May 29th, 2012
Casey McCallister has put together some great filters for Adobe Lightroom that resemble the filters in Instagram. Some say they aren’t perfect replicas but I couldn’t see how they could be. I think they’re pretty good.
Good idea. And I’m glad he’s charging for them.
/via The Verge.
May 17th, 2012
Interesting project by Adobe – Shadow is a way to share your current browser’s location with a bunch of different devices. In the demo embedded here it shows how easily it would make testing a site layout or web app on all of your devices at once. Pretty slick.
November 6th, 2010
What do I think about this recent “movement” to uninstall Flash? Glad you asked.
I think it is great. Flash has certainly been a tool to help us get to where we are today and no one could argue with its ubiquity. It is a tool that was good enough to get the job done and pretty much everyone had it.
But tools have cost and some are more expensive than others. Flash has proved to be a bit too expensive on the Mac for some people. At the cost of performance and battery life – some would rather do without that particular tool and go with another one. One that costs less, seemingly has the same quality but maybe less features. HTML5 video playback, on most up-to-date Macs, outperforms Flash video playback in nearly every way except features. But, arguably, most every day uses for video do not need many features.
So why do I think it is great that so many are uninstalling Flash? Because there hasn’t been enough pressure on Adobe over the years to improve Flash’s performance on the Mac. Adobe has been updating Flash for years but (and this point is probably arguable) they’ve been worried less about performance on the Mac then they’ve been worried perhaps about features. They’ve spent more time making Flash do more instead of simply doing it better.
Apple started putting pressure on Adobe by releasing the iPhone without Flash. Apple never said Flash didn’t do anything useful – they simply pointed out what needed to be improved in Flash for it to run on the iPhone. Performance and stability were the two biggest complaints from Apple. The two things Adobe seemingly hadn’t been focused on. And Apple also thought Flash didn’t have very good interactions with a touch-based interface. Something Adobe could probably address rather easily.
With the success of both the iPhone and iPad obviously the guys at Adobe should have been striving pretty hard to make Flash run much better on these mobile devices. Obviously they haven’t done that or been able to accomplish that because – well, Flash still isn’t on the iPhone.
Then Apple decided that the new Macbook Air performs much better without Flash being installed and so they’ve left it out of this model by default. Something they learned from not having Flash on the iPhone and iPad. The new Macbook Air can boast a considerably longer battery life and better CPU performance simply because it does not have Flash installed.
Sure, many new Macbook Air owners will still install Flash the moment their browser tells them they don’t have it – but I’d bet they are selling boat loads of these Airs so there are still going to be a lot of people without Flash running around the Web.
This recent fad of Flash being uninstalled en masse by the Mac tech crowd, the Fireballers if I may, is simply the next squeeze on Adobe. Yet another reason for Adobe to step up and alleviate the reasons people are uninstalling Flash.
Put simply, if Flash didn’t cause our Macs to melt and our batteries to die this conversation wouldn’t be happening. The iPhone would have shipped with Flash, the iPad too, and we’d all be happy to have Flash installed on our Macs. But the truth is Flash really sucks on the Mac. And as a Macintosh user and someone who works for a company with a very big Flash product – I’m hoping that Adobe is being squeezed hard enough now to make something finally happen. To finally make Flash better on the Mac.
August 31st, 2009
For our 10th anniversary, which was on the 27th of August, we received an incredible gift from Eliza’s mother Carla – an anniversary party in our favor. Since she told us many months in advance that she was going to throw us this party we were able to help with some of the planning and, something I thoroughly enjoyed doing, the invitations.
Since we were planning on inviting a few hundred people I knew that we couldn’t do anything like the LOST invitations (since they took a long time to do) and certainly nothing hand-drawn like the thank you card that I had done in the past. This had to be something digital, printable, personal, fun, and reflect our personalities.
My favorite set of photos of Eliza and I are ones that we took in a photo booth. To be honest I don’t even know where we were when we took these photos (I’m sure Eliza will leave a comment below answering this) but I just know that these were some of my favorite photos of us. I decided to extend that idea into the invitation and started to browse around online for inspiration.
I ended up finding several examples of people that had taken photo booth generated photos to use them in “film strips” as ways to create things like invitations and other fun projects. Once I had the idea in mind, I opened Photoshop and got to work.
The idea and execution is amazingly simple. Take a single film strip, duplicate it as many times as you want, move them around to make them look like they are sitting on a table, and pop in some photos. But we had a problem. We knew we needed to have text on the invitation for things like the date and time, location, and RSVP information. So Eliza had the idea that we’d hold up blank sheets of paper and I’d then be able to add the text later. This worked out really well since we were able to position the information anyway that we wanted it and spread it out over the invitation as we thought would look neat.
So Eliza and I fired up Photo Booth, an application that comes with all Macintoshes, took a few hundred random photos of us doing silly faces, normal faces, holding up wine, cats, and blank sheets of paper. Then, I slowly placed us into all of the film strips and rotated them until we were happy. Then we saved the file and sent it off to Overnight Prints – a simple and inexpensive printery that we’ve used in the past.
