Firstly, it’s worth noting that this free software is published by Adobe, developed using Flash, and is featured in the App Store.

For those who keep their head off the Internet/are apathetic towards Apple’s mobile platform powerplays, let me just briefly note that Apple and Adobe are hardly best of friends. Accordingly, while the approval of a Flash-based application is a little cheeky, the elevation of one to featured app store status is straight up devious.

We can only speculate as to whether pragmatic or political reasons motivated Adobe’s development in this way. Self-evidently, they have a lot of in-house competencies around Flash development, but they would also love to get a product approved insofar as it drives adoption of their Connect platform (which, unlike the App Store app, is anything but free).

There are many less sneaky ways of building a compelling tech demo. If I had to guess, I’d attribute the use of Flash to a substantial existing software investment for web-based clients that was largely portable to the mobile context. The impact this has on user experience is likely to be minimal, as they likely redesigned the frontend entirely — though obviously other performance concerns may apply.

At any rate, this is the first I’ve noticed of approvals of overtly Flash-based applications. If possible, this may open the App Store floodgates even further, while providing hope to many for whom the barrier to entry in terms of rewriting code was simply too high.

We’re excited about this as certain component parts of software we’ve developed depends strongly on Flash for data visualization and reporting. The prospect of being able to deploy this on the iPhone (and yes, the iPad) is a compelling opportunity that is, plainly, freaking exciting.

In InDesign, press ⌘+K (Ctrl + K) to bring up the Preferences dialog, then click through to the last pane, “Clipboard Handling”. At the bottom of this pane, under “When Pasting Text and Tables from Other Applications”, set Paste to “All Information (Index Markers, Swatches, Styles, etc.)

Some Word styling will now import — watch carefully to make sure nothing too stupid finds its way into your pristine InDesign document!

However, it is not without its faults. On Vista, when typing text in Fireworks things can occasionally go very, very wrong. The solution at least initially is to turn off the “Auto Kern” option in the Properties dialog — but this removes one of the big benefits of using Fireworks in the first place!

There are other options. The problem will go away (sometimes) when the file is closed and Fireworks is restarted — this is hit and miss. More permanently, disabling Vista’s fancy-pants Aero theme (the thing that makes all window borders transparent, gives that snazzy Start + Tab effect, etc.) will ensure you have a glitch-free Fireworks font experience.

The real solution? Sneak into Adobe HQ and write a patch to fix the stupid thing!

The “Initial View” setting in Adobe Acrobat is the answer. Simply open Document Properties (Ctrl+D on Windows, or ⌘+D in OS X) and click onto the “Initial View” tab. Here, you can set the initial page display format, opening page, zoom levels, and even what the title of the window is.

When you’re done, just close the Document Properties window and save your file. Easy!

By vendor, that constitutes 176 crashes/hangs/‘not-respondings’ of Microsoft software to 21 of Adobe software over the same period. Now, it feels like I’m cheating the numbers here by reporting Windows Problem Reporting itself, because probably 90% of its crashes occur when reporting on Internet Explorer, but hey — these are the numbers Microsoft’s software itself gave me, so who’s complaining?

In case you think this isn’t a fair comparison for reasons of time spent using various programmes, exclude Problem Reporting crashes (though you shouldn’t) and the Microsoft stat comes down to 124. That is, lots.

I can’t think of a day since owning this computer I wouldn’t have used at least one piece of Adobe software, most commonly more. To be fair, Adobe software is more likely to do weird things (like, ya know, refusing to save) causing me to restart the application rather than letting it ‘crash’ per se… but Microsoft’s junk is vastly less likely to give me any sort of warning before flaking out.

These crashes are reported over a three-month period spanning November 26 until January 25.

Vista SP1 continues to be eagerly awaited.

It does a lot of things right. CS2 was good in its integration but pretty mediocre in thumbnailing and metadata support, but this is finally an app worth having. The filter (bottom left) is magical; the thumbnailing isn’t horrifically compressed like it used to be; resizing using the slider is a lot faster; there are three different immensely-useful views built in…

It’s just good. And lots lots lots faster to use than CS2 is (load time is similar, but once you’re actually using it… pure gold).

For whatever reason, I wasn’t paying attention when I bought CS2.

I somehow failed to realise that Production Studio Pro has nearly all the same things (ex. DTP stuff that I don’t really have much of a use for, but it’s nice having anyway) and more (Premiere, AfterEffects) for… not a lot more money at all.

*breathes deeply*

On the plus side, Creative Suite 3 is launching later this month though I don’t know if that means the next version of Premiere just yet. So I’ll wait til that’s an option before purchasing Production Studio, which means I get CS3 versions of the stuff I actually use — Photoshop & Illustrator — and still have CS2 of non-essentials, like InDesign, GoLive, etc. Acrobat is going to be alright for a while coz I’ve already got Acrobat 8 because of relatively-late acquisition of CS2. Dreamweaver… I don’t particularly care about, though I’ve happily used it for various things.

