If you receive an error while installing an extension to the CS5 (or CS4) suite like "You do not have appropriate permissions" to install the extension, do the following:
If you're using WordPress 3.0 or above (which, if you're using WordPress, you really should be), you have the option of adding custom menus to your theme without extra plugins.
In the past, this was managed via plugins such as "Page Links To" and "Exclude Pages." Now, this can all be managed within the WordPress admin console and in your theme, with a decent amount of customization.
In this tutorial, I'm assuming you know the basics of PHP (enough to create your own theme, at least).
To tell WordPress that this theme supports menus, add the following code to your theme's functions.php file:
To use a menu in your theme files, you will need to add a line similar to what's shown here. I added this in my header.php file for the top navigation, and added a similar line to footer.php:
There are many more options available for how your menu is displayed; see the WordPress Codex page for wp_nav_menu.
To create your new menus in WordPress, go to the admin console, click Appearances > Menus. This screen is fairly self-explanatory. I was able to replace three plugins and some custom header/footer code using only this method, in about 10 minutes (including research on wp_nav_menu).
For even more hardcore customization using custom walkers (a feature described in the Codex), check out Christian Budschedl's excellent post, Improve Your WordPress Navigation Output.
Happy blogging!
Note the "CS5.5" tag, because it's the exact same box as CS5.
Adobe has recently released version 5.5 of its Creative Suite packages. Having recently upgraded to CS5 from a mixed CS3/CS4 environment, I had to ask myself if it's worth both the trouble and expense to upgrade at this point.
The short answer is no. I'm not really sure why Adobe felt this was a necessary update that they felt was worthy of charging money for.
The long answer...well, I'm good at the long answer. Hold tight.
First off, this release is numbered a bit differently than previous releases. It's a point update (CS5.5), so it's not quite a full update warranting an entirely new version number (CS6). Previous Creative Suites have used whole numbers, with the applications themselves updating their revision numbers as patches have been released (Photoshop 10.01, for example).
This fact in itself makes me wonder: is this simply a bugfix release with a ton of marketing and an actual purchase price behind it? The list of updated applications would seem to indicate this is the case. There are numerous improvements across the board to a few of the applications, but others receive no update that I can see.
Photoshop, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, and Fireworks are still CS5. For most users, this means that there is no reason to upgrade. Adobe should continue to support these versions with patches (as long as they don't start charging for those too) until the next full release comes out.
I'm pretty disappointed in this, because there are still numerous issues with Photoshop alone that haven't been addressed (this problem is ongoing). Adding GPU acceleration is great, except that most artists I know end up turning it off. And we're still stuck with layers not able to be dragged between tabbed windows.
Acrobat X Pro adds improved integration with Microsoft products, including Office 2010 (meaning the icons look like they belong in Office 2010 now) and Sharepoint. It also adds online file sharing, which I'm sure won't be exploited any time soon, and a new fullscreen viewing mode. There's also a wizard for creating PDFs, and an improved toolbar.
Admittedly, I don't use InDesign much (or at all), so I won't go into too much detail. It doesn't look like much to me, but feel free to check for yourself (warning: Adobe randomly changes their site around from time-to-time, so, sorry if the link is broken).
I pay for this thing every time I upgrade, but after the first time, I'll likely never use it again unless I need to mix multichannel audio. Oh yeah, 5.5 adds native multichannel 5.1 support. There is also project exchange with other NLEs. I still think this application falls far short of Cool Edit and Sound Forge, but at least it will visually match your other Creative Suite applications. Dark grey for the win!
Now, it's been quite some time since I used Dreamweaver (back when it was a Macromedia product, actually), but it's an application I know pretty well that works in a field I know very well.
In version 5.5, Dreamweaver adds CSS3/HTML5 support, which is interesting since neither of those specs are finalized yet. I'm guessing further patches will make corrections to these specs as they evolve. There is also a multiscreen preview so that you can view your output on multiple devices at once.
Dreamweaver looks like it's as suited for modern web design as it's always been. It's not the way I prefer to do my web work, but if you like Dreamweaver you'll probably be happy with the upgrade overall.
It really looks like After Effects got the lion's share of changes this time around. Stereoscopic 3D is far improved for this version, and it looks like anaglyph rendering is no sweat, either. The cameras actually have a true bokeh blurring filter now, so no more multi-layer nightmares for depth-of-field. This pleases me.
