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Adobe Photoshop Express
Friday, March 20, 2009 — posted by Sheila Loring
Photoshop Express is a photo editing and sharing web-based application. You can store up to 2GB of photos for free. Accounts are available for $19.99 (20GB), $39.99 (40GB) or $99.99 (100GB) per year.You can either upload photos or log in to your Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa accounts and edit the photos directly. When I logged in to Flickr and Facebook, my albums all appeared in Photoshop Express along with the descriptions. The tags didn't make it for some reason though you can tag the photos in Express, but still, I like the Web 2.0 integration.
The typical editing options are available -- sharpen, crop, rotate, red-eye, white balance, hue, etc. It's very similar to Picasa. You can email and link to photos, order prints through Shutterfly, and decorate with cute objects, costumes, conversation bubbles, and other stock graphics.
Once you share photos, friends and family can visit your account online.
Photoshop Express is worth checking out if you don't want to pay for Photoshop Elements (my personal favorite) or Photoshop and want to edit photos on social network web sites. The editing features are more robust than Flickr (but similar to Picasa). The main downsides are lack of online community (like that of Flickr) and expense. (I get unlimited online storage at Flickr for $24.95/year.)
Update March 21, 2009
I love the integration of Photoshop.com and Photoshop Elements. I can create an album in Photoshop Elements, upload it to my Photoshop.com account, and easily order prints. Cool! Other programs offer this feature, but I've never used it in Elements. I've only used Elements to organize and edit photos.
10:59 AM Permalink | |
Presentations on features squeezed into FrameMaker 8
Thursday, November 20, 2008 — posted by Terry Smith
Just two weeks ago I was in an elementary school gymnasium working as an election official. Fourteen straight hours with no breaks for meals because officials aren't allowed to leave the polling area (which is why your ballot may have crumbs on it, sorry about that). In my precinct one candidate received only one vote more than the opponent; in another race, the difference was six votes. A very long and exciting day.Bleary-eyed but pleased to have served my precinct, I spent the next two days attending the DITA/TechComm conference. Perhaps not the heady stuff of this year's election, but definitely worthwhile. This conference had two themes: DITA and the tools in the Adobe Technical Communication Suite (although Madcap Flare was definitely represented, too). The place where those two topics meet is FrameMaker.
I was scheduled to speak on two FrameMaker topics for the conference. FrameMaker 8 now has built-in DITA authoring capabilities, which I demonstrated. I had a few slides to keep the demonstration on track. The slides, which I have included here, are brief.
FrameMaker 8 also includes new capabilities for filtering conditional content. For my second presentation, I prepared to show things to consider when single-sourcing in either regular or structured FrameMaker.
Labels: adobe, conferences, dita, FrameMaker, PDF, presentations, xmetal
11:49 AM Permalink | |
Surveying the landscape
Friday, October 17, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
Surveys are on my mind this week.
The HAT Matrix (Char James-Tanny) recently conducted a survey on help authoring tools. The raw results are available at their blog, the Mad Hatter. On the HATT list, a debate immediately erupted over whether the survey was skewed by MadCap Software.
"Intentionally skewed" is a rather loaded phrase. Let's just stipulate that the survey was mentioned by MadCap to their customers. Since Char made the raw survey results available, you can see that a little over 10 percent of the responses indicated a MadCap origin. One might assume that these participants will be heavy MadCap Software users.
If you attempt to adjust the numbers to account for this potential bias, you end up with RoboHelp and Flare basically neck and neck, whereas in the raw numbers, Flare is quite a bit higher.
And therein lies the rub. Look at the coverage that the survey is getting:
At Core Dump:
It seems that MadCap Flare has pulled well ahead of RoboHelp as the dominant help authoring tool, being used by about 40 percent of the respondents.
Madcap is not only a major competitor to RoboHelp, but it now seems to now have an edge on it.
If MadCap had not, um, encouraged their people to participate in the survey, we'd be seeing very different discussion. And these discussions shape perceptions.
People are also drawing the conclusion that DITA isn't happening just yet. This is possible, but the participants on the HATT (help authoring tools and technologies) list are not exactly the poster children for XML usage. We can draw the conclusion that the people who participated in this survey aren't using DITA, but I'm not too sure about anything beyond that.
In a related matter, there was a recent survey asking about structured authoring implementation. In this survey, one of the questions was about vendors/consultants who helped with implementation. It included the following seven options:
- Not Scriptorium
- Another Not-Scriptorium vendor, much smaller than Scriptorium
- A conversion specialist
- Another conversion specialist
- Yet Another Not-Scriptorium
- A Scriptorium competitor
- And finally, you guessed it, not Scriptorium
You may imagine my conniption fit. No, go ahead and double that. Throw in a tantrum and some gutter Italian words and you're slowly getting there.
By any objective measurement, we should have been included on the list.
Perceptions matter. To a prospective client, our absence on this list sends a message. It basically says that we're not relevant enough to be included. Now, it appears that we were left off because of, um, mediocre research, but that doesn't mitigate the potential damage to us.
http://www.google.com/search?q=structured+authoring
So, in conclusion, I'm not feeling too good about surveys this week.Labels: adobe, analysis, dita, madcap
2:14 PM Permalink | |
Tout de Suite...too many suites?
