Adobe seems to be throwing their hat into the "software-as-service" market: first they announced (and released into beta) an online video editing application ("Remix"), and now they've announced an online version of Photoshop in the next few months.
It'll be interesting to see what direction this takes... re-bundling applications with some online metering (ala GameTap or the like) will get some small traction in the short term, or maybe work for some niche markets or legacy application environments. But this is at best a bridging strategy - its a goofy "web" experience that doesn't embrace any of the real values (other than raw pricing) of software-as-services, and in the medium to long term.
Everyone's been experimenting with this for years and years, and it's just not workable... unfortunately the paradigm doesn't "feel" right.
Of course, that's not what Adobe's doing - Remix is a completely, ground up, brand new web application. That's good, though the problem is that, being brand new, its really not particularly more feature rich or capable than any other web video editor (like Jumpcut or EyeSpot). The only really "edge" Adobe has is brand value - and web users are pretty fickle.
So - I'm curious to see what "online Photoshop" looks like. One the one hand, a real web app is the right way to go, and what I'd like to see - and I think its important they start this now before someone else does it first (it'll happen). On the other hand, I think if its a true web app, version 1.0 will likely not be a real Photoshop replacement in any meaningful way... and it'll get dinged pretty good for that.
This has to be a commitment for the long term.
Cracking the right design patterns for "offline" web applications will also make a big difference for moving them beyond casual users, I think, among other things...
March 1, 2007
February 21, 2007
On Vacation
Been in Hawaii (hence veeerry little posting...) for a little while now - I'll be back next week (ish :))...
February 12, 2007
High Frikkin' Larious
February 8, 2007
Bit shifting
I always forget that shifting positive integers and negative integers always rounds down (not towards zero), such that 126705>>3 = 15838, but -126705>>3 = -15839, which, of course can be subtle but disastrous for things like, oh, I don't know, rasterization fill conventions. Its supposed to be "live and learn", but it seems like "live, rinse, and repeat"... fixed precision computer math requires surprisingly high attention and focus...
... sigh...
But even that aside, as someone recently pointed out to me, preserving symmetry and sub-pixel accuracy is still an unsolved problem (font hinting could be considered a special case of this domain). I think its not a rasterization problem, but a geometry problem - context matters.
... sigh...
But even that aside, as someone recently pointed out to me, preserving symmetry and sub-pixel accuracy is still an unsolved problem (font hinting could be considered a special case of this domain). I think its not a rasterization problem, but a geometry problem - context matters.
February 6, 2007
New stuff: Vista, Lightroom, GeForce 8800
Some recent product launches of note:
- Microsoft Vista Home
Overall, its a great improvement over XP - looks good, works well; I like it. But underwhelming after all this time (not sure there's a killer feature), and a mess from a consumer perspective, in two ways in particular (thus far that I've noticed):
a) It takes a loooooong time to get installed and started. I bought a brand spankin' new PC with Vista pre-installed, turned it on (expecting to be able to play with Vista), and it was probably, oh, 45 minutes to an hour, if not longer, before I actually made it to the desktop. Between the install, performance check, customization, etc. - oy. I mean, it was probably much less time if you sat there the entire time, but of course, like most real users, I kept getting up to do other stuff after any progress bar took more than a minute or two. Contrast that to the Mac mini I just bought, which was an out-of-the-box joy... that "what if Microsoft produced the iPod" spoof spot really rang true whilst I waited...
b) The "everybody's-a-limited-user" mentality in the pursuit of security is well intentioned, but just awful in practice. Everytime my kids put in a CD to play some game, they get two different dialogs - one to ask whether they want to run whatever autorun application the CD has, and another asking if its OK to run that file. The dialogs look completely different, and you click in different places on different actions to continue, and to add aesthetic insult to injury, the entire screen flashes black in-between the dialogs (the second dialog, for security, is a hardware interrupt, like ctrl-alt-del). All this is teaching my kids is to click "ok" or "allow" ALL THE TIME because these warnings pops up so often - but I guess it permits Microsoft the legal high ground, so that's good, right?
I can see the marketing slogan now: "Vista! Now with less Class Actions!"...