And yeah, I’m still going to uni and doing all that sorta thing, so it’s cheaper. I’m just vaguely annoyed I didn’t drop $200 more for Production Studio when I could’ve if I’d read a bit more, but it’s done now. Hopefully they’ll launch a new version of that along with CS3 so I can pick it up soon after the end of this month.

One day I might even make a decent amount of money out of this :P My reasoning is that living at home & studying = good time for doing loss-running, skill– and network-building, moderately-expensive-but-just-within-means geeky things.

At the minute I’m not losing money on it, but it’s not something I’d be able to afford to do if I were dependent on regular income for rent, or whatever. Speaking of regularity, John C & I ran job interviews yesterday and decided to get one of the applicants onboard for CYIADA! So now that enters the build phase & we’re actually going to be MakingStuff™ that’ll become more directed and stable — not in a financial sense, but just in a number-of-hours-a-week kinda way. At the minute my hours have fluctuated a bit depending on what I’ve been able to think of/motivated to get done, but that’ll obviously stabilise a lot as I move back to cutting code and actually seeing it develop!

Anyway. Can’t wait.

The new version of Word is a thing of beauty. It just works, and makes sense, and is generally a usability wonder. I’m sure someone will publish a study to the contrary in the next week, but I don’t care — it is perfectly intuitive to a non-Office literate user. Yes, that is myself–I’ve battled with OO.org for years, and am utterly convinced it sucks. I have occasionally fought with MS Office products in this time, and battled slightly less, but still it’s felt like I’m doing things the slow way. Every essay I’ve written over the last eighteen months is stored in LyX (LaTeX) format: I’ve basically not used a word processor for anything serious in at least that long. And I haven’t used a Microsoft word processor at home for three years (on a horrible laptop), and not on my primary desktop computer for four, or possibly five. Historical perspective: I started using Windows when I was 7, stopped when I was 15 or 16, and returned at 18 ½ — Microsoft have got good reason to be trying to bring me back into the family, because I’ve been away for a long time.

I am as upset as the next web developer about the Outlook team’s brain-dead decision to switch back to Word as the primary rich email rendering engine, but will wax lyrical about the new calendaring features in Outlook!! For they are greatly beautiful. Observe my three calendars (Organised into: Personal & Work; Uni; Church) layered together here:

Groove makes me shrug enormously, it does nothing useful for me. Unless it’s like Sharepoint only… good. But even then, I’ve never dug that whole Intranet collaborative thang. Really, if I were going to run bloat-inducing collaborative software, I should start with Adobe’s Version Cue. But I don’t use it because… too many apps in my tray annoys me, and Firefox eats all my memory as is (screeny from yesterday… it peaked at about 1GB but I couldn’t be bothered taking another):

The only reason I still use that bloody browser is its extensions support: Firebug has stolen my heart where Office 2007 hasn’t yet. Here’s its asset download graphy thingamijig:

It’s even better than Chris Pederick’s toolbar. But oh how I’d love to switch to Opera (or even, shock, IE) full time now. Firefox really isn’t doing it for me with its bloat these days.

Speaking of bloat, Office 2007 is one 500MB download. It doesn’t download a 500MB stub and then install the rest — no, that includes Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel, Publisher, … and all the other random crap I installed but will probably never use. Fantastic.

Everything is pretty fast (but it emphatically encourages you to install Windows Live Desktop, and seeing as I’m a beta tester for other Live stuff pretty willingly, I figured I may as well, and when you first install that indexing makes everything chug) which is excellent — but I’m still looking to buy a new dual core 939 sometime soon. Graphics are fine because I have no intention of upgrading to Vista (read: needing DirectX 10 and a $1000 graphics card) in the next 18 months at least, but… well, another 2GB of RAM would go down nicely. Shame it’s still relatively expensive, though.

Microsoft, I wasn’t going to pirate your software because it’s not that good, but thanks for the discount, anyway!

It’s almost frustrating to find such good and mature CMS products on the market and not have any need to use them for CYIADA… I spent the last week mostly trying to shape fairly simple data models for different aspects of the website and it’s rapidly becoming clear just how structurally complex multi-tiered community/community generated content sites are. At least in terms of relational DB complexity, yes, this is bigger than MySpace.

Anyway, SilverStripe looks worth a look for simpler endevours.

The complexity is mostly introduced where users become authors, which defies traditional CMS workflow altogether. It’s also far more structured than Wiki systems are, and far more private. Privacy is being balanced against flexibility which is being balanced against community and all of these are being met with time/cost concerns.

But I like to keep telling myself I don’t really know what I’m talking about and getting a programmer will solve all these dilemmas … yeah, right.

I’ve got sick of sitting on my hands and just want to be a web practitioner again. I know the product inside out, it’s been planned to the hilt, stakeholders are universally intrigued/waiting for it, and I’m being impatient and feeling generally like charging forwards. Which is, in all probability, not the best way to be approaching things.

