Maemo Firefox disables Flash
blog.pavlov.net
blog.pavlov.net
When I was on Windows, I found the Acrobat plugin to be a hog and hated looking at pdf's. On a mac, without Adobe software involved, pdf's are pleasant. Almost nothing makes my Macbook's fan run except Flash. However, YouTube never seems to do this, so is it just that Flash gives developers more rope to hang their apps with?
I actually do use Photoshop and Illustrator quite a bit, but mostly because I work with a few people who are quite skilled at these programs. Personally I'd stick with graphicsmagick.
Illustrator is the most confusing program I have ever seen, but that's because I don't know what I'm doing. If you do vector art for a living it's features cannot be beat. It's mainly because its so feature rich that once you learn the subset that will be useful for your workflow, you're golden. I haven't been able to get a comparison to inkscape yet.
Photoshop is pretty intuitive, I mostly use it for resizing and touching up pictures. I'm far from a power user. The Gimp is like a 5 year old photoshop, I can't stand it.
I also find many of the Gimps features more intuitive than Photoshop's. For instance, to rotate an image in The Gimp, it is under the Image menu, which is also where resize is. Resize is also in the Image menu in potoshop, but to resize you need to go to the Edit menu, the the Transform submenu. It took me far too long to figure that one out.
Frankly i think the most confusing aspect of The Gimp is its windowing model on desktops that don't properly support toolboxes. They are working on a SWM though, and it will be out in a year.
How do you run your Mac off a non-HFS filesystem? I thought Mac OS would only install on an HFS+-formatted drive. (Or maybe you just wanted to install Photoshop on a non-boot disk?)
I understand why code might assume a case-sensitive FS, but am puzzled how it might make use of case-insensitivity. Do you know what happens with the Photoshop installer? Is it doing something silly like `touch a; cp A b`?
Link: http://imaginationunbound.blogspot.com/2007/12/adobe-photosh...
Adobe seems to focus on putting out new features first and fixing existing work second. I've seen it before in companies whose development schedules are dictated by sales. "Hey, I spoke to this guy, he said he'd buy 100 units if we ...".
Out of interest, I've recently discovered the Sumatra PDF viewer:
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html
It's open source, for Windows and faster than Foxit, the reader usually mentioned as an alternative in this situation.
As you point out, Youtube can make Flash apps that don't kill your cpu, and so can I and many other people. But there's a ton of developers out there for whom Flash is just too flexible.
There's been a big backlash recently against Flash, mostly I feel by people who have never actually done any Flash work. Having done plenty of it myself, here's my opinion - for what it's worth: If we ever manage to get rid of Flash, it will be because browsers finally catch up and do all of the things that Flash does, with the same amount of flexibility. That will be good, because the standards and most of the implementations will be open. But it won't fix the problem of spinning fans. The same bad developers who are currently making your fans spin with Flash will just move on and do the exact same things in javascript.
I love it, and I hate it. It’s by far the best tool around for the kinds of things I want to do to my pictures (I could write several pages about why the GIMP is inadequate). It’s an extremely deep program – the deepest I’m very familiar with – full of all kinds of little thoughtful touches that make it smooth to operate for experienced users. It has several very powerful abstractions for dealing with numerical manipulation of images, which when mixed and matched support a broad diversity of workflows and needs.
But – Adobe has been unwilling to ever remove anything from it, or change any existing feature very dramatically. With the result that it has accreted features and grown into a newbie-unfriendly mess, to some extent. Many of its features end up superfluous because there are better ways of accomplishing the same thing, and so they sit there in the menus and palettes crowding out the rest. The majority of the earliest tools should be radically redesigned to account for the more sophisticated interfaces (which is not to say more complex) and more computationally expensive algorithms possible on modern hardware. Many of these tools have literally barely changed in 15 years, even though users’ needs and hardware tools have changed dramatically: digital cameras have become ubiquitous and much better, etc.
I don’t have much use for Photoshop haters, but I’m deeply saddened that Adobe hasn’t faced much real innovative competition, and the whole image editor field has kind of stagnated as a result.
I found Sumatra PDF was viewing quite a lot of things (transparent images and similar) totally wrong, which made me go back to Actobat in the first place.
Though this is only due to hardware accelerated video.