The Warp Stabilizer tool is worth its own paragraph, for sure. This thing takes most of the work out of stabilizing footage. It will analyze your scene and automatically smooth out the motion, and can crop and scale the edges to fit your composition to the smallest necessary (or largest possible. if you've done footage stabilization, you know what I'm talking about). It looks like Adobe has put the seam carving (aka content-aware scaling) algorithm to good use here, as After Effects can fill in the now-missing border data from adjacent frames. Pretty impressive stuff (seriously, go check out the videos).
Given the improvements to cameras and lighting, as well as 3D stereoscopy and camera tracking, I'd say After Effects 5.5 is a definite improvement.
Flash Professional 5.5 shows mostly incremental improvements over CS5. Most changes appear geared toward mobile content development. I have opinions on this, but those are outside the scope of this already lengthy post.
Remember when this was the cutting edge of Flash? Yyyeah...
The Flash team has always been very involved with the user community, and there are improvements on this front as well. There are TLF (Text Layout Framework) control improvements, streamlined publish window (THANK you, that thing was really starting to show its age), as well as...(drum roll)...autosave. Whooo.
Flash development cycles generally seem to alternate between tools for developers and tools for designers. In CS5 (v10.1), we first received the TLF. In CS4 (v10), we were blessed with rudimentary 3D support (aka flying cards in space).
Of course, I see absolutely no mention of Molehill on the CS5.5 page, so I guess that's a wash for this version. Stick to FlashDevelop or FDT.
Yes, finally, the conclusion. So, is it worth the upgrade? I'd say it depends. This upgrade is probably worth it to you if you:
So, other than these very limited (and totally plausible!) situations, I'd say CS5.5 is a cash-grab for Adobe, since most of this crap could have been released in a patch (and should have). Alright, with the exception of After Effects, Audition, and Dreamweaver. If you use any of these three regularly, they might be worth the individual upgrade, but certainly not worth upgrading the entire suite.
So, sorry Adobe, all this is doing is making you look greedy.
If you actually bother preemptively reading your software documentation, you may have already known this, but this is a huge time-saver over having to render test movies for my HDTV.
At work, I'm using a 27" 1080p monitor/television as my secondary monitor. We use a model that has a similar color profile for presentations, so using this screen as a preview screen is essential. Otherwise, we'd have to keep our presentation displays unpacked and hooked up to a computer, transfer files, and so on. I won't get into (more) details, but suffice to say it would be a royal pain.
You can stretch to the edges, but there's still a border.
Even with this setup, I've been rendering drafts to an mp4 file and running a video player fullscreen on the HDTV (which matches the production environment). This is still a step I'd rather not have to do, so finally today I did some searching.
Lo, and behold! There is a way.
According to Adobe documentation, Ctrl-backslash (Command-backslash on Mac) does the following:
Resize application window or floating window to fit screen. (Press again to resize window so that contents fill the screen.)
Since my composition window is on the second monitor already, I pressed Ctrl-backslash (that's this one --> \) twice.
Ah, fullscreen goodness.
Bonus off-topic chatter: The slashes in a URL are just that, slashes. They are technically forward-slashes, but we just call them slashes. There are no backslashes in URLs.
Right: "http-colon-slash-slash-homestarrunner-dot-com-slash-404d"
Wrong: "goatse-dot-cx-backslash-mfw"
See also: xkcd
Situation #1: You are taking a series of screenshots and pasting them into Photoshop. Suddenly, you keep getting the same image when you paste, despite taking updated screenshots.
Situation #2: You copy an image to the clipboard from your browser, paste it into Photoshop, and all subsequent paste operations from your browser result in the same damn image.
Situation #3: You are working in Photoshop, and try to paste an image from any external program, and end up getting something you copied in Photoshop earlier.
What do these situations have in common (other than being annoying)? They're all instances of Photoshop's clipboard thinking it's smarter than you.
This problem is likely a legacy from when computers were slow and didn't have much memory (like artists flattening images to make file size smaller, but that's a discussion for another day). Contrary to any logical reason I could think of, Photoshop keeps its own clipboard data separate from the system clipboard, and monitors the system clipboard for changes. It then, for whatever reason, decides that the clipboard data hasn't changed, so why bother updating its own clipboard with redundant data?