These two consultants came in a week ago and we explained the project to them and (what I heard was) they said “we want flowcharts and scope documents”. I’ve killed a few trees in my time, but the next person to help me in that isn’t going to be a consultant telling me to rehash (yet again — I’ve written documents in so many forms, website copy so many times, etc.) what I’ve got without any further input. I’m in this weird place now where waiting for a programmer is nearly required for further planning action, and everyone but me appears to want more planning before action… meanwhile, I’m writing models for Django and scaring myself with the complexity and learning Adobe products better and generally landing squarely back in front-end territory, which is where I’ve comfortably been for the last two or so years. Well, with the exception of Adobe products, which I only finally caved to last year… whatever :P

The box is nearly big enough to fit a partridge (whatever that is) in, too.

This is probably really average stuff these days, but I’ve never driven Protools and haven’t touched audio editing things with a barge pole for so many years now that, frankly, it doesn’t matter whether it’s objectively innovative or not. Seems brilliant to me.

My biggest problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to add to an existing selection? That, and because I’ve been spending a bit of time in graphicsland this week (so I’m a newborn Adobe junkie, oh well!), it seems like the Remove a Sound task (and effects in general) would be a perfect candidate for application of whatever the audio equivalent of a mask layer is in terms of user interface. Non-destructive, easy to turn on/off, easy to build up in multiple passes (because it’s really still quite linear in the way you have to work).

Then again, it’s entirely probable I’ve just completely missed some way of working that makes it all very sensible… but possibly not. Whatever, I’m quite content to keep playing for a while longer… only I’d like to get this particular job done (audio & video) before today is over!

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jan. 4, 2007 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that the next version of Adobe® Production Studio, the integrated video and audio postproduction tool set that is part of the Creative Suite family, will be available for both the Macintosh and Windows® platforms. Film, video and web professionals currently using Adobe After Effects®, Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Illustrator® on the Mac will soon be able to harness the power of completely new Macintosh releases of Adobe Premiere® Pro, Adobe Encore® DVD and Adobe Soundbooth™ — all key components of an upcoming milestone revision to Adobe Production Studio. The software will have its first public demonstration during the Macworld 2007 Conference and Exhibition at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, January 9 – 12 (Booth 901). The next release of Adobe Production Studio is expected to ship in mid-2007.

Are they trying to convince me to buy a Mac? Ever since someone showed me what you can do with Objective C and Quartz to any video source on a Mac I’ve been wishing it were practical to buy one and use it for everything I wanted to, but couldn’t bring myself to consider FCP on account of lack of snazzy integration. Ah well. I’m sure something else will crop up before the elusively-dated “mid-2007″ to help me reconsider…

Speaking of software, though, as soon as I buy that it’s time to finally get Premiere as well. So. Sick. Of. iMovie/WMM/Avid Free DV/whatever. The few times I’ve had opportunity to use Premiere for a while have been fairly pleasant experiences — obviously it’s a lot more powerful than free crap, but that doesn’t seem to have a massive usability trade-off. Which is, you know, kinda nice. Only, again, kinda expensive.

If I pay any tax this year after having claimed all this software I’ll be slightly horrified :P

I was reading a PDF document this evening and of a sudden there comes forth a dialogue (uninvited) proclaiming gifts. It was, of course, a ploy to make me download Adobe’s crap (I do not feel particularly inventive in my invective this evening — “crap” suffices to describe such software for the minute). For which I did not fall.

I dutifully selected “Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0.7.1.6.3.4.4.32.265.5.3.3.5.3.3.whateveritsnotlikeiactuallycareanymorebecauseitstillreadsthesamecrapdoesn’tit.howhardisittomakeadocumentreaderyoudon’tneedtoupdateeverytwoweeks?“
and let it do its thing (being careful, as always, not to select anything unessential). It cruised along, I started doing something else (having dutifully abandoned what I was reading).

It (very sensibly) downloads in silence in the background, and doesn’t try and get my attention even when it finishes: it knows that I will pay it attention in due course. Indeed, I do. It begins installing (or, unpacking the installer).

Of a sudden, it decides it would be an opportune moment to steal focus whilst still on a progress bar dialogue in which the only button is “Cancel”. Okay. Point one: moronic time to steal focus, no user action is required. Point two: stealing focus can mean the user is about to do any manner of things in terms of key presses or mouse clicks. Point three: when the only user interface element cancels the operation that’s pressing this apparently-urgent update to a document reader (yes, it’s a freaking document reader — oh, hurry up everyone, let’s all go and patch Notepad. Dangerous security flaws! Watch out!), chances are users aren’t going to bother going back.

So, instead, I printed out the Adobe logo onto a sheet of 3-ply toilet paper and.… okay, perhaps not so literal. Suffice to say, I am presently in no hurry to install any more of their garbage. Stronger words could be used.