I understand that Photoshop is a great program. I'm willing to concede that there's really no comparable software for the professionaluser. What I just don't get is why the average user thinks 1) they need Photoshop and 2) they need to pirate it.
A few years ago, no one came in and asked me "Can you put Photoshop on my computer?" Most users hadn't even heard of the program. Now the perception from the public seems to be that if you want to edit photos at all, you've got to have Photoshop to do it - and that you might as well just steal it.
But why? Most users don't need even half of the functionality in Photoshop, and there are plenty of great editors that are easy to use, less hard on computer resources, and completely free.
Clear your conscience and try one of these alternatives!
Adobe just added new video content to its AIR-based Media Player, but it all pretty much sucks in one form or another. The Adobe Media Player is a slick media browser that can play and subscribe to videos from the web, and it also provides somewhat high-resolution content from Adobe's media partners such as MTVN and Comedy Central.
Despite the fact that the player is very visually appealing and easy to navigate, it's just not that useful. It's possible to use any regular, free browser such as Firefox to watch online video content, allowing web-travelers to avoid the installation of an extra app. As a result, the main reason for installing the app (unless you really, really like the subscription feature) is to watch the 25,000+ videos provided by Adobe.
And that's exactly what's wrong here. Adobe's video library is still weak, and most good of the good TV shows aren't full episodes but rather short clips. Furthermore, the full videos Adobe is adding aren't current TV hits like Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Instead, Adobe partnered with CBS and Sony to add tons of clips and a few movies/episodes from old stuff like Men in Black, Jerry Maguire, The Love Boat, Beverly Hilly 90210, Family Ties, and even The Price is Right. They might as well call the app something to the tune of Adobe Senior TV On Demand.
Sure, Adobe has the money to keep it up and running, but why bother if the company isn't bringing its best to the table? Why not partner with Hulu and create an official, fully functional Hulu AIR app instead?
It may seem illogical to tie Meebo to a desktop app, but that's exactly what's going on here. Meebone uses Adobe AIR to bring Meebo's services to your desktop through a dedicated app, but it's still in beta. So if you're down to try it, keep in mind that you'll probably encounter some problems... just like we did.
When attempting to login to AIM, Meebone was confused by a space in one of our user names. Other IM clients and services -- even Meebo itself -- aren't usually bothered by spaces. But that was our only major issue with the AIR-based app. And we're hoping it will be fixed before Meebone graduates from beta.
We tested the app with Google Talk and AIM accounts. Each logged-in successfully, brought up buddy lists, etc, etc. In other words, it introduced a basic Meebo set-up to our desktop, and we liked it. Just barely, but we did like it even though it sort of defeats the purpose of Meebo itself.
Adobe Reader 9 is out, and while the latest version of Adobe's popular PDF reader offers faster launch speeds and native support for Flash content, it still takes forever to run Adobe Reader on some computer systems. If you've ever come across an unexpected PDF link on the web, you know what we mean.
While there are plenty of alternative PDF readers (some of our favorites include Foxit and Sumatra), if you want an application that can handle pretty much any PDF file in existence, you're still best off running Adobe Reader, even if it has a ton of features you'll never need. Fortunately, there's a stripped down version of Adobe Reader called Adobe Reader Lite.
Adobe Reader Lite is maintained by a third party developer and isn't officially supported by Adobe. But version 9 was released last week, hot on the heels of Adobe Reader 9. AR Lite contains all of the basic functions you'd need from Adobe Reader, but none of the extra junk like autorun, desktop shortcuts, or some of the less frequently used plugins.
FreshAIRApps is, as its name would suggest, a directory of new Adobe AIR applications. As AIR has grown in popularity, we've started following the site more closely to see what's new in the AIR world. The only comparable site out there at the moment is Adobe's own AIR showcase. Because FreshAIRApps is such a great resource, it surprised us to hear reports that Adobe is upset with the site's owner over his use of the "Adobe® AIR™" trademark.
