Filed under Intertubes, Software on November 19th, 2007
Not wanting to be tagged as a Photoshop lover or an Adobe shill (I’m referring to my previous post), here is a recount of me trying to be kept up to date with the latest Adobe wares.
As you probably already know, last Friday (11/16) Adobe issued some updates to Camera Raw and Photoshop Lightroom programs. Good luck trying to download them or find any useful information about them.
I know what you’re thinking. “I’ll go visit the website”. No word on the front page about any updates.
Well, there must be something on the Downloads page. Let’s see, there’s an “Updates” option in the Downloads menu. It has to be here, right? And, sure enought, it is. We see a listing for “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.3 Update - November 16, 2007″, complete with links for the Windows and Macintosh version. Yeah! Let’s now click on the Macintosh link.
It takes us here. Hey, where’s our 1.3 update? All we can see in this page is the older 1.2 update. Damn.
Maybe we’ll have better luck with the Camera Raw update. Back to Downloads -> Updates we go. Here is is. “Camera Raw 4.3 update, November 16, 2007″. Let’s click the Macintosh link below it. Hmmm. Interesting. It changes under our feet,
through an internal direct from:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3821
to:
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/?notFoundID=null
Which leaves us on the main Downloads page with the listing of every product.
Change of strategy. Maybe we can find a link to the updates from the product page. Let’s visit http://www.adobe.com/ap/products/photoshoplightroom/. Sure enough, here’s a link for the mythical “Lightroom 1.3 Update”. We hesitantly click on the Macintosh link next to it. Ah, the good old http://www.adobe.com/downloads/?notFoundID=null page.
Touch luck. It seems that there are no updates for us today (or any of the four previous days, for that matter).
Updating? Forget the Updater
With some Adobe stuff, you can use Adobe Updater to, em, update it. A fine piece of software that does not play well with FileVault and chokes your system to 100% CPU (seehere, screenshot included).
Not that Adobe sits on its hands. It suggests, and I kid you not, this solution:
Solution 1: Change the Adobe Updater preferences to not check for updates. If your computer is connected to the internet, then you can change the Adobe Updater preferences to not check for updates.
Solution 2: Edit the AdobeUpdaterPrefs settings file. If your computer does not have an internet connection, then you can manually edit the AdobeUpdaterPreferences.dat file. (…) If the 1 tag already exists, thenchange the value from 1 to 0. Otherwise, add the line 0 anywhere between the tags.
Solution 3: Disable the Updater.api plug-in. (…) Rename the Updater.api plug-in to Updater.api.old
Those are the Windows “solutions”. I guess something similar exists for the Mac. Good luck trying to find it.
Oh, the incompetence
It’s not that Adobe doesn’t know about those issues. It might be that, with no competitors and all, it just can’t be bothered.
For example, the Lightroom Journal, hosted on Adobe by Lightroom stuff, aknowlegdes the problem with the broken links et al and even provides an alternative download method (via ftp). Still, 4 full days later Adobe’s page remains erratic.
Filed under Software on November 18th, 2007
It starts with a simple recipy. Build an application with all the core Photoshop
features but none of the bloat. Take advantage those fancy Apple Core technologies to build it in a few months. Give it an easier UI, so Aunt Tillie can bitmap. Sell it for less. Profit, you’ve just made a Photoshop killer.
It’s a simple plan isn’t it? Actually no. It’s something akin to simple, but not as good: it’s simplistic. It’s armchair software engineering, oblivious to the ways and needs of the software world. You have seen all those pleas for a “Photoshop killer” in blogs and forums and opinion pieces. Yet, this mythical beast never seems to emerge. Here’s why…
We *need* bloat
One man’s bloat is another man’s feature. Fact of life. Apart from some easily spotted oddities (certain translucent menubars come to mind), it’s very difficult to decide what’s useful and what’s bloat. You were never that hot about those fancy “custom brushes” in Photoshop? Well, my art depends on them, and you’re gonna have to pry them out of my cold, dead mouse pointer.
I know what you are thinking. This “keep it simple” thing worked with the iPod. The iPod is a phenomenal success and it actually has less features than it’s competitors. Well, yes. The difference is that the iPod is a special purpose gadget. People buy the iPod to (primarily) listen to music. In it’s purest form it’s expressed in the iPod shuffle. A play button. Music playing is several orders of magnitude simpler than what general image editing. And even with the iPod, features just keep piling up: image viewing, video, games, cover flow, wi-fi, web browing, buying music etc.
After all, does anyone actually wishes his software had less features? People might wish their software was easier to use. That is was snappier. That is had a more straightforward user interface. That it could hide options that you don’t need. That it took less time to load. Those are all genuine wishes. But wishing a program had less features? Seriously, who wants that? Even when people sometimes seem to be pitching for less features, they actually want some of all those other things, and (mistakenly) see “less features” as a means to this end.