Purging Photoshop's clipboard doesn't help; it only gives you a blank clipboard that still won't update. Of course, none of this stops Photoshop from sticking its own copied data into the system clipboard, which works 100% of the time. Sigh.
You can easily fix this by modifying the Windows registry. Past versions of Photoshop included a .reg file on the install disc that you could simply double-click. Looking on my installation media, I can't seem to find any .reg file. But, I'm lazy. For previous versions, look in
"Photoshop [Version]/Goodies/Optional Plug-Ins/Photoshop Only/Optional Extensions" for a file named "AlwaysImportClipbd_ON.reg"
I will outline the registry modifications below, and follow it up with .reg files for specific Photoshop versions. Once you have taken the appropriate actions, you should restart Photoshop if it's already open.
The usual warnings apply to editing the Windows registry: Make a backup, only do this if you know what you're doing, etc.
Registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Adobe/Photoshop/[PS Version] (Where PS Version corresponds to your installed version: 12.0 for CS5, 11.0 for CS4, 10.0 for CS3, and so on)
You will need to add a new DWORD value (on 64-bit OSes, this will be the 32-bit value) named "AlwaysImportClipboard" and set the value to 1.
Your new registry key should look like this.
Restart Photoshop, and that's it!
Note: I would be willing to recreate the appropriate .reg files if there is sufficient interest, or the steps above prove too complicated. Happy pasting!
Update: Never mind, this appears to do nothing at all. Photoshop still randomly stops using the clipboard, even with this registry value set.
I installed Photoshop CS on my home machine because Photoshop CS4 runs like a dog, even on my quad-core machine beast. I do still use the rest of the CS4 applications, because their enhancements are actually worth using. But, that's a whole different story...
Anyway, if for some reason you're using Photoshop CS in Windows 7, you might find your layer dragging going quite slowly, and things generally not working at full speed.
To fix this, go to your Photoshop shortcut and right-click it. Select Properties, then the Compatibility tab. Check the box marked "Disable desktop composition" and press OK. When you start Photoshop, Windows will go into "Basic" color mode, which looks like crap, but your Photoshop will now run smooth as silk.
Old-school.
On a side note, I also had to do this for 3ds max 9. I don't remember the exact issue, but it also required old-school access to the screen drawing.
Based on a conversation with a buddy this morning:
Michael: (after reading this iPad review) could you imagine walking into someone's house where they used their ipad as a $500 picture frame, all the time? I think I'd punch them in the face
Steve: I wouldn't - I would sell them a iPad stylus for $100 (it would be a standard #2 pencil)
Michael: LOL ...be sure to put shiny black plastic on it
Steve: $150 for for the "distressed" stylus (chewed up pencil)
iDistressed: Only $149.99!
You've just gotten your computer set up with dual monitors. You're sporting the true sea of information, baby! Only problem is, you don't want to see the same crappy image on both:
Double your wallpaper, halve your coolness.
...and you definitely don't want to stretch a wallpaper intended for a single monitor onto two.
Stretching the desktop image is for losers, not designers.
I'll present a few different ways of getting your monitors to show independent pictures on each desktop, and as a bonus, you will learn how to span a single dual monitor wallpaper onto dual monitors. Then you can use the high-quality dual monitor wallpapers I've created for you.
Originally created for Windows 98 (actually, IE4, which almost converted Win95 to Win98), this gem allows you to have any item that Internet Explorer is capable of rendering directly on your desktop, and offers slightly more customization of monitor content.
Active Desktop was originally intended for Microsoft advertising trolls partners to push crap useful targeted product notifications onto Microsoft customers, but works for putting strange items on our desktop. You can even set entire web pages as your desktop.
In the Display Properties, under the Desktop tab, click the Customize Desktop button. In the window that appears, click the Web tab, then the New... button. A dialog will appear that allows you to select a web page or image. After you pick your image, you should see a bar above your new image. Drag this bar to the appropriate monitor, click the maximize button, and your wallpaper should be covering the monitor. Right-click the desktop and select Lock Web Items on Desktop to keep it from moving around.
This method simply involves stitching two wallpapers together, side-by-side, so they form one continuous image that matches the vertical dimension of my monitors, and double the horizontal dimension.