According to a message on the front page of FreshAIRApps, the site will continue as RefreshingApps.com, with the purpose of promoting the work of the developer community, not promoting Adobe. The site's owner says that the move caused him financial loss. No word from Adobe, although the message claims that the company's community evangelists think FreshAIRApps is good promotion for AIR.
Download Squad originally told you about the Adobe Flash beta in May, and yesterday Adobe announced further updates to "Astro." So what do you have to look forward to?
From a viewer's standpoint, there are several new features of interest. Tops among them: advanced 3d effects - that's right, Flash now supports shaders. Web gamers rejoice, because this no doubt means a whole new era of addictive browser-based gaming.
Sound APIs have been refined as well, which should provide a boost not only for games, but also for streaming media applications. Also along these lines, Flash 10 support dynamic bitrate adjustments. Translation: it'll adapt to crappy network conditions automatically so that your video doesn't get all choppy.
Adobe's Flash technology has long been the bane of efforts to create a Web site or application that can be indexed by Google, Yahoo! or other search engines. What it lacked in search engine optimization (SEO), Flash made up in offering designers an infinite playground for creating rich-media apps, games and video.
But what good is an application that users can't find?
Adobe has built a suite of online office applications to compliment Buzzword, the company's online word processor. We've covered Buzzword in the past. It's pretty, fast, and not really all that much more useful than similar products from Google or Zoho. Here's a rundown of the other applications you'll find at Acrobat.com:
ConnectNow: A web conferenceing tool that lets you share your desktop with others, chat, talk over a VoIP connection, or share files and mark up whiteboards.
Share: Selectively share files with other users. Adobe Share lets you send files to a list of contacts, and lets the recipients view PDF image, and video files online.
Create PDF: Seriously, do we need to tell you what this does?
My Files: Store and organize up to 5GB of files online.
You'll notice that Acrobat.com doesn't have a complete office suite. There are no spreadsheet or presentation applications. But that 5GB of free storage space is pretty attractive.
Adobe has also released Acrobat 9, an updated version of its desktop PDF reader. The biggest change in Acrobat 9 is support for embedded Flash, which means you might start finding PDF documents with embedded YouTube videos or other Flash content.
The Flash security flaw that we recently wrote about has been addressed by Adobe and a new version is being offered.
This security flaw was affecting PC and Mac users and allowed hackers to redirect you to nasty .SWF files which could then potentially execute malicious code on your machine.
You can feel secure (as well as warm and fuzzy) by downloading a Flash update with the fix here.
It's a pretty fast response to a pretty serious issue, so Adobe gets the pass this time.
Special thanks to commenter daniel free for the heads up!
It has come to our attention that there's an Adobe Flash player vulnerability in the wild that may affect your PC.
Simply by visiting a naughty website, the unsuspecting web visitor will be attacked with a piece of code that redirects you to an evil .SWF file that can then execute nasty code on their PC.
Adobe has blogged about the issue, but hasn't issued any releases, or patches to take care of the problem as of yet. Security firm Symantec says that 20,000 web pages may be affected by this style of attack.
Since there's no real way around getting hit with this one, you can either disable your flash player altogether, or get the No-Script add-on for your Firefox browser.
Let's pretend you read this column and agree that it's time to embark on a Web site overhaul for your small business. You understand a little about Web 2.0-ness, want some interactivity, are considering using new online tools and have created a real job for the webmaster to do site updates. What's on your Web Overhaul Due Diligence To-Do List? What steps should you take to ensure that your site gets architected, designed, programmed, launched, and updated correctly?
HOMEWORK – let's start browsing sites and making favorites/bookmarks out of the ones that catch your eye. Note that you like the drop-down menu in one and the fading background in another. Make a "how did they do this?" list of snazzy features to ask your designer about implementing. In fact, build a spreadsheet and make column headings such as: URL, feature, forms, Flash, menus and more so you can keep your design notes and questions in a handy electronic document to share with all the design firms you interview, and we want you to talk to more than one.
