The Fine Art of MythBusters

Q: What do you get when you combine the MythBusters, NVIDIA and the Mona Lisa?
A: Awesome Robots.
Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman show you how to paint the Mona Lisa in less than a second—80 milliseconds to be precise:

NBC is Back!

After throwing, what can only be termed, the equivalent of an "adult temper tantrum," snatching up their toys and running home to mamma, NBC has returned to iTunes. And they have brought all of their shiny toys back, as well, including: The Office, Battlestar Galactica, and Heroes (among others). Only now, they're "shinier," offering version in HD.

This "spat" all started with iTunes sticking to its commitment to consumers to maintain the $1.99 pricepoint for all of its TV content. On the flipside, NBC wanted them to start a "value based on chronological-relevance" system, charging the $1.99 for older programming, but then raise the price for newer content, and etc. Well, iTunes simply said, "no" to which NBC responded, "Fine, we'll make our own, cause you're stupid!"

Hence, the inception of an awkardly named little program, known as "hulu". So now we have "hulu" vs the brand recogniton and market penetration of "iTunes." Sounds like a winner. Oh, and their business model? Offer content for free, but with commercials and advertising and stuff, minus the option to download and watch, i.e. you're stuck at the mercy of your internet connection via streaming data—how convenient is that! (Incidentally, there's no way you could make high-def content feasible, using streaming as your delivery model) Yeah, sounds like a winner. Hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe "hulu" has a very prosperous business model; it's still around, right?

All I know is that they're back on iTunes, and I couldn't be happier. The top five shows that I watched on iTunes were Lost, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and Prison Break, with the top tier being Battlestar Galactica and Heroes, both NBC shows. So, of course, I'm glad to see them return. Let's hope that they can continue to play nice.

CS4: It's Here

Every once in a while, a company comes out with a product release that becomes iconic. You know, the one that everyone talks about; the one that you need to have. Other versions, then, become more like the filler in between—with a stability enhancement here, and a feature addition there; still deserving of a legitimate +1 to the version release, but nothing groundbreaking. It is those landmark versions in between that seem to mark time and innovation. Well, CS4 just might be one of those releases. In Adobe's own words, this is "the biggest launch in the company's history."
So, what do they bring to the table that's so compelling?

Well, starting with Dreamweaver, they have added features that any web designer would be ga-ga about. Writing a tutorial on html, I have termed Dreamweaver an "option," not a "necessity." This new release is really putting the screws to that comment. More and more it may have laid down it's street cred as "da bomb-digiddy."

The first feature, and most "visually" obvious one, is the split-window . . . going vertical. Yep, instead of viewing your code above while viewing the design below, you can now view them in left and right panels, back-to-back. I love it! I've never liked the horizontal, top-and-bottom, layout.

Second, is the "live" preview now available. Built on the most standards compliant browser, "webkit," (for the un-initiated, this is the same browser engine that Safari uses) it allows you to view the site, in all of its functional glory, "live" right in the design window. Even better, the code updates, as the mouse interacts with the preview. That means the effects of rollovers can be seen in realtime via the code. How neat is that?!

Finally, contextual information about any given element. Translation: click on an element and all of the CSS styling rules are given for that element. From there you can drill down to the specific attribute that you want to change, and there it is in code view for you to edit. Talk about making things super-fast and much more manageable. All that CSS inheritance? Not a problem.

Now to a program which has a soft spot in my heart: Illustrator. Feature #1 - Multiple artboards. Feature #2 - multiple documents open in tabs. I like :o) And feature #3 - the "Blob Brush". This is a tool that allows you to paint like you would with a paintbrush. It then translates the blob of painted shape into a path. But even more, it allows you to also "erase" like you normally would in photoshop, and it updates the path accordingly. Same behavior when you add to it by painting more on. Way too cool.

Flash also has its set of new, cool, features like the addition of armitures to manipulate images. This is simply adding "bones" to shapes and objects in such a way that you can bend them. The example used was the image of a person. Using the appropriate tool, they clicked and dragged, click and dragged, until they had a manniquin-like set of segments which they could then bend in kind to make the character wave, jump, and so on. Then, there are some after-effects like tweeking capabilities for 3d effects and animations. All good stuff. (See it in action, at Adobe TV; look for "Adobe CS4 Launch Broadcast")

And now, finally, to the main event: Photoshop. Did they bring anything to this well-established product worthy of writing home about? Oh, absolutely. Don't lose your lunch, because its gonna be a wild ride!

The first thing that I would like to highlight is the GPU accelerated performance. In layman's terms, this means that Photoshop will now utilize your graphics card, as well as your processor to increase performance. For those of you who are like me, and have recently purchased a macbook pro, it means that you will now be tossing that impressive NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card into the fray, to be measured alongside your core 2 duo chip, as part of Photoshop's performance horsepower.

Second, is something called "Content-Aware Scaling." What this little jim-dandy does is scales an image, when you are cropping, to maintain all of the important elements, or focal points. Think of it in terms of scaling down an image from a regular-view webpage where screen real estate isn't an issue, to one more suited for a mobile device display, while keeping all of the good stuff. An example is below:



Third, is a whole array of interesting features under the category of 3D. Many of them are under Photoshop Extended, so if you're in the market right now—something to consider. One of these 3D features allows you to stitch together photos, attatch them to a sphere object, and then have the ability to pan around a 3D space, as though you were in the center of the room. "Yes, intriguing." For sake of sanity, I won't go over all of these features, but you can check them out in the videos below, from Adobe:

There was also some talk of "non-destructive" cropping and editing thrown around, as well.

CS4 Suites will be available for purchase November 1st. If you have any more input regarding CS4, let me know, and I'll post it. Or feel free to comment. Now go out there, and be Creative!

CS4: Soon Out the Door

Adobe will be announcing the introduction of CS4 tomorrow (Sept. 23rd.) What will this new iteration of the Creative Suite bring to consumers? Not much info has been given, so it's all down to speculation. Finding a sneak peek, however, I did get a bead on one particular feature: on photoshop, the dodge and burn tool has been dramatically refined, leaving images less washed out when using the tool.  The sneak peek talks about some other small things, with the keyword being "refine;" yep, seems the main enhancement, as given by the sneak peek preview, is a "refining of tools the suite already has."
But probably the most significant feature of this new suite is the amalgamation of all applications to one universal gui—translation: Dreamweaver and Flash will now look more like Photoshop, Illustrator, and so on.
A secondary overhaul, and this is actually a biggie, is full 64-bit support. Big frown for apple fans (me, included) because this includes you, out. "Life is over; pc users will have a one up on me, an adoring mac fan." Not neccessarily. Do your homework. The way that the two platforms utilize resources does not translate straight across. In fact, you with pc's who have 4gb of ram installed? Guess what--you're blocked from using more than 2.3gb at the OS level, where your mac counterparts utilize all of their maxed out 4gb ram. This is due to how the OS parses memory. Also, bigger doesn't always translate to better. 64-bit can actually mean it takes more juice to do essentially the same thing as 32-bit. Think of it as using larger batteries on a device just to make a light blink--the size of battery doesn't matter; it may be better to save your money and get the cheaper, more efficient, smaller batteries. Rough example, I know, but you get the gist. This isn't to say that 64-bit won't give you better rendering power, but on the mac side of things, CS3 with Leopard was already quite zippy.

That's it for now. Stay tuned tomorrow when CS4 opens its curtains. More coverage is on it's way.