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 — posted by Sarah
You may have missed Madcap's recent announcements of their sundry product upgrades somehow. Perhaps you were on a deep-sea expedition or out in the desert? I fully expect, though, that you would have received an announcement from Madcap via SMS on your satellite phone. But I digress...the topic of this post is not supposed to be the awesome power of the Madcap Marketing Machine™.The Adobe Army has the Tech Comm Suite to face off against the MadCap Minions with their MadPak. Adobe's marketing is a little less...um, aggressive than their competitor. And let's not forget Author-it, which describes Author-it itself as a tightly integrated product suite.
So many suites...so little time. I feel like a kid in a candy shop. (And I'm a bit of an expert on candy shops.)
Except for one problem. Take a look at my top three requirements for authoring software:
- Creates XML content in my preferred structure
- Validates XML content against my preferred structure
- Publishes XML content through XSL and XSL-FO to create HTML, PDF, and other deliverable formats
But as I've said in many publications and presentations
, the current trend is to take away publishing responsibilities from content creators. Instead of authoring books, authors are creating bits of content, which are then assembled into the final deliverables. And the use of a suite seems to go against that trend because authors are once again placed at the center of the publishing effort.
Am I the only one who would like to see a shift in focus?
PS I apologize to the French language. I am well aware that I completely murdered the translation of "tout de suite" -- which actually means "right away." I'm afraid I'm just powerless against the joy of really bad puns, especially really bad multilingual puns.
Labels: adobe, analysis, madcap, xml
3:14 PM Permalink | |
DocTrain: Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication
Wednesday, May 07, 2008 — posted by Sarah
RJ Jacquez of AdobeSenior Product Evangelist, TechComm Suite and e-Learning initiatives
(This is the first time he has presented this content.)
There are now four generations in the workforce; the youngest belong to Generation Y, the "video generation," born between 1981 and 2000. This generation assumes use of the Internet and technology such as picture phones, iPhone, email, instant messages, blogs, podcasts, social networking and bookmarking, tagging, wikis, and Second Life.
Adobe is organizing the first-ever Virtual Trade Show -- a conference on e-learning (!) that will take place entirely online with no offline equivalent. They're calling it the industry's "first true desktop trade show." It will take place in Second Life or something similar.
Internet video is growing explosively:
- 9 billion video clips available.
- 134 million users have watched video online.
- 75% of US Internet users watch videos online.
- 181 minutes per viewer per month.
- 68 clips per month
95% of online video traffic is Flash-based.
Adobe is claiming widest "reach" in the world -- 250 million PDF files on the public web and 98% installation rate of Flash Player. He's also put Adobe AIR on this slide, presumably because they would like for it to become the next standard.
Nice demo of PDF with 3D. The example is a brake assembly. Being able to manipulate the model is kind of fun, but the ability to remove pieces of the brake assembly part by part is really useful. The page has a series of buttons that let you specify which parts you want to remove. You can see the demo file here.
Demo of PDF with animation. Very nice. We have an example of this in our Web 2.0 white paper, available here (PDF, 1.7 MB).
And now Adobe AIR. His example is Buzzword help.
(Side note: RJ likes the phrase "really, really cool.")
Labels: adobe, doctrainwest08, web 2.0
11:47 AM Permalink | |
Pass the popcorn...
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 — posted by Sarah
There's a very polite undeclared blog war going on. Adobe fired the latest opening salvo in a post entitled Welcome Back:One of the biggest requests that we heard from a small community was a migration path back from Flare to RoboHelp. This community includes those who were early adopters of MadCap Flare and had made a change of the Authoring tool while there were fears of RoboHelp being “Dead”. [...] We found that this community was not growing as the migration had stopped as we succeeded in establishing faith back in RoboHelp by releasing Adobe RoboHelp 6 back in January 2007.The ostensible point of the blog is to discuss a Flare-to-RoboHelp migration tool developed by John Daigle. But I love the bit about how migration to Flare stopped as soon as Adobe made RoboHelp viable.
And in the MadCap corner, we have Sharon Burton with some corporate history:
3 years ago, MadCap showed at WritersUA. [...] With an old technology base and RoboHELP on its death bed, the demand was there for a new product.And there's some detailed stuff about customer retention that follows. I'm betting that's not a coincidence.
In the last 2 and a smidgen years, we’ve gone from 0% to 25% of the help development tools market. [...]
[P]eople are looking for a way to do more with less. I think our tools do that in a way that no one else’s does. [...]
We also have some product announcements [that will be made at WritersUA]. I’m not saying anything but this is going to upset the competitors in the industry. The stuff we have planned over the next year is going to make your life so much easier.
Anyway, I don't use either product much -- most of my single sourcing is XML-based and neither product -- despite massive positioning to the contrary from both company -- supports XML content. But the boxing match is highly entertaining.
[I have received complimentary software from both Adobe and MadCap. And, in case it matters, Just Systems. Scriptorium is an Adobe Authorized Training Center. I think those are all the disclaimers needed.]
Labels: adobe, flare, madcap, robohelp
10:05 PM Permalink | |