oh man this just made my day—
“About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod,” said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s pretty staggering.”
The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player — that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft’s corporate campus. “This irks the management team to no end,” said the source.
read the full article over at wired
Apple has made a new site with a nice design geared towards students. Hopefully no web design students will pick up on how badly its coded, riddled with validation errors and tables. On the arts and creation page they state:
“2. Innovation-Apple is always innovating with creative professionals in mind.” While this is completely true with their computers, its lacking in the coders they hire. Seems to me with giants around them like Eric Meyer some of this standards stuff would rub off. It would be a tremendous advantage for them to employ standards as the “innovating” professional company they are, or at least hire a good firm to set them up with a good structure/framework they could build on.
Well, Adobe just released Photoshop Elements 3.0.
After recently dumping every program I had, to go legit, I’ve been slowly replacing things here and there to get my core application arsenal back. And having been using trial versions of the Adobe Creative Suite, all good things come to an end and the trials have expired on both my macs.
So today I went to the Apple store here in Soho to pick up what I thought to be Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, but to my suprise version 3.0 was out and I had just stopped by a few days before and version 2 was still on the shelf. Lets just say visually it all goes downhill from here on. It took me a while to spot it and actually the reason I did see it was because version 2 wasn’t around with its bright yellow shining sunflower box. Instead there was a box of cheese. It was awful my friends.
A white box with a digital camera on it with a long usb cable that curls into the word “elements” (that has the embossing layer effect on it to boot) and continues to the end where the usb plug then is inserted into the most embarrassing framed stock photo of this lady with a miniature man standing on her shoulder whispering into her ear, eliciting a giggle from the woman.
After staring in dismay at said box for a solid 5 minutes to be sure it was actually Adobe Photoshop Elements, I reluctantly picked it up and looked for new features, saw that it had the RAW plugin which was cool and they added the healing brush as well. Well, I then headed down to the registers, paid and brought it home, in a NICE APPLE store bag.
*Warning to viewers with weak stomachs* looking below this line may cause cramping. consider yourselves warned….
Ok, Installation! The whole time in the back of my mind I’m wondering what the application icon is going to look like, surely its even better than version 2’s slammin’ sunflower? Installation Complete! I navigate to my applications partition, in excitement and… (remember that warning part? well here’s the first incidence)
What the heck is that BLUE THING? Surely its not the app I just installed….yeah…it is…
I’ve put it next to a few other Adobe apps, including the CS version and version 3’s predecessor with the sunflower. You see this would not be a big deal had Adobe not done such a good job with version 2 branding. You can see how it fits well with CS and is a great folder icon on its own merit as well. So back to this blue thing. Me again with the lengthy stare of dismay- reluctantly move to double click open the blue thing. *Second warning squemish folks*
[shakes head and hangs it in dismay, and points to] another blue thing. Hey lets look at this positive like…. it matches the other blue thing. This caused me to scratch my head a few times and ponder:
Upon reflection its probably neither, I imagine it was a move by Adobe to make a clear distinction between a $89 app and a $650 one, which probably caused the sunflower designer to go ballistic having to trash the potentially awesome version 3 design he/she had made.
If that’s the case too bad Adobe you blew it by actually putting some nice work into branding version 2 and then bringing in the wrecking ball with version 3.
Alas! my dismay doesn’t end yet folks! Lets pop open that app and get started making some graphics! *Squemish this is your third and final warning* Now mac people will definetely get what I’m about to show you but PC people will probably not get it, unless they have worked on macs before. Application loading.. Splash screen…..yeah its that chick again…and…….click me if you dare.
What you see in this pop up is just a tremendous let down to a mac user. You see all that screen real-estate being taken up on my Powerbook? They completely redesigned the GUI. With some exceptions on the mac we don’t have applications that take up our entire work area, among those exceptions would be apps like painter, various 3d apps, but also macromedia has started making more palattes as well.
But what you see here is prime PC. Worst part is that some of the palattes have fixed minimum widths so you can’t make them smaller than they are to save space, and yet others you can resize so you have this irregularity of palattes. Also notice the tremendous amount of wasted bottom space on the tool palatte on the left, it used to end right at the bottom of the color swatch. We’ve also got a very Microsoft Office esque toolbar up top taking valuable screen real-estate.
The long and short of it seems to be that Adobe is creating a different application all together now with Elements, implimenting odds and ends of Photoshop but creating a dumbed down GUI and cheap branding ID. Even with all this though, I’m glad to have it until I can get up the dough for the Creative Suite Premium, although I might have to hurry, who knows what Adobe has lurking for CS2, please don’t let it be another blue thing.