Memorial Day – A Day To Honor Those Who Made The Ultimate Sacrifice

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the men and women that currently serve or have served in our US Military Service! Your continued sacrifices to protect our freedoms are greatly appreciated. We are able to spend this day with our friends and families because of what you do!

As we observe this solemn day, we must remember all the brave men and women in uniform who gave their lives in the service of our great country.

Again, Thank You!

Terry White

Gelaskins: The Terry White Collection :)

I’ve been using Gelaskins for a couple of years now to customize my various devices. As a photographer I’m always looking for ways to display my work. Put the two together and now my “Creative Portfolio” is on my MacBook Pro, iPad and iPhone.

P.S. I love it when the TSA agents are so busy looking at my photos that they forget to make me take off my belt! 😉

Check out Gelaskins here. You can buy existing designs or upload your own!

Review – The Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for iPad 2 and the New iPad

Sometimes I get comments here, jokingly about how much money I just cost you because I reviewed something cool that now you must have. Well you’ll take pleasure in knowing that it just happened to me too. My colleague and gadget buddy Dave Helmly just showed me his latest gadget and in about 3 seconds I knew I’d have to have one.

The Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for iPad 2 and the New iPad

I’ve tried other iPad keyboards and while they work, I usually just ended up carrying my Apple Bluetooth Keyboard. The problem I had with the ones that are designed to be a case for the iPad is that they typically added more weight and bulk to the iPad than what I was willing to carry. At that point I figured I might as well carry my MacBook Air. That all changed when I saw the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover! First of all the “ultrathin” part is key. I use Apple Smart Covers now and I don’t want any cover that’s much thicker than those. Logitech brilliantly designed their Keyboard Cover as a “Smart Cover”. That’s right, it magnetically snaps on to the iPad 2 and the New iPad just like Apple’s Smart covers do. Just snap it on and close it. It maintains a very low profile and is very thin when attached. The next smart thing they did was they made a magnetic slot to dock the iPad in to prop it up either vertically or horizontally while you use the keyboard.

The keyboard is bluetooth as you would expect and rechargeable via a standard USB micro cable. Speaking of the keyboard itself, the first key I looked for was the import Shift Key on the left side! The other keyboard I tried (Brookstone) didn’t have a Shift Key on both sides and that really bothered me. Typing on this keyboard seems very natural. I can’t speak to battery life yet as I’ve only spent a few hours playing with Dave’s, but I’ve already ordered one for myself. Damn you Dave you just cost me money (again)! 🙂

You can get the Logitech Ultrathink Keyboard Cover for iPad 2 and the New iPad here for about $99.

The Tour Site That Muse Built – Thank You Oslo, Prague, Warsaw & Istanbul!

A packed house in Warsaw

As many of you know I’m currently on my Adobe CS6 and Creative Cloud World Tour. As I visit different countries showing Adobe’s latest offerings I like to use my own demo files as much as I can. This means photos and videos I’ve taken as well as using real-world scenarios. Last week it hit me! The best way to show off Adobe Muse was to build a site in it from scratch, update it live on stage in front of the audience and publish it so that they could check it out themselves.

I rolled the site out during the Warsaw tour stop and it was a big hit.

The Gear

Using my Nikon D7000 and an Eye-Fi Pro X2 Card I shot wirelessly to my iPad using the Shuttersnitch App. I then chose the ones I wanted and using the PhotoSync App I wirelessly transferred the photos to my MacBook Pro (granted I could have had the Eye-Fi card configured to transfer directly to my computer, but it was already configured to go to the iPad). From there I used a Photoshop CS6 Droplet to automate saving the high-res images to web ready jpegs and then I added them to the slideshow for that particular city.

The beautiful city of Prague

Adobe Muse is a fantastically easy tool to design and build websites with!

Check out the site here: cs6tour.businesscatalyst.com

CloudFTP Lets You Share a Hard Drive Wirelessly with Your Devices, even your iPad

I ordered this little gadget before heading out on my current tour and got a chance to try it out in the hotel lounge with one of my colleagues. CloudFTP for all intents and purposes is a little adhoc access point with a USB port on it. Technically you should be able to hook up just about any storage device to it and share the content on that device wirelessly with your devices (computers and iOS/Android devices).

I figured I’d give it a real world test and time for a CloudFTP review. I took it out of the box, read the little manual that comes with it (so I could figure out how to access it), plugged in my LaCie Rugged Firewire 800/USB 2 backup drive into and fired it up. After a few moments it was up and ready to go. I then went to the web browser on my iPhone, keyed in the URL and there it was!