Adobe, who only last week was denying Creative Suite 4 release date rumors (or that the next version of Photoshop will be called Photoshop CS4), has just released the first CS4 betas for three of their products. Early versions of the next-generation of Soundbooth, Dreamweaver and Fireworks are all available for download for both Mac and Windows (Soundbooth is only available for Intel Macs).
Dreamweaver and Fireworks were both part of Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, and to us, neither program felt fully integrated with the existing Adobe products in CS3. The CS4 betas promise to provide better Creative Suite integration (especially for Fireworks users) as well as providing some great new features.
Dreamweaver now boasts a Live View Mode so that users can see real-time previews without having to leave the program. Fireworks features a new user interface and compatibility with other Adobe technologies. The big news with Soundbooth is support for multi-track editing.
The beta applications will be active for only 48 hours, unless you are an existing CS3 customer. If you already have a CS3 license for the product your are trying, you can continue to use the CS4 betas until the final release. Thanks Kent!
Although some of the best-known Adobe AIR apps thus far are Twitter clients, you don't have to be a Twitter freak to get in on the action. In fact, you just have to be hungry for pizza. Pizza Hut has released a desktop pizza-ordering app , and it's built on AIR. If you thought AIR hadn't hit the mainstream yet, this might change your mind.
Pizza Hut Shortcut is basically a slicker-looking, easier to use version of the familiar online ordering system. It has the current specials built in, so you might be able to skip the "Googling for coupons" phase of the order. We suspect this app is targeted at true pizza addicts, because you can still order almost as easily from the web interface. Also, the feature that saves your last order for easy reordering was a bit of a giveaway.
Adobe has just made the prerelease version of Flash Player 10 available for download. Almost as impressive as the player itself is the fact that the beta is available for Windows, OS X AND Linux (including Ubuntu support)!
For the full list of features and known issues, check out the release notes, but some of the highlights are:
New text engine
Ubuntu OS support
Custom filters and effects
Large bitmap support
Adobe's demo page for Flash Player 10 is pretty impressive; we especially liked the inverse kinematic and native 3D demos.
Adobe recommends uninstalling previous versions of Flash Player before installing 10 beta. Downloads are available here.
We're always on the lookout for good desktop Twitter clients. Because while the microblogging service is kind of useful as a web-based tool for sharing your thoughts, desktop clients make Twitter feel more like an instant messaging platform that allows you to communicate with hundreds, even thousands of people at once.
While there are a couple of excellent Twitter clients for Windows and OS X, Linux users have had a more limited selection. A few months ago we looked at gTwitter, an application for reading and sending Tweets from your Linux desktop. While gTwitter will get the job done, it lacks some of the features we use the most, like URL shortening and the ability to reply to tweets from other users with the click of a button.
So we were pretty excited when we read about Twitux, another Twitter client designed for Linux. Installation couldn't have been easier. We downloaded a deb file for Ubuntu, and our system automatically downloaded all the required dependencies and instlled Twtiux. And then we saw that it was almost as basic as gTwitter. Twitux gives you more control over your timeline view, allowing you to see the public timeline, your friends timeline, your own timeline, direct messages, or replies. But if you want to send a reply or direct message you'll have to do it manually. There's no option to click on a friends' name in the timeline and respond.
Fortunately, now that Adobe has released a version of their AIR platform for Linux, you can run popular AIR-based Twitter clients like Spaz and Twhirl, So while we're still kind of hoping that someone will develop a full-featured Twitter client that runs natively in Linux, we'll happily settle for the cross-platform Twhirl client. A new version of Twhirl was released this week with a few bug fixes and one major new feature: support for Friendfeed discussions.
FreshAIRApps
UPDATE: E.W. Scripps SEM Manager 
The Flash security flaw that we 
It has come to our attention that there's an 
Let's pretend you read this column and agree that it's time to embark on a Web site overhaul for your small business. You understand a little about 
Adobe, who only 
Adobe has just made the prerelease version of Flash Player 10 available for download. Almost as impressive as the player itself is the fact that the beta is available for Windows, OS X AND Linux (including Ubuntu support)!