- Adobe Lightroom
Its shipped, and its a really nice execution of a productivity tool for photographers. But although its a good value at $199, I think unfortunately that the preponderance of good free image organization/editing software (most notably Picasa) will limit the impact and reach. Adobe should consider a version that's free, but limited in some way (for example, only support 8-bit channels so that they can preserve the pro-market, who are the only people who are going to pay anyway).
- GeForce 8800
Holy mother of god is that thing fast! I bought the GeForce 8800 GTS, the "lesser" of the two models, which has a mere 640MB (on my video card - hah! :)), and only a 24 BILLION pixel fillrate. That's with a "B".
Installing it was a mess, and its HUUUUGE, but its cool... though the gap between the low end and high end for consumer graphics continues to widen, which means in practice, no game looks as good as the demos ATI and nVidia produced 3 years ago (and yes, I've played Oblivion :P)
- Microsoft Vista Home
Overall, its a great improvement over XP - looks good, works well; I like it. But underwhelming after all this time (not sure there's a killer feature), and a mess from a consumer perspective, in two ways in particular (thus far that I've noticed):
a) It takes a loooooong time to get installed and started. I bought a brand spankin' new PC with Vista pre-installed, turned it on (expecting to be able to play with Vista), and it was probably, oh, 45 minutes to an hour, if not longer, before I actually made it to the desktop. Between the install, performance check, customization, etc. - oy. I mean, it was probably much less time if you sat there the entire time, but of course, like most real users, I kept getting up to do other stuff after any progress bar took more than a minute or two. Contrast that to the Mac mini I just bought, which was an out-of-the-box joy... that "what if Microsoft produced the iPod" spoof spot really rang true whilst I waited...
b) The "everybody's-a-limited-user" mentality in the pursuit of security is well intentioned, but just awful in practice. Everytime my kids put in a CD to play some game, they get two different dialogs - one to ask whether they want to run whatever autorun application the CD has, and another asking if its OK to run that file. The dialogs look completely different, and you click in different places on different actions to continue, and to add aesthetic insult to injury, the entire screen flashes black in-between the dialogs (the second dialog, for security, is a hardware interrupt, like ctrl-alt-del). All this is teaching my kids is to click "ok" or "allow" ALL THE TIME because these warnings pops up so often - but I guess it permits Microsoft the legal high ground, so that's good, right?
I can see the marketing slogan now: "Vista! Now with less Class Actions!"...
- Adobe Lightroom
Its shipped, and its a really nice execution of a productivity tool for photographers. But although its a good value at $199, I think unfortunately that the preponderance of good free image organization/editing software (most notably Picasa) will limit the impact and reach. Adobe should consider a version that's free, but limited in some way (for example, only support 8-bit channels so that they can preserve the pro-market, who are the only people who are going to pay anyway).
- GeForce 8800
Holy mother of god is that thing fast! I bought the GeForce 8800 GTS, the "lesser" of the two models, which has a mere 640MB (on my video card - hah! :)), and only a 24 BILLION pixel fillrate. That's with a "B".
Installing it was a mess, and its HUUUUGE, but its cool... though the gap between the low end and high end for consumer graphics continues to widen, which means in practice, no game looks as good as the demos ATI and nVidia produced 3 years ago (and yes, I've played Oblivion :P)
February 5, 2007
SEO and the real world
The impact of the internet (and search applications specifically) on editorial and programming (not programmer programming :P) in the real world seems to bubble up every few months (case in point, courtesy of slashdot). I've been sucked into discussing it before (and again now, I guess :)).
Ultimately, I guess its appropriate that headlines adjust, even if it seems arbitrarily driven by our new content navigation overlords.
So I think we're left with either news content as a business, in which case this is simply adapting to new influx channels, or that its a service, in which case clarity over wit doesn't seem like a bad thing (even if it happens to be today's search tech view of "clarity").
But it still bugs me. Go figure.
Ultimately, I guess its appropriate that headlines adjust, even if it seems arbitrarily driven by our new content navigation overlords.
So I think we're left with either news content as a business, in which case this is simply adapting to new influx channels, or that its a service, in which case clarity over wit doesn't seem like a bad thing (even if it happens to be today's search tech view of "clarity").
But it still bugs me. Go figure.
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