Adobe Creative Cloud

PCWorld has the article on this, but Adobe has announced a very cool new service that is going to get subscriptions out of a lot of us, and you can actually read about it at Adobe’s own web site.
AdobeCreativeCloud

It seems in the first half of 2012 there will be a new way to get Adobe Apps. Instead of upgrading the Master Suite, or which ever version of the creative suite that you use, you can do a $49.99, which comes to about $600 a year, and you get access to not only the full all of the Creative Suite Desktop Tools now including Adobe Lightroom (which was always separate), as well Adobe Edge and Muse online web creation tools, all the new Adobe Touch Apps for iPad and Android. You also get Device and PC Sync, 20GB of cloud storage, Adobe Typekit for cloud based web fonts, the digital publishing suite, and the community.

And of course that is not all. The coolest things is that you get aces to betas of all the new software before it is released to the public with the latest new technology previews in it. No longer waiting for new features, you can try them out right away!

Very cool! I think that is where I will be heading!

My Letter to 500px

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I just sent the following to 500px.

I would like to cancel my Awesome Pro Account and get a refund for the remaining 5 months

I want to do this because of your changes to the site. I feel that the feature changes have made it so that this is not the site that I signed up for, and that I deserve to get my a refund of the money for the last 5 months of the subscription.

First off I feel that flow is completely unprofessional. If I send someone to see my photos, I do want them to see flow, I want them to see my gallery! In fact I think I should be able to restrict others from seeing my flow or my favorites at all, but at least when it went to my photos first I felt like the site felt professional, now it is much more of just a social photo finding device.

And the other thing that has ruined this site for me is the removal of the friends page and friends RSS feed. I used this site to subscribe to my friends and guarantee that I would be able to see there newly uploaded photos. I always knew how many I had to view and my rss reader would make them read once I viewed them. The 500px page is not a replacement! It only show a small amount of photos on a page, there is no way to have marked the ones I have seen read, and even worse is the more function! Now if I click on a photo after I have hit more, when I go back, it brings me back to the first page of photos before I hit more! Are you kidding me? This is horrible and a huge step backwards. In fact it is so bad that I am considering deleting my account all together!

You had created this great site, with a lot of great features, and a great community that supported each other, and in one fells swoop you have erased that community and made your site a whole lot less professional and a whole lot less usable. Please consider going back to the old site design, and maybe some of us will stick around, otherwise, it looks like it is time for me to consider moving to SmugMug.

VCL 2.0 Breaks DVD Decryption in Handbrake

Macgasm has an article on the new VLC version 2.0 breaking DVD decryption in handbrake! Luckily they also have a solution. Run this installer from the VLC web site, it will install the DVD encryption engine in a place that handbrake can use it.

Version 2.0 is a great upgrade, but the breaking of handbrake is not a good feature, lets hope they keep the installer available!

500px update has made the site completely useless

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Wow, it is so sad to see a great site go down the tubes! 500px has quickly become the premier photography web site in the world. Where you can post and view the best photos from great photographers everywhere.

The problem is that they updated the site yesterday and basically completely broke everything that was good about it!

First off, now when you go to a photographers link instead of seeing their pictures you go to a new thing called flow, which is basically facebook’s timeline for activity on the site, so you are seeing the photos that the photographer has seen and liked instead of their photos. Well this is about the least professional thing I can think of. I don’t want to send people to my photos and have them see the photos that I like, I want them to see my photos. I can see having the option to see the photos that I like as a part of a social network, but honestly that should be able to be turned off if you don’t want people to know your taste in photos! And there is no reason it should be the first page people are brought too.

And equally as annoying they have removed the friends page and rss feed completely. Previously you could follow people on the site and it would add them to your friends page, and you could follow that RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader and you would see all the new photos that your friends have uploaded, and be able to keep up on them, see how many there were, and never miss a photo. Now this feed is completely broken, and the friends page has been removed. Now the only way to see your friends new photos is to go to the 500px front page, and if you are logged in it shows your friends most recent photos, but only a pages worth, with a more at the bottom, but if you click more, then on a photo and go back, you go back to the first page of photos, and there is no way to have marked the ones you have seen as read (which you could with the RSS feed) or know which ones you have missed if you did not have time to go through the web site to find them. Honestly this completely breaks the whole community aspect of the web site, and makes the site almost completely useless!

Honestly I am considering deleting my account, because they have ruined the best things about this site completely!

Misadventures of Bear Episode 3: Macy and the Fish

My newest short, the Misadventures of Bear, Episode 3: Macy and the Fish has been released on this very site. Just click on The Misadventures of Bear and you can watch the new episode, which is her first full adventure.

This relied heavily on After Effects to remove the puppeteer from the shot, so I hope you enjoy it.

Apple has Announced Snow Lion

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Apple has announced the next version of their OS, which now drops the mac name and is just OS X Mountain Lion. This continues bringing OS X and iOS closer together.

New features include:

  • Further integration with iCloud, which keeps your mail, calendar, contacts and documents in sync.
  • iChat has become Messages, and includes support for messaging with iOS devices and you can download a beta today. It is still a little rough, but being able to have my iMessages synced across all my devices is very cool.
  • Reminders is now on the Mac and syncs with iOS, though this should have been there from the start.
  • Notes is now on the Mac as welll
  • Notification Center on the Mac access with a 2 finger swipe is just like the iOS version, and looks like it will replace GROWL for notifications on the Mac.
  • Share Sheets allows you to contextually aware share where you are from Safari, Notes, iPhoto
  • Twitter has been fully integrated into the OS, just like on iOS
  • Game Center is now integrated into the OS, and you can supposedly play some games between the mac and iOS.
  • AirPlay Mirroring allows you to mirror your computer to your Apple TV.
  • Gatekeeper is the most controversial new feature, initially is set to only allow apps from the Mac App Store, but can be turned off so you can install your own Apps.
  • Another unannounced feature is that Sotfware Update is now gone and integrated into the Mac App Store. This one I find weird, as you don’t upgrade your iOS device through the app store, you have to go into settings to do the update, so why shouldn’t you have to go to Software Update?

Of course it doesn’t come out to till the summer so features will change, and hopefully the color finder icons will return!

AND AN IMPORTANT NOTE FOR EDITORS AS FINAL CUT PRO 7 will likely no longer work on Mountain Lion, so it is time to move on.