Here’s an example from a recent review of Pixelmator:
In Pixelmator, I immediately missed Elements’ superb and comprehensive photo correction toolset, most particularly the Auto Smart Fix command and the Adjust Lighting and Adjust Color submenu selections, as well as the Spot Healing Brush, none of which are available in Pixelmator. (…) Other things that are missing include CMYK and RAW support (both to be added in later versions reportedly), and there are no guides and rulers in the document window.
And here’s another:
Typography Sucks
There really isn’t any pretty way to say this, but Pixelmator offers no real power over managing text in the interface. Whereas in Photoshop you can adjust the kerning, line height, font size, colour, and more by simply selecting the layer and changing those elements; in Pixelmator, there’s absolutely nothing for text manipulation.
The same things apply equally well to Acorn, Naked Light et al. Don’t get me wrong: they might be mighty fine programs in their own right. It’s their aptitude as Photoshop killers that we assess here.
Joel, of Fog Creek Software fame, has written one of the definitive opinion pieces on the issue of features vs bloat, Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth. In it, he writes:
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20″ rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.
When you start marketing your “lite” product, and you tell people, “hey, it’s lite, only 1MB,” they tend to be very happy, then they ask you if it has their crucial feature, and it doesn’t, so they don’t buy your product.
So, if a fancy new piece of software comes along with less features, it won’t be a Photoshop killer. It could be a ImageWell killer. A GraphicConverter killer. An iPhoto killer. Just not a Photoshop killer.
What’s a Photoshop killer, anyway?
This second point follows from the first one. People (not just creative professionals) use Photoshop for a lot of different stuff. We retouch photographs. We draw things. We design webpage mockups. We convert RAW files. We airbrush imperfections off of cover girls. We work with bitmaps, vectors, text, paths, layers, brushes and filters.
Given the above, what it takes for a piece of software be a “Photoshop killer”?
Would a program aimed at simple bitmap editing (like Pixelmator) do? Would a program aimed towards painting and drawing (such as Painter or ArtRage) do? Would something aimed squarely at photographers (such as Aperture) do? Actually, most of those have at one time or another been called a “Photoshop killer”, yet Adobe’s behemoth just won’t die. Just because some random program fills your humble needs of croping and rotating doesn’t means it automatically qualifies as a Photoshop alternative.
My point is, if we are talking about a “Photoshop killer” proper, then the program will have to a) cover the whole ground that Photoshop does, b) sell a boatload of copies. The (a) part is needed in order to qualify as a Photoshop competitor. The (b) part is needed to justify the “killer” moniker.
The only program that comes to mind as having these two qualities is Macromedia’s Freehand. Sadly, this program, the only real competitor Photoshop ever had, is no more. It has ceased to be. It was killed after Adobe bought Macromedia.
It’s the resources, stupid
Developing a competent image editor is not an easy task. Actually, it’s an extremely difficult task. People magically expect some third party OS X developer or small software company to come up with something to compete with Photoshop. Well, it can’t be done.
Even Apple cannot just create a Photoshop killer. The only reason Aperture holds so well in the photographic workflow space is that it got out at a time when Adobe did not yet have a competing product. Even so, Adobe quickly built upon Lightroom (a rough, experimental project of Adobe Labs), to provide a competent alternative. That’s what top-notch code monkeys, relevant engineering experience (the Lightroom team had previously worked on ImageReady), a large code library, ample resources and a huge development budget buy.
Consider Pages as another example. Pages 1.0 one was a nice text editor application, but it was no match for Microsoft Word. Pages 3.0 is better by leaps and bounds but there are still a lot of things that it does not do (equation editor? bibliography support? native “Save to Word / HTML” option? multiple page orientations per document?). Sure, it’s getting close, but my point is it took Apple at least three revisions to produce a match for Microsoft Word. These things do not happen overnight.
Even Photoshop itself started small. As in “one developer” small. Then, time happend. 20 years have passed since mr. Knoll started working on it. Today’s Photoshop (or, 2000’s Photoshop for that matter) is the work of hundreds of programmers. It incorporates features and engineering experience and coding magic and fixes and third-party licensed code that span hundrends of man years. Can a smallish team outdo this in a couple of years? I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter how smart they are (Adobe hires smart people too). Developing programs like that takes time. If a Photoshop killer ever emerges, it will do so gradually. You will have plenty of time to notice. It will get incrementaly better as versions and years go by.
