One of the most important tools for people in my industry is Adobe's Creative Suite. I probably use Photoshop more than any other product. And today is the day adobe released CS4.
I have just finished watching the special one hour event, and I must admit that I am very excited about the news. The most important feature is, without a doubt, their focus on time-savers and integration. That is, they have made a lot of things many times faster to do, either by speeding up the process - or by reducing the number of step you had to take to do something cool. That alone is worth the money for an upgrade.
They have also made the integration between each product much more flexible and consistent, which is great news for me, because I don't do everything myself. In fact, when it comes to video and flash I turn to my colleagues that are much more skilled at these things.
We also use CS3 to automate a ton of things that we normally had to do manually, and I really hope that Adobe had improved that as well - although I have not been able to find any news about automation, and CS4 scripting.
Of course, the new features are also - always - very exciting, but to me, the workflow is where the gold is.
I must admit that I am super-excited about the new content aware scaling. I very often have to scale images in ways that is usually a nightmare. I have to make a horizontal image fit into a landscape box on the web (almost everything is landscape on the web), or even worse - make a tall image fit into landscape mode on a mobile phone (that is usually a killer).
Another very interesting development is Flash 10, which is going to allow us to do a lot more than what we used to do. Apart from built in 3D (YEAH!), it also has built in hardware acceleration support. One of the biggest issues with Flash these days is that it is insanely slow. If you have ever tried to do multi-layered effects, or handle 200 elements at once, then you will know what I am talking about. Flash 10, supposedly, solves this.
I have not tried out Adobe CS4 yet. But I will be sure to get my hands on it as soon as I can.
Here is a brilliant idea. What if your furniture could react intelligently to your presence and anticipate when you need it. Or what if it could move out of your way out of the way when you are just passing by? What if your furniture could help out in social situation? Wouldn’t that be something?
There are many online image editors. Like Picnik (which was recently bought by Google), Pixlr, Aviary Phoenix, Photoshop online and many others. All them require that you go to their website to edit your images. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could bring the online image editor into your own web apps.?
Back in late October 2009, Adobe Labs showcased an upcoming feature in Photoshop called Content Aware Fill. And it was absolutely amazing. Now they have released another video, showcasing even more impressive image manipulations.
Earlier this week Penguin presented their vision for how they could translate their book into the ebook format. Or rather, how they can really make us of digital publishing to create much better books.
Remember Microsoft Surface? You know, the big multi-touch coffee table? Now Microsoft is working on a much smaller version with Mobile Surface.
Today, Microsoft announced "Windows Phone 7 Series", featuring a completely new edition to the long infamous Windows Mobile operating system. It looks modern, polished, graphically exciting and nothing like the tiny windows 95 that we have been used to seeing.
The newspaper industry is falling over themselves in the fight to come up with a ever more impressive newspaper tablet. The problem is that they miss the point completely (as I wrote about in "The Future of News, Tablets, and Business Models").
As you probably know, both Google and Microsoft have entered into a partnership with Twitter and is now incorporating social search into their regular search engines. This is a big deal because social is a very important element of the future of search... it's not the only part though.
Wouldn't you like to mix wild hand gestures, cute birds flying around your screen, Twitter, tweeting bird sounds, and your web camera? Well, now you can with Flyar.
A number of people have pointed me towards PhotoSketch, a research/student project from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at National University of Singapore (now there is a mouthful).
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