Went to the filming of the Adobe launch event on Monday which was interesting. I’m not exactly sure who it was aimed at or what the purpose of it was, but I can’t say I was overly impressed by it. The products are cool enough with some great new features, but the event was trying too hard to be Oprah or something and just didn’t work. It would’ve been better if they’d filmed the hipster designers talking about some cool project they’d used CS4 on and showed the clips instead of having said hipster designers come on stage and fumble through a product demo. Ben Grossman from the Syndicate did a good job, but he didn’t talk about his stuff, just the standard Adobe demo material. I would’ve been much more impressed by a 3-5 minute clip of him showing where CS4 was used in the Radiohead video.

Then again, I’m just a jaded and cranky plugin developer. Maybe it worked for everyone else. ;-)

Actually the most exciting thing about CS4 is something no one is talking about. The Help system. The help system now pulls from the usual stuff, but also from Adobe’s web site, certain partner web sites, and other areas. So you no longer just get the, usually, mediocre help from Adobe. It’s possible you’ll see answers from Lynda.com, Total Training, or even a plugin solution from Digital Anarchy. It’s one thing to have new features (or even old features), it’s something else to know how to use them and what they’re capable of. The new Help system stands a chance of offering that.

and, uh, btw… is it just me or does the content aware scaling stuff look like the coolest, sexiest, most-useless-in-practice technology ever? It’s probably just me… nevermind.
cheers, Jim

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Jim Tierney
www.digitalanarchy.com
Digital Anarchy
Filters for Photography & Photoshop
f/x tools for revolutionaries
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Tagged as: Adobe, Adobe Photoshop