be curious to see how much I (and others) end up using it day-to-day. [Update: Apparently I’m not alone: I see in the notes of this podcast that Leo Laporte has ditched Quicksilver in favor of Leopard menu search.]

* Side note: I love that it’s now possible to browse Safari’s history via the search feature.  I’ve been using search in Safari 2, but the new UI exposes the capability much more readily.  On a further side note, apparently the extension Safari Stand will bring Cover Flow viewing to your history.

Let your fingers do the rocking:

• Photographer/designer Trevor Morris has posted a highly detailed yet compact list of Photoshop CS3 shortcuts, in PDF form to facilitate printing as a quick reference.  See also Camera Raw & Bridge shortcuts from Ian Lyons, as well as Trevor’s 50 interface tips for Photoshop.
• The Digital Photography school has posted a list of 18 Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts. [Via]
• It’s a bit dated now, but Michael Ninness’s Photoshop Power Shortcuts book is a terrifically thorough (and–having updated the text for PS7–may I say, enormously accurate) printed reference on the topic. Bonus fact: It is (presumably) the only Photoshop shortcuts book to be illustrated using gratuitous images of my old car.

With the mouse turning 40, and with the number of photos, emails, and other documents ever growing, do we need a new kind of user interface?  Do we need, maybe–dun dun duunnh–a return to the command line?

That’s part of what usability expert Don Norman thinks.  He notes that search engines, both on the Web and on the desktop, now support commands (e.g. "define:photography" in Google), and that computer interfaces are now enhanced by, rather than dependent upon, typing in specific commands. If a command isn’t valid, modern search implementations fall back gracefully to basic searching.

This is something we’ve been discussing for quite a while at Adobe. What if, instead of hunting through menus ("Hmm, is commenting under Edit, or Format, or…?"), or having to memorize the keyboard shortcut for each command, you could simply start typing & getting a list of matching commands? The CS3 generation of tools makes some moves in this direction:

• After Effects has offered searching for filters (as it has for a while);
• Illustrator CS3 includes a new, Flash-based "knowhow" panel that can search the Web for info related to the current tool;
• InDesign CS2 introduced a "Quick Apply" capability.  In CS2 it could apply styles (here’s a demo), and in CS3 it can invoke menu items as well.  InDesign PM Chad Siegel explains:
  

  "In CS3 we expanded Quick Apply to optionally include all menu items and commands within the application as well as scripts. Once the item is displayed, it can be either applied or invoked simply by selecting it from the list. [See a quick demo, under "Productivity Enhancements"]

  "That’s a lot of information that could be displayed so we also provide the ability to limit your search to certain classes of items (e.g. Paragraph Styles and/or Character Styles only). We also added shortcut codes which display within the UI that can be added as a prefix to limit the scope of individual searches. For example, p: is used to limit the search to paragraph styles and m: to limit to menu commands, etc. So users can type m:print and see any command in the list that included those characters. It also searches the characters that customers enter from both left to right and right to left, giving preference to exact matches at the top of the list.

  "Finally, it also displays the location of the commands so that folks can find it more easily within the UI. For example m:print shows File>Print in the list.

So, what about Photoshop?  The app doesn’t presently feature built-in support for something like Quick Apply, but it’s an intriguing possibility for the future.  I’m hoping we see some developments here soon (not from Adobe, so I’m not sure how much I can say just yet).  On the Mac there’s also Quicksilver, the darling of power users.  I’ve found a beginner’s guide; some tips for searching menus; and Merlin Mann’s podcast on the subject… but damn if I’ve yet had the patience to configure my copy (it’s death by options).  I may get there yet.

In any case, I think we’ll see plenty of interesting app-searching developments in the future.

• The blog since1968.com features an interesting interview with Mark Hamburg (photo), founder and engineering manager of the new Photoshop Lightroom product (not to mention a driving force behind Photoshop itself for more than a decade).  In it Mark discusses the gestation of the product, some of the concepts behind its user interface, reasons they abandoned things like a free-form light table, and more.  I’m looking forward to part 2 of the interview, due to be posted soon on the site.  [For more on the history of Lightroom development, check out Jeff Schewe’s behind-the-scenes overview.  For more interviews with Mark, check out some of the Lightroom podcasts.]
• CNET has been featuring some of the creative forces at ILM this week, highlighting the work of John Knoll (who co-wrote Photoshop with his older brother Thomas).   Now they’ve posted a 4-minute video in which John discusses those early days.  [For more info, photos, and clips from ILM’s Pirates work, see the mini-site they created. For more on the Knoll brothers & the creation of Photoshop, check out this piece on PhotoshopNews.]

Side note: I love that Hal Hickel, now an effects whiz at ILM, saved the rejection letter he received when, at age 12 in 1978, he proposed a sequel to Star Wars.  It reminds me of the note I got from LEGO 20 years ago, when I proposed camouflage bricks–a notion they rejected as being too war-like.  Yeah, and now they make a Lego Death Star… 😉

Also, speaking of that “small moon,” how brilliant is this video, re-enacting the Star Wars Death Star battle using ony disembodied hands? [Via]

This week C|NET published findings from MetaFacts indicating that "nearly half of Mac owners are 55 and older–almost double the share for average home PC users."  Apple disputes this claim, though I’d take it as a compliment that my tools can be used by a generation not raised by Grand Theft Auto. 

As it happens, the registered base* of Photoshop customers has skewed older in recent years, due to the exploding popularity of digital photography.  The same folks who in previous generations might’ve sprung for a home darkroom now tend to buy a really nice digital SLR, computer, and the best software to go with it.  These trends prompted my colleague Ashley to quip, "Photoshop & Macs: The new shuffleboard?"

This demographic trend has some practical implications. Most obviously, we need to make a user interface that’s easy to navigate with older eyes.  Given the 20- and 30-something demographics of many visual designers, this isn’t always easy to remember, but we’re working on it.  The emergence of scalable, resolution-independent will be essential here, and in the meantime Photoshop CS2 added the ability to adjust the font size of the interface (a small thing, literally, but a step in the right direction).

*Note: This of course way undercounts all the five-finger-discounting little l33t-speak haxxor-kiddies. (“im in ur base, stealin ur ‘Shop…”)

This week C|NET published findings from MetaFacts indicating that "nearly half of Mac owners are 55 and older–almost double the share for average home PC users."  Apple disputes this claim, though I’d take it as a compliment that my tools can be used by a generation not raised by Grand Theft Auto. 

As it happens, the registered base* of Photoshop customers has skewed older in recent years, due to the exploding popularity of digital photography.  The same folks who in previous generations might’ve sprung for a home darkroom now tend to buy a really nice digital SLR, computer, and the best software to go with it.  These trends prompted my colleague Ashley to quip, "Photoshop & Macs: The new shuffleboard?"

This demographic trend has some practical implications. Most obviously, we need to make a user interface that’s easy to navigate with older eyes.  Given the 20- and 30-something demographics of many visual designers, this isn’t always easy to remember, but we’re working on it.  The emergence of scalable, resolution-independent will be essential here, and in the meantime Photoshop CS2 added the ability to adjust the font size of the interface (a small thing, literally, but a step in the right direction).

*Note: This of course way undercounts all the five-finger-discounting little l33t-speak haxxor-kiddies. (“im in ur base, stealin ur ‘Shop…”)