Arranged Delirium

The Adobe Photoshop 6 Beta popped up last week, and its an important upgrade. I know - some upgrades are more important that others, and like always, this one depends on your needs. But if you are doing any real work with image manipulation you are going to want this one for the content-aware tools. Content Aware Fill was one of the best new features to come along in a long time and we’ve enjoyed it for some time now. With PS6, Adobe is building of that and putting more tools into play that are huge timesavers.

As usual, there are a ton of reviews available online, including these from MacWorld, c|net, and Digital Photography Review.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the UI has adopted the charcoal background that you see in many other Adobe apps. Looks like that trend will continue despite the usability studies that indicate the limited contrast of white text on dark backgrounds. I’m not trying to sound like an grumpy old man - I’m just saying we know that black text on a white background provides the most contrast and makes everything more readable. You can however adjust these levels of darkness which should help - but it means you’ll need to do the work to customize your workspace. But I guess the old interface was black on light grey, so the contrast wasn’t amazing anyway. I think we just get picky with tools we use daily…

But in terms of features, the most interesting elements for me (and my students) are the Content Aware Move and the Content Aware Patch tools. These work surprisingly well and make manipulations much faster. For students, this means they will be able to do things that all but the most dedicated would have avoided in the past due to time constraints. The crop tool is improved, and I think should help students that struggle with modifying images while confusing image size with resolution. I’m not sure yet - I’ll have to try it in the classroom. But this has been an ongoing conceptual problem for students working with digital imagery, so any advance is a help there. There are updates to the Camera Raw interface for improving images, and that will also be a welcome advance for my classes, since we use that all the time.

There are a number of features that will mean little to most users (video functionality, some new filters, etc.) but most of the additions are really helpful. I’m particularly pleased to see the return of text styles - I don’t want to switch to Illustrator just to do some character work. Also, there is a skin-tone masking ability that should make selections easier, but I struggled to make the tool work effectively. That could be user error though, so I’ll need to practice.

Overall, the big wins here are the content-aware tools. From an education perspective, you’ll be able to get student to do more, with less time involvement, which will likely increase motivation and decrease frustration. For my courses, this will be a “must have” upgrade. You can download the beta from Adobe Labs.

A couple of unrelated notes that I’m stuffing together into this one post:

1) I’ve been amazed this term by how few of my students know Jeff Bezos. Here’s a Wired article for the uninitiated. Of course, like most tech leaders, you’ll find both lovers and haters; but if you actually do a little research, you’ll be able to develop an informed opinion…

B) We’ll be talking about CMS software soon, and I was struck by a recent quote from Matt Mullenweg, referring to users of enterprise software: ‘How come the [content management system] that my company spent $4 million for is crappier than the thing I use for my blog, that I pay $12 a year for?’ Good question. You can read more here.

Education doesn’t need technology. It’s not a popular position, but not thinking about the topic leaves us open to a rather ignorant acceptance of the Modern ideology that progress is necessary and all technology is “good.” In any event, it’s interesting to see what’s going on in California where many tech leaders chose to send their children to decidedly non-tech schools. Why might that be? Here’s a recent article that describes the phenomenon, but it’s nothing new - tech leaders have been doing this for years. True, it’s anecdotal evidence, but isn’t it possible that they know something because of their experiences in the field?

Students in web design are creating (possibly) a new web site for the ITL department. But one thing that is always important to me is making sure that everyone know how to publish email links without just putting them out there for spam-bots to harvest. There are all sorts of complicated ways to prevent this; but there are also some very simple ways that can limit the nefarious spam industry. Here are the simple ones in order of complexity:

1) You simply use the [amp#64;] character instead of the @ sign in your code. This is quite easy; but there are numerous email harvesting spiders that can reconstruct this, so the amount of protection is very minimal.

2) You could also use characters or even type the address differently to obfuscate the address: name (at) washjeff _dot_ edu. This works a bit better, but depending on the formulae, most of these have been cracked; and from a user-interface perspective it can create effort on the part of the sender. This is a less than ideal solution if you actually want people to contact you. Plus, its pretty easy to de-munge.

3) In your code you could replace the actual text with hex values for the characters. This provides a bit more protection that the steps above, but there are still bots that can crack it. That being said, unless you are attracting spammers, it’s probably enough protection. Most certainly, it’s better than nothing! You can find tools online that will generate this for you. This is probably the course of action that you want to take if you are avoiding javascript.

4) You can use javascript to obfuscate the email address. As long as users have javascript enabled, they will see a clickable email address, but the bots will encounter javascript. It’s only a matter of time until this process becomes less effective; but thus far it still works well for me and the organizations I’ve done development for. I use the online tool Enkoder to generate the javascript for me. Supper-easy.

Of course there are better ways to do this - you could create a form, use captchas (annoying), or use a php script to protect email addresses. But truthfully, the javascript method works well enough unless you are being targeted and it is much better than just posting the email address out there where anyone can see it. Publicly broadcasting email addresses is a sure indicator of novice development - you don’t want to do it.

I had a student yesterday that needed to resize a good number of images. I told him to go look for some online tutorials (and there is 1 good one) but many of them were, well, more difficult than they needed to be. So, for student of new media, here’s how you resize multiple files at once:

Step 1) File menu -> Scripts -> Image Processor…
Step 2) Identify the source directory
Step 3) Identify the destination directory
Step 4) Make your desired changes
Step 5) Click the Run button

Thats it. There are a number of other options you can select if you know what you are doing, and as usual - you’re mileage many vary if you are using earlier versions. (For instance, I think the sub-folders option only came around in CS4, so if you are using the machines downstairs with CS3 you are out of luck.) Another tip: If you are at all confused about file locations and directory structures, do yourself a favor and just make two folders on the desktop: one with all the images you want to modify, and another one for where you want the new images to appear.