Core Image doesn’t buy a lot, anyway
If anything has contributed the most to the idea that a Photoshop killer is just around the corner, is Core Image. Or rather, a basic misunderstanding over what Core Image offers. You see, Core Image is not a magic box full of lego bricks to construct your own Photoshop. It’s an image processing and rendering framework. As such it is more akin to Photoshop filters. Problem is, while the filters are nice and all, they are not the really difficult part of making an image editor. After all, most of this stuff is already available in various programming libraries such as ImageMagick or the GIMP libraries. Core Image puts it at your immediate disposal and takes advantage of hardware acceleration, which is nice, but there is the rest 90% of the work to be done.
Check the latest crop of OS X image editing apps that leverage Core Image, such as Pixelmator and Acorn. They share the same basic filters, provide some basic editing tools, layers and that’s it. Nowhere near the power tool that Photoshop is. Some people might be fine with that. More power to them. Just don’t claim that those apps are anything close to a Photoshop killer.
It’s more than Photoshop
In the professional space, in order to compete with Photoshop you have to compete with it’s mighty friends too. How about seamless integration with Illustrator and InDesign? How about being able to fully read and display PSD files with all the bells and whistles? How about being able to run all those indispensable plug-ins and co-operate with third party tools designed to work with Photoshop?
The list goes on.
What I’m not claiming
I’m gonna be misunderstood, anyway, but here’s a quick list of what I’m not saying:
- I’m not saying that Photoshop is perfect
- I’m not saying that Pixelmator, Acorn et al are not fine programs
- I’m not saying that Pixelmator, Acorn et al don’t suit your needs
- I’m not saying that we don’t need some Photoshop competitor
- I’m not saying that we are never gonna see some Photoshop killer
To all the people trying to design a Photoshop killer: hang in there, fellas.
To all the users waiting for one: don’t hold your breath.
Filed under Apple, Software on November 15th, 2007
On a recent post titled “How to fix the Leopard GUI ugliness (dock, menubar, stacks)” I wrote about turning your Leopard Dock to a 2D one, and complained about the white edges you get when you do so.
Adam Jury commented about how you can get rid of those lines if you just remove the files named bottom1.png to bottom5.png inside the folder /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app.
I got to work, and here’s a more refined version of the same tip: replace those same files with 5 fully transparent PNGs of the same name. This way, Dock.app still finds the files it needs, and it’s less likely that a possible system update (say 10.5.1) will try to restore your missing files. That said, the end result is identical to what Adam proposes.
I have prepared a zip archived with the necessary files. Just unzip them and replace the regular ones inside /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/ [to see this folder from the Finder, select /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app and control-click -> Show Package Contents].
Get the replacements here.
Filed under Bananaranha on November 13th, 2007
My, how time flies. It’s a couple of days less than a full month that this blog operates. Where by “month” I mean an arbitrary 30 day period, since I didn’t have the foresight to launch this blog on a 1st.
Even at this early stage I have had several thousand visitors. Of course, submitting most of the early posts to Digg’s Apple section didn’t hurt. Digg’s stance of this is uncertain (”While we welcome users to submit their own content, overdoing it often incites the users to mark the user as a spammer, the site as a spam site, and otherwise decent content as blogspam.“), so I took my chance. Well, the worst did not happen in my case, so I guess some people found my posts worthwhile. After all, they were all relevant to Apple, and better written that a lot of the Apple stuff that’s out there. Of course, I could be biased ;-)
Anyway, I stopped submitting every other story of mine to Digg (which sounds a little silly, patting myself in the back and all). I now have one of those fancy “Digg This” button, so you can do it, if you like what you’re reading. But digg is not the best traffic source. Content is the best traffic source. You see, I found out that while my rants and speculations get a cursory glance, what really draws people in (and back again) are the helpful articles, the tips and tricks, the how-tos. Expect to see more of those (intermingled with my rants and wild speculations, because, hey, they are the reason I started this blog: to voice my frustations and expectations about Apple and software in general).
Here’s a run down of what I’ve written so far:
October 17th, Hello and Welcome [introductory post, nothing to see here]
October 17th, Top 10 Leopard features (in order of importance) [a rundown of my favorite leopard features]
October 18th, Linux advocacy considered silly [some random guy bashing Quicksilver in favor of the command line]
October 19th, Delicious iPhone [a very cool idea for a Delicious Library app for the iPhone]
October 20th, .Mac 2.0 - Turning dot mac to a successful online community [my ideas on what Apple should do with .Mac]
October 21st, It’s time TextEdit.app gets some love [A rant about the sorry state of this unloved application]
October 22nd, Flickr invites are teh suck [Do you hate flickr badges ("invites")? I hate them more]
October 22nd, Leopard Gold Master last minute changes? [Gruber reports on Apple fixing the ugliness issue with Leopard Dock used on the side]
October 23rd, Leopard Only Applications, the first bunch… [A list of applications pre-announced to be Leopard only]
October 23rd, More Leopard Only Stuff: Panic [Panic announces that CandyBar 3.0 will be Leopard only].
