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.