Tips From Tony Blog

Dateline: Macworld Expo 2007

Photoshop CS3

I spent some time watching the Photoshop CS3 beta demonstration today, and it was wonderful - The main impressions I’m taking away with me are:

- It’s jammed with new, very worthwhile features
- It’s a lot faster (on Intel Macs), and
- It’s going to be worth the upgrade, but…
- We will all need to take tutorials to find the best new tools.

Once Photoshop CS3 comes out in final, production form, I will probably be giving overview classes, just to motivate everybody to learn more.

Apple Consultants Network

I spent some time chatting with the folks representing the Apple Consultants Network today, and I think that I’m going to re-join. I used to belong to the ACN back in the very first days, but it didn’t suit my needs at the time. According to everything that I’m hearing, it’s time to give it another look. I expect that I’ll be getting referrals from other local consultants, once they find out that my specialty is CREATIVE people - Fussy, non-linear, high-maintenance types. I love ‘em!

MOST nerdly consultants get a bad case of the hives from folks like that. Creative folks don’t communicate in the same fashion as technical types, and they tend to talk right past each other. I’m unusual because I can speak fluent Geek (sometime it feels like Ancient Geek), but I relate better to artists than to accountants.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of vendors, products, publications, handouts, demos and people that I haven’t written about, and I feel guilty about it (that darned Catholic Guilt!). Instead of trying to feed you the whole smorgasbord via two-fingered typing, I chose to absorb the entire show osmotically and to use what I’ve learned in future writings. If you’re one of my local clients, you can grill me directly, next time that we see each other!

I’m very glad that I came here this week… It’s wonderful to be at the very tip of the wave of change, and everybody here is on the same blissful high. I haven’t seen anybody be a jerk. I’m surrounded by Techno-Hippies!

Well, I’ve downloaded and installed the Public Beta version of Photoshop CS3 (which also includes Adobe Bridge CS3). Better than that, I’ve also downloaded the FREE video tutorial for Photoshop CS3 Beta, which taught me one thing, very, very clearly:

Adobe really HATES the idea of Apple taking business away from them.

A while back, six programmers at Adobe jumped ship and started working for Apple, and created Aperture, which is one of my favorite programs. It’s optimized for professional photographers, and it’s hard to learn (because it uses such advanced new concepts), but it’s really fast and easy to use, once learned. I took some classes, and I love it. It does not compete with Photoshop in any way.

Adobe DESPISES it, though - They want all of that pro-photographer business for themselves. Right around the same time that Apple announced Aperture 1.0, Adobe announced Lightroom, which directly competes with Aperture.

Now that I’ve taken the free Lynda.com tutorial for Photoshop CS3 Beta, I can see that Adobe is folding everything in Lightroom into the Adobe Bridge software that works with Photoshop CS3. Bridge is identical-identical-identical in operation to Aperture. Other than the shape of the magnifying glass (square vs. round), Bridge CS3 steals Apple’s ideas, down to the very tiniest details. I mean seriously - It’s time for Apple’s famous lawyers to start filing papers in court. I’m boggled - I haven’t seen such a blatant interface-theft case since Windows 1.01.

Other than that, I haven’t done much hard-core evaluating of Photoshop CS3 Beta’s speed. I’ve been letting other folks do the heavy lifting, so far. It seems to work fine on MY MacBook Pro, but I haven’t got any hard jobs to throw at it, so close to the holidays. I’m also aware that it has all sorts of issues, so I’m in no rush to be on the bleeding edge, quite yet.
I’ll keep y’all posted on any progress that I have made, though. Watch this space for further developments.

This is looking very good, and I’m jazzed… There are lots and lots of new techniques popping up to run Windows applications on an Intel Mac. I’ve been waiting for one that: - Doesn’t require a Mac user to re-start into a different, alien environment, and - Doesn’t force anybody to load Windows. The idea is to double-click on a Windows program and just run it alongside your Mac programs. This is highly important for folks such as realtors running “MLS” software that will ONLY run on a PC. Evidently, Crossover for the Mac is in the early, “beta” stage, but it’s getting some rave reviews already: I plan to be watching this one very closely.