Arranged Delirium

The Adobe Photoshop 6 Beta popped up last week, and its an important upgrade. I know - some upgrades are more important that others, and like always, this one depends on your needs. But if you are doing any real work with image manipulation you are going to want this one for the content-aware tools. Content Aware Fill was one of the best new features to come along in a long time and we’ve enjoyed it for some time now. With PS6, Adobe is building of that and putting more tools into play that are huge timesavers.

As usual, there are a ton of reviews available online, including these from MacWorld, c|net, and Digital Photography Review.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the UI has adopted the charcoal background that you see in many other Adobe apps. Looks like that trend will continue despite the usability studies that indicate the limited contrast of white text on dark backgrounds. I’m not trying to sound like an grumpy old man - I’m just saying we know that black text on a white background provides the most contrast and makes everything more readable. You can however adjust these levels of darkness which should help - but it means you’ll need to do the work to customize your workspace. But I guess the old interface was black on light grey, so the contrast wasn’t amazing anyway. I think we just get picky with tools we use daily…

But in terms of features, the most interesting elements for me (and my students) are the Content Aware Move and the Content Aware Patch tools. These work surprisingly well and make manipulations much faster. For students, this means they will be able to do things that all but the most dedicated would have avoided in the past due to time constraints. The crop tool is improved, and I think should help students that struggle with modifying images while confusing image size with resolution. I’m not sure yet - I’ll have to try it in the classroom. But this has been an ongoing conceptual problem for students working with digital imagery, so any advance is a help there. There are updates to the Camera Raw interface for improving images, and that will also be a welcome advance for my classes, since we use that all the time.

There are a number of features that will mean little to most users (video functionality, some new filters, etc.) but most of the additions are really helpful. I’m particularly pleased to see the return of text styles - I don’t want to switch to Illustrator just to do some character work. Also, there is a skin-tone masking ability that should make selections easier, but I struggled to make the tool work effectively. That could be user error though, so I’ll need to practice.

Overall, the big wins here are the content-aware tools. From an education perspective, you’ll be able to get student to do more, with less time involvement, which will likely increase motivation and decrease frustration. For my courses, this will be a “must have” upgrade. You can download the beta from Adobe Labs.

de Chelly is showing at Wide Open 3 in Brooklyn. The show opens today, so if you’re in the NYC area and want to see some interesting art, I think there’s a lot of nice work in this show. About 130 selections were made form over 1600 submissions, and I think the quality of the work in this show was quite high.

White Sands is showing at the National Art Premiere at the Elmhurst Art Museum. If you’re in the area… : )

Students in ITL 380 (Mobile App Development) will likely be interested in recent data regarding mobile browser market share. Here’s a link to the recent data.

One of the design issues we are struggling with is: how safe are we when we use webkit-specific style declarations? Well, I’d say fairly safe. The only major mobile browser that isn’t based on webkit is Opera Mini (I think - I’ll need to check. I guess I’m getting old.). Of course, I use Mozilla on my android devices, so I’ll need to check some of our work there to see how it works. Fun times.

Now that Adobe has finally abandoned Flash and embraced HTML5 it’s producing a number of tools to facilitate development. I think we’ll be going through a period of time where we’re waiting for the dust to settle, but there are a number of interesting tools to explore while waiting. First, Adobe bought out Nimblekit and wrapped PhoneGap into Dreamweaver so you can compile mobile apps developed in HTML5. It’s a good approach, and makes Dreamweaver even more useful - but it continues to add to the bloat of that application (meaning that DW is essentially a software development platform and not as useful for small projects). That’s all good if you know what you are doing, but if (like my students) you are just learnign how to do some of these things, it’s not the best tool.

I am excited though about Shadow, which is a new tool on Adobe Labs that lets you view your HTML5 development on multiple devices. As it matures, this could be a versatile tool. On of the challenges I’ve noticed in my own web/mobile development is that it’s much easier to write new code that runs well on all platforms than to try and go back and re-tool older code that I wrote years ago. Shadow can make it easier to see how those new designs will look on multiple devices.

If you are into this stuff, you might also be interested in Edge (essentially a timeline-based animation tool). This would give you a good idea of where to go now that Flash is dead.