October 25th, What comes after Leopard? Musings on OS X 10.6 [Musings on the next version of OS X, based on solid facts and wild speculation]
October 28th, haxies: Mess with the O.S, die like the rest [A rant about those distateful application "enhancers" that have bitten some people upgrading to Leopard]
October 29th, I can has Office Suite? [An interestring observation about Apple's office suite strategy]
October 31st, Enough with the Java drama queens! [Some thoughts on the delay of Java 6 for the Mac]
November 2nd, On the curious persistence of certain names such as Amiga and Napster… [What's in a name? Why do names like Amiga and Napster stuck when the thing they reffer to have long since become obsolete?]
November 2nd, Why can’t I bookmark an iTunes Store page? [Why, Apple, why?]
November 5th, Culture in the age of the blog [A nice interview with mr. Doctorow]
November 6th, Blogger Templates are teh suck [A rant about the blogger templating system. Apparently, it sucks donkeys balls].
November 7th, How I got MySQL and PHP running on Leopard (in 3 easy steps) [A short tutorial on enabling MySQL and PHP on OS X 10.6]
November 8th, Naked Light : Photoshop killer or one more mid-level image editor? [Reporting on another one of those OS X image editors]
November 10th, QuickLook chokes on BOM-less text files [Hope they fix this soon, although it will only bite those with non-latin files]
November 11th, How to fix the Leopard GUI ugliness (dock, menubar, stacks) [All the available options for reversing some of the Apple-inflicted ugliness of Leopard]
So, there you have it. If you really liked any of the above or if you really hated one (now, why would you do that?), please, do add your comment below. I’d like to here what you think of Bananaranha in general.
Now, off to the next post.
Filed under Apple, Software on November 11th, 2007
Well, since Apple’s UI team seems to be in ruins (or on cheap acid capsules), someone has to step up and fix the bloody mess that they have created.
Make the Leopard Dock 2D
For the Terminal-fearing types there is a simple application that lets you switch between 2D and 3D look. It’s called 2DOrNot2D and it’s freeware (though, donations are appreciated).
If you don’t mind using the Terminal, just type the following line into it:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
The dock will be restarted automatically with a standard 2D look (albeit with an ugly gray line around the edges, why Apple, why?).
If you’d rather have the 3D dock look, there is a plethora of alternative 3D designs for the dock, from a piano look (reminiscent of the 80’s piano neckties) to a yellow cheese background (complete with holes in it).
Get rid of the hideous transparent menubar
I’ll give some credit to Apple: with the right desktop picture, the transparent menubar is a little easier on the eyes than a full white one. However, the same effect could be easily achieved with a toned-down menubar, and it would work with every desktop background.
There are several ways to fix the transparent menubar. You can try using a desktop picture of a solid color. That would hide the more hideous form of transparency (background patterns leaking through the menubar), but of course the desktop color would still show through.
Another way is to make a special desktop picture with a solid white stripe where the menubar is (you’ll have to make it 21 pixels tall, here are some instructions). You can even paint the stripe in various shades of gray to tone the menubar down, or even give it a special hue.
As a third option, there is an application that fixes the menubar automatically. Get it from here.
Fix those annoying stacks
Last, but not least, a brilliant fix for the “Download Stack” feature. The problem was that it shows as a Dock icon the icon of the latest downloaded file with the rest of the downloaded file icons behind it. Meaning that the frontmost icon changes all the time: now it’s a document icon., not it’s an application icon, now it looks like a zip archive. What was Apple thinking?
You could add an icon that you like in there and change it’s modification date to the far future . That would work, but it doesn’t look very good with all the other downloaded items icons showing behind it. Except if you use a special icon designed to look nice when over-imposed above other icons, that is.
That’s what some clever guys in Japan did. The solution is a set of folder icons that overlays an image in front of all the other icons in your stack. You have to manually set it’s date to be in distant future. Check it in action on this site, where you can also download an archive with several different stack icons for various folders.
It’s such a simple and great idea that Apple should integrate it in a future OS X revision (and compensate those guys well). Anyway, it’s better that Apple’s own implementation of the Stakcs icon.
Miscellanea
Apple straightened up the rounded corners of your screen in Leopard. If you like the old rounded look, you can use the Displaperture app to restore it.
There is also an application called Cage Fighter to remove the pill shaped buttons from Mail.app, though it doesn’t seem to be updated for Leopard. I’ve got used to them, personally. Use at your own risk.
