Good or Bad: Adobefication

I have always been a great advocate of the Macromedia range of products, in particular Flash and Dreamweaver. Macromedia have consistently produced sensibly priced, high quality user friendly products that are powerful yet easy to pick up.

On the other hand I have never been a fan of Adobe products, I have always found them over priced and their user interfaces clumsy, unintuitave and overly complicated.

So now what? Where does the Adobe / Macromedia "merger" (read takeover) leave users? It is obvious from the recent changes to the Macromedia website who the dominant party is. Many of the users on the "Adobe formerly Macromedia" Team Macromedia forums have expressed similar concerns, such as the future for Macromedia products that conflict directly with existing Abobe products, for instance Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator. I know which product I think is superior, but in cases like this it's not the end user that matters, it's "brand identity" and "rationalization". Some have suggested that any rationalization will lead simply to any such products being sold of to other interested parties. I'm afraid I don't see this happening. For all Adobe are making all the right noises at the moment about continued support and product development I can't see any rational in selling off what are competing products to a competitor, it just makes no sense. Ultimately I see such products being shelved or, even worse, core elements of the Macromedia product being incorporated into the main Adobe product to create a single Adobeised hybrid product.

Personally I would have liked to see Adobe act as an umbrella company, maintaining the Macromedia brand. Now this may be a generalization, but I think, and this seems to be confirmed by opinion on the forums, that Macromedia users are not the same as Adobe users they belong to different markets and, more importantly, have a different cultural mindset. The Macromedia website was(and for the time being remains) a user driven, community based environment where users could feel they actually made a difference and that the company Macromedia listened to them directly. It was warm and friendly, something that has been lost following the recent Adobe brand "makeover".

Whenever any large company seeks to remove a competitor via the acquisition route the only people to suffer are the customers. I have just one thing left to say directly to Adobe. Guys, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

istockphoto.com - The designers dirty secret! (review)

If, like me, your job (or even hobby) involves an element of creative design then you have absolutely no excuse for not signing up to istockphoto.com , a repositiry of royalty free stock imagery containing images from photographs to flash files. You would be hard pressed not to find what you need for your latest masterpiece somewhere in the vast collection.

istockphoto.com differs from many stock image suppliers in several areas, not least on price. Pricing is based upon a pre-purchased credits system with each image being available in various resolutions, typically costing between 1 and 3 credits. At time of writing one credit is equal to one US dollar, which by anyones reckoning is a fair price for design imagery. Another interesting feature of istockphoto.com is that the imagery is provided exclusivley by existing members and submission is open to all. Provided that the images meet istockphoto.com submission criteria it is possible for anyone to add their photos to the collection and earn commission on every download (see site for current commission rates).

The quality of images at istockphoto.com is generally good, with many professional photographers and designers being active contributers, however it must be remembered that not all the images are of a professional standard and it pays to be picky before making a final desicion.

The site has many other useful features to get the creative juices flowing, including an active collection of forums, plenty of articles submitted by pros and amatures alike and image searching functions that are second to none.

All in all istockphoto.com is one of my favorite haunts, and I must say I spend probably far too much time there browsing through images.

Is your CD collection messing with your PC?

Sony BMG learns hard lesson in war against 'casual piracy' of CDs - Technology - International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/13/business/rights.php

Enough said...

For The Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;

They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;

They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

To the end, to the end, they remain.

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Uber search

Yahoo, Google, Google, Yahoo. Sometimes it can be a difficult choice between both these leading search monsters. Well not any more, search both at once with GahooYoogle

Woohoo!

EFF: Is Your Printer Spying On You?

EFF: Is Your Printer Spying On You?

If you're really paranoid (or if you really do have something to hide) you may want to check out this article!

www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/

I wonder how the law stands in the UK, does the DPA cover this? As a company DPA officer I know that the DPA is pretty toothless anyway when it comes to law enforcement, I suspect the same is true of the intelligence services

Free ipods, Oh yes...

Let me ask you a question....

Do you fancy a free ipod just for reffering a few friends to

http://ipods.freepay.com/?r=24060743

Techdirt:How Will We Regulate Online Games Whose Premise Is About Virtual Illegality?

V. interesting point about the boundries of law ... here

Open source intranet anyone...?

I think I may have just found the answers to my prayers. I'm tasked
with developing an intranet/extranet for our company and also with
bringing the development and maintainence of our company website in
house.

