Welcome to my technology blog!
See all the amazing new things that were announced on Day One of Adobe MAX during the Adobe Keynote Address. While I encourage you to watch the whole keynote, I think you’ll really like the stuff that gets shown near the end! Let’s just say "there’s an app for that!"
I’ve taken the liberty of giving you direct access to the entire keynote video here:
I’m here in Los Angeles for the day presenting at Adobe’s MAX conference. I’m a Featured Speaker and I have a Photoshop CS4 Tips and Tricks session on the conference track where I will be showing some of my favorite tips for enhancing and retouching your photos. If you’re here, stop by and say hello. Also don’t forget to Follow me on Twitter for updates about the show and new things being introduced.
I just wanted to give a quick thank you to all that came to my live photo shoot at the Westcott booth during Photoshop World Vegas last week. During my demo I showed how I use the Spiderlite TD5 daylight flourescent lighting system. When I got to the booth my lovely model was already there and waiting and the one thing I hadn’t considered was what she was wearing. As you can see in the photo she had lovely long black hair with a very lovely black outfit on and we were shooting against a Westcott popup "black" backdrop. In case you haven’t detected the theme here, there was a lot of "black" going on! I could have certainly flipped the backdrop around to the white side or I could have moved everything over to the Westcott uLite green screen setup, but I really decided to accept the challenge of lighting her with the Spiderlites.
Usually I have time to shoot, make adjustments, shoot, make adjustments, etc. However, in this case there was a crowd of people standing around and I had to make it work quickly. So I just went for it! I set my Nikon D5000 (my new travel DSLR) to 400 ISO at f/2.8 with my Nikon 28-70mm lens. I shot at a 1/60th of a second and my goal was to use just the Spiderlites and a reflector. Of course the shots were imported into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 and minimally retouched using Adobe Photoshop CS4.
One of the things that really bugs me about the iPhone’s built-in calendar is that there is no way to set an alert/alarm for Birthdays. They are already present in most of my Contacts. They appear automatically on the "Birthdays" Calendar, yet Apple doesn’t allow you to set reminders for this calendar without going through some workarounds. It wasn’t even until iPhone OS 3.0 that I had a way of subscribing to my Birthdays calendar on my IPhone directly. So there is still a LOT of room for improvement in this area.
Occasions is an iPhone app that is designed to overcome this shortcoming. It automatically picks up the birthdays and anniversaries in your Contacts. You can also enter events manually if you need to. It then keeps a running list in chronological order of upcoming occasions. While there are many iPhone apps that do this including the app I was using before "Upcoming Events", this app supports the iPhone 3.0 Push Notifications feature. This means that the app can pop up alerts and sounds without being open! My old app still hasn’t been updated with this important feature so I’ve moved on.
As promised I have posted the Adobe Keynote Video from Photoshop World Las Vegas. The keynote features lots of new technology introductions from both NAPP and Adobe. It’s well worth a watch. The keynote opens with some great football themed content from Scott Kelby and the Photoshop Guys and then they hand it over to Adobe’s SVP Johnny L who not only covers the progress that we’ve made with Photoshop CS4, but all the things that have come out since CS4 was introduced and a glimpse at some technologies in the works. Russell Preston Brown aka "Dr. Brown" helps out with the demos and shows how to use some of the cool features of Photoshop CS4 and Bridge CS4.
Follow Me on Twitter for more updates through out the rest of the week.
Continue reading “Adobe Photoshop World – Vegas Keynote Video”
Hey everyone! I’m here at Photoshop World in the Adobe booth showing some CS4 Design Premium Time Savers. I thought I would show the audience a live post using Adobe Contribute CS4 right from the show floor. So here it is!
Photoshop World kicks off this morning with the Adobe Keynote address by SVP, Johnny L. I’ll be on hand to report the going ons here on my blog via Twitter. You can of course Follow me on Twitter or watch the feed here. I also hope to post video from the Keynote later today so check back for that too.
As you know AT&T finally enabled MMS (Multimedia Messaging) on the iPhone last Friday after Apple introduced the feature back in July with the iPhone OS 3.0 update. Although the iPhone officially had this capability when 3.0 was introduced earlier this summer, AT&T iPhone customers had to wait until the end of summer before being able to use it. Now that it’s on and working for most of us (some are still having issues. If you are having issues, you may want to check out this troubleshooting document), the big question that I’ve been getting from a few friends is:
After all if you’re an iPhone user, you’ve been able to send pictures via email on your iPhone since day one right? In an iPhone only world, sending emails is a good way to go. However, most non-iPhones, especially non-smartphones, something as simple as email can be a real pain. Many (probably most) non-smartphone users don’t even have email setup on their phones. So the email would go to their computers and they would see what you sent then. OK, what’s wrong with that? Actually nothing at all. Desktop email is a rich experience and once the picture is received it can be printed, added to albums and managed in a photo management program. It can even be edited. So then why MMS? I don’t think that it’s one or the other (MMS or email), I think it’s a matter of using the right one for the right situation. Think of why you send SMS (text messages) vs. email today? Usually if you send someone an SMS message it’s because you want them to read it right then and there and usually you want a response. "Where are you?", "Bring home dinner." "What time does the movie start." "I’m running late." etc. etc. You could easily send each of these via email, but the problem is they may not get it in time. So you send an SMS message instead because you want immediate attention.
photo of me above by the amazing Joe McNally.
Photoshop World is one of the few shows I look forward to working each year because I have such a good time reconnecting with friends and customers. It’s really a treat being around a couple thousand users of your company’s products and the level of learning at this conference is second to none.
Although I’ve had a Playstation 3 in my home theater setup pretty much since they introduced it, there has been one thing that has always bugged me about it and that is that there really wasn’t a great universal remote solution for it. Granted I’ve used work arounds such as the Nyko Playstation 3 remote/adapter, but it didn’t allow for 100% control over all functions such as power on/off. It also occupies one of the PS3’s USB ports. So needless to say, I was happy to see Logitech come out with an adapter that is 100% functional!
Continue reading “Logitech Harmony Adapter for Playstation 3”