The invitations turned out to be a pretty big hit and now I’m looking forward to putting something together for the thank you cards that we’ll be sending everyone.
July 20th, 2009
Roz Savage, the Ocean Rower I linked to the other day, recently mentioned that she was a feature on Bing.com’s home page. Since I’m a few days behind on reading her posts she was no longer featured on the home page by the time I got there.
I noticed that Bing.com’s home page features have little arrows in the bottom right where you can, or seemingly can, go back and see past home page features. There’s just one thing – when you try to go back to previous home page features you get this message.
Essentially: You need to install Microsoft Silverlight – which is Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash – in order to see the home page archive.
No thanks Microsoft. Although I’d love to page through Bing’s home page features I’d rather not install Silverlight. I’m not sure why I can see the current home page feature without it installed – but I’ll chalk it up to the developers of Bing being pigeon-holed into using Silverlight instead of JavaScript and/or Flash to create the home page archive.
My suggestion: Go with JavaScript so that everyone can see the home page archive and there is no real competition argument to be had.
February 12th, 2009
An excellent example of why I’m happy I did this experiment – here is a tutorial from Jesse J. Anderson on how to make seamless grunge textures using Photoshop.
What I appreciate the most about Jesse’s tutorial is the step-by-step detail that is given. A lot of tutorials, that I’ve come across for similar things, are a mess of screenshots with captions as instructions. I like this balance better.
April 15th, 2008
Leo Laporte recently went to Tasmania on a photography adventure. Sponsored by O’Reilly and Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Adventure on the Australian island seemed to be a blast (and you can consider me jealous).
Recently Leo went through his bag and showed off his photo kit that he brought with him to Tasmania, why he chose to bring what he did, and how it uses each of the things in his bag. Leo is sporting a Canon 5D with a three or four lenses. Watch the the video for more, or click through to his blog and watch it.
February 19th, 2008
What do geeks do when they have a little free time on their hands? They accessorize! On Sunday I found myself wanting to play with my iPhone’s camera. Since getting the iPhone, and even more since I because posting mobile photos to Flickr, I’ve wanted to try out new ways of distorting, enhancing, and affecting the images capture by the iPhone.
A few years ago one of my digital cameras just decided it didn’t want to work anymore. It wouldn’t turn on. Actually, to be more accurate, the thing wouldn’t turn off. Turns out that there was a small screw inside that busted up the innards. No idea how that happened.
Well, like any self respecting geek I kept the camera’s body around for a few years always thinking I’d do something with it eventually. You know, the same way car enthusiasts keep around old Corvette parts thinking one day they’ll rebuild those. That’s me with electronics – only, I’m horrible at rebuilding things, but fantastic at ripping them apart.
I figured that inside of this extraordinarily complex device I would surely find some way to manipulate the way the iPhone took photos. Turns out, I ended up with a fairly decent macro lens for the iPhone.
The macro lens on the iPhone
Obviously this thing isn’t built for the road, but it works in a pinch. I just took some double-sided tape, wrapped the lens from the camera’s eye-piece in it, then used a paper clip to fasten it to the iPhone. Yeah, I know, prize winning engineering indeed.
I am not sure how I’ll end up using this, but I’m glad that I know have it in my bag should a reason to use it arise. It does a fairly good job and I’m happy with the outcome. I’m looking forward to finding a way to build a fish-eye lens now – and I’m open to suggestions on how exactly to pull that off.
The iPhone doesn’t have a built-in flash. Some mobile phones with cameras built-in actually have a pretty bright flash, but the iPhone has none, zip, zilch. I’ve never really cared about that, but I can see why when people switch from a phone that has it would complain.
Last year at SXSW’s keynote featuring Will Wright’s demonstration of SPORE (which has a release date of September 7, 2008 that I’m excited about) Adobe graciously gave away some odd little lights. Each light has a small handle on the side that lets you crank it up to power the light. Pretty neat little gizmo, so I fastened it to a mount that came with my old iSight and voila, instant light for the iPhone. Here is a photo of it.
This isn’t anything special, of course, and the results are a bit meh. But I thought it good enough to use when I might need it. The iPhone is terrible in low-light conditions so anything helps.
Conclusion? The lens is going in my laptop bag and the light will probably stay home.
Update March 21, 2008 — I’ve now recorded a video demonstration of the macro lens in action.
This is the 500th post to cdevroe.com.
May 25th, 2007
So a few weeks ago I asked for help to switch back to iPhoto from Aperture. I had a few issues that I wasn’t able to solve myself so I asked the masses for some direction.
Turns out I did learn a few things from the conversations this post, and the Apple discussion board post, that I created. But, nothing that came through those channels provided me with the solution I needed.
But I lucked out! I was digging through some old backups and I found that I backed up my photo library just before switching to Aperture on February 12th of this year. All I needed to do was open the backup, import any photos I took since that day, and move some libraries around and poof! I’m back in iPhoto and loving it.
As I stated, and before anyone gets a little woozy about using Aperture for their photo cataloging needs, the only reasons I am switching back are mentioned in this post. Nothing more. I really like Aperture but I can not deal with those two caveats (unfortunately). I look forward to giving Aperture, or perhaps Lightroom, another look in the future.