I have been looking at various products over the last few months and
in the main those that fit the bill have had fairly large cost
implications (we're not a huge company). I looked at open source
products too but they were in the main either too intensive for our
limited number of IT staff to install and maintain or they were simply
not up to the job.... until last night, when at some ungodly hour I
stumbled upon Metadot. I installed it on my laptop in under 2 minutes
and I'm just printing out the manual now... I'll let you know how I
get on.

Bloody internet!

Spent most of the last hour trying to access the mamboforge.net website to download Mambo CMS. Very frustrating… I really want to try it out!

Poker Mania

Is it me or has the UK gone stark raving poker mad? It seems like evey late night TV channel schedule isn't complete without it's very own casino website sponsered poker tournament variant. I can't help but be secretly pleased at the idea of pro gambling scheduling in what is rapidly becoming a nanny (or should that be police) state, but at the same time can't help wondering how long before some point scoring politician in search of a crusade decides it's time to ask questions in the house about the corruption of the poor british publich who are, let's face it, incapable of making their own decisions. It's not long ago that a similar situation arose when someone in government suggested that the UK should become the next vegas with large licensed casinos... boy did that cause a stir!

Just found a mass of images on an old hard drive I thought I'd lost including lots of my digital artwork. This one's called paranoia


image copyright no unauthorised reproduction.

Ringo Starr to become superhero

However he does have to go buy a new cape...

BBC NEWS Entertainment TV and Radio Ringo Starr to become superhero

Ringo birthplace to be bulldozed

It's curtains for Ringo's birthplace...

BBC NEWS England Merseyside Ringo birthplace to be bulldozed

No historical significance, The Beatles - Three musicians and a drummer?

Some people have way too much time on their hands

And too much fluff in their bodily nooks!

The Incredible World of Navel Fluff

Picassa, help for the disorganised photographer

If, like me, you take lots of digital photographs and are, again like me, somewhat indiscriminate when it comes to filing them away then Picassa is for you. Like Google earth this is another free application developed by the boffins at google. When you first install Picassa it scans all the drives attached to your PC (including network files) looking for image files in most of the popular formats. Those paraniod types will be pleased to hear that you can specify exactly which locations picassa is allowd to scan!

Once the full scan has finished Picassa displays thumbnails of all the images it has found in an easy to use interface which includes basic image manipulation tools, organisational tools and provides the ability to post your photos directly to your blog or share them with friends and family.

Whilst it could never be classed as a primary graphics application, Picassa is a godsend when you're looking for that killer image you know is lurking somewhere in one of those random folders you dropped onto your PC nine months ago. I for one couldn't live without it...

It's a virtual world...

My favorite toy of the moment is Google Earth.

How do you fancy being able to see a virtual planet earth floating in
front of you awaiting your command? At the flick of a mouse you spin
the globe around to the general area that interests you, double click
on a country and within seconds you are zoomed in to view high
resolution ariel images of your home town... well at least if you live
in the USA! Here in the UK the story is a little different as most of
the imagery is a bit on the low resolution side, a situation I'm sure
google will improve over time... (guys?)

One thing that you'll probably need is a broadband connection as the images are downloaded as required (otherwise I guess the install would be huge!!)

If I were a geography teacher (which thankfully I'm not) this piece of kit would be number one on my list of must haves. As it is I've lost count of the hours I've spent (wasted) just browsing this little green and blue ball we all live on...

Now I'm a self confessed google fan, the google guys and gals have produced some pretty cool free software over the last year or so picassa, hello and gmail (from where I'm posting this) to name but a few. Now a cynic might say that this is no more than the natural progression of the viral marketing model driven by a need to increase brand awareness. Whilst this may be true who really cares? I'm already well aware of the brand and the google software offerings really do do what they say on the tin. It all works (even the beta stuff most of the time) and it's all free, at least for the time being...

In search of charity

Every now and then I stumble upon something that restores my faith in humanity. One such "something" found its way to my browser last week. The Rectifi search engine www.rectifi.org.uk is the brain child of one Jonny Platt a 22 year old student of Development Studies at Sussex University. Like other search engines Rectify searches for websites based on search terms entered by the user, also like other engines it displays relevant "sponsered" adverts, however unlike other search engines the revenue generated by these paid for adverts is donated to charity. Additionally Recify also offers a price comparison service (much like kelkoo) and access to ebay auctions. Both these services also generate revenue for charity. If there's a better way to generate money for charity without actually having to do anything I'd like to know what it is!