My hard drives directory structure. I could access any file and if the file was iOS compatible such as a PDF or movie I could see it right then and there. Speaking of movies, I get asked all the time about plugging in hard drives or other external drives into an iPad or iPhone to carry movies around and up until now I never really had a good answer. This would do the trick nicely. The first movie I tried wasn’t in a format that iOS liked (it was an AVI file) and therefore it copied the movie to the iPhone and then I was able to open it in the VLC App and it played just fine.

The movie playing above is streaming wirelessly from my LaCie hard drive to my iPhone 4s via the CloudFTP

I tested another movie that was in the proper .MP4 format and it streamed. However, I will note that about halfway through the movie the video froze and the sound kept going. Not sure if that will be an ongoing issue or not. I was also impress that the built-in USB port had enough power to run the drive without the drive or the CloudFTP being plugged into a power source. The second thing that impressed me even more was that it didn’t seem to matter what format the drive was in. My hard drive was Mac formatted and it still showed up as the “C” drive with all the directories (folders) showing.

Battery life is up to five hours and you can share documents, music or photos with up to 8 users at a time or movies with up to three users. It creates a WiFi network for your devices to join but keep in mind it’s not a WiFi Internet Router and therefore there is not internet connectivity while you’re connected to it. However, you can configure it to join your existing network if you like.

The Bottom Line

I don’t know how much use I will get out of this. I primarily got it as a method to quickly share files between computers and multiple users. I don’t run into those situations often, but when I do this device should come in real handy. The small size is also a plus as I can just keep it in the ThinkTank Cable Management 30 accessory bag that I carry in my laptop bag. The only thing I don’t really like about it is that while it does charge via USB, it comes with it’s own proprietary charging cable and that means having to keep up with more more cable as opposed to using a standard USB micro cable to charge. Other than that it works as advertised.

You can check out CloudFTP here for $99.95 and it comes in either Black or White

Adobe CS6 Creative Cloud World Tour – Thank You Helsinki & Stockholm

Wow! What a way to end the week. We presented Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud to over 1,200 people in Helsinki Finland and Stockholm Sweden while touring on the Adobe CS6 Creative Cloud World Tour. It’s always a treat for me to get out and see real users of our products and to see those users get excited about the new features of Creative Suite and the new options in Creative Cloud!

Now that Creative Cloud is available as well as the new Adobe Touch Apps we can show even more in the cities to come. Today we’ll be in Oslo Norway! Looking forward to seeing you this week and in the weeks to come.

Jason Levine once again put together a great clip with some customer testimonials….

I also got to spend a little down time off the grid in Sweden over the weekend thanks to my colleagues Fredrik and Jason!

Adobe Creative Cloud is Now Available

Although Adobe Creative Suite 6 shipped earlier this week, many were waiting on Creative Cloud as a way of upgrading to Creative Suite 6 for a low monthly cost with access to just about “everything!” That day has arrived as Creative Cloud is now available. Here’s a nice one page chart of the costs and what you get: Even if you don’t plan to go with a paid membership to Creative Cloud, you can still sign in and access your free Creative Cloud services here.

Adobe Lightroom 4 Now Available in the Mac App Store

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 is now available in the Mac App Store! This is good news for those of you who haven’t bought Lightroom yet. As with most things there are some pluses and minuses:

  • This is a single platform license for Mac only. (The boxed version and the ESD offering on Adobe.com can be installed on Mac or Windows)
  • Updates will take place through the Mac App Store, not via Adobe.com for this version of Lightroom. When we update Lightroom for new camera support(about 4 times per year), the Mac App Store version may be released at a different time than the update on Adobe.com
  • There is no upgrade pricing available on the Mac App Store for Lightroom customers who own Lightroom 1, 2 or 3.
  • Because there is no upgrade pricing or upgrade validation currently available on the Mac App Store, there is no guarantee that upgrade pricing will be available to Mac App Store Lightroom 4 customers when Lightroom 5 and future versions of Lightroom are released.
  • Lightroom 4 is available on the Mac App Store in North America only
However, like all Mac App Store purchases you can install this version of Lightroom on as many Macs as you own.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 - Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe CS6 Tour: Copenhagen – Thank You

We’re on tour here in Europe and I wanted to take a quick break to thank Copenhagen for coming out to our event yesterday! We had a great crowd of over 750 people and they were quite pumped up about Adobe Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud. My colleague Jason Levin put together this video (yes using Premiere Pro CS6, Audition CS6, SpeedGrade CS6 and After Effects CS6 🙂 <-yeah he’s crazy that way):

Today we’re in Helsinki Finland and once again showing CS6 & Creative Cloud to a packed house! Looking forward to Stockholm tomorrow!