For example: my monitors run at 1600x1200, so I create an image sized 3200x1200, and paste the two wallpapers I'd like to use next to each other. Photoshop, by default, has snapping enabled, so I don't even have to pixel-align them. I save out this new file, and set it as my wallpaper with the Position to Tile. Setting it to Tile forces the wallpaper to begin at the top left and span as far as it can before tiling. In our case, the tiling happens offscreen, giving us the appearance of two separate wallpapers on each monitor.
This is the method I use, because I always have Photoshop open, and don't use Active Desktop. I also use this method to merge two wallpapers into one continuous image, or create a new wallpaper from scratch. All my original dual-monitor wallpapers were created this way, as shown below:
Dual-monitor continuous image set to Tile.
If you're not the do-it-yourself type, you may just want to download an application to handle all of this for you. A third party application has the benefit of sometimes offering additional functionality, such as dual-monitor window management.
As far as management applications go, I'd have to say Ultramon is, by far, the highest recommended application out there. It supports more than 10 monitors, and provides window management along with a host of other features. Unfortunately, it is $40, but from what I've read it's well worth the cost, especially with more than two monitors. I have not used it myself, so can't make a recommendation for or against it.
The software that came with your graphics card may provide this functionality as well. nVidia's nView Control Panel applet supports separate wallpapers, and I'd think ATI's CATALYST software does too.
John's Background Switcher not only switches your desktop automatically with images from Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, DeviantArt, and almost any other source, it will switch your monitors independently, saving you from the bother of messing with them at all.
I use WallPapa to switch my desktop backgrounds. It only supports dual monitor wallpapers as a side effect of the "Tile" technique above. Your wallpapers must be stitched together beforehand. It also has...other issues, but that's an entirely different discussion.
Adobe has decided to make more of a commitment to customer support. They are teaming up with a global service provider, so I assume that means outsourced phone support. The best place to take your change requests is the Adobe Feature Request form.
This is a really, really long post. It's long both because the Adobe Creative Suite 4 is vast and encompasses many software packages, but also because I found a great deal of things to complain about. While complaining is nothing new for me, finding this many problems with a mature software product is.
In this post, first I will detail the problems I encountered using the CS4 products, some action items for Adobe, state a few positives, and an overall conclusion. I do not intend to review all of the new features (which are many).
Note that this post is about the Windows version. I believe many of these issues are not present on a Mac system, but I can't make any assumptions, because I do not own a Mac, nor have I used CS4 on a Mac.
We'll start with Photoshop, because I'm guessing that the majority of people experiencing a CS4 product will be using Photoshop CS4.
First, the interface, which was the source of the lion's share of the problems I had with CS4.
Photoshop CS4 changes things up by presenting a mostly familiar interface, but uses custom window chrome. All of the curves have been taken out of panels, which you may remember from CS or CS2. CS3 featured more standard-looking tabs on its panels.
Photoshop CS4's custom chrome and square tabs
I actually don't have a problem with the panel tabs, as the new look is very clean. I also understand the reasoning behind removing the window chrome, as it presents a bit more usable space with the menubar riding the top edge. I guess it's more Mac-like, but it does break with Windows convention, which is to have a titlebar. Not a huge deal, but it does present additional problems (more on this later).
One thing about the tabs I do have a problem with, however, is the way tabbed documents were implemented. The tabbed interface makes it impossible to drag layers from one document to another. If you drag a layer over a background document's tab, it simply does nothing. Dropping the item there also does nothing.
See? That's how you notify users of a drop target.
When I drag an item onto a taskbar button in Windows, Windows warns me that I can't drop an item there. If I hold an item over a taskbar button, after a brief pause, that window will open, allowing me to drag and drop no matter how many windows I have open.
The workaround to this tabbing problem is to either arrange your document windows into actual windows, which sucks if you have more than a few documents open, or drag the tab of the document away from the dock, which results in its own floating window, which you can then drag layers into. This is a pain in the ass, because the default behavior is to open documents in tabs. You can change this behavior by opening Edit > Preferences > Interface, and deselecting the "Open Documents as Tabs" checkbox.
Many times, when using the Polygonal Lasso tool, my screen would go white with only the top toolbar visible until I closed the lasso. I could not see the canvas or previous lasso selection, despite it still being there once the problem corrected itself. This all happened on my home office machine, which has hardware acceleration turned off. I haven't encountered the issue at my office office, but I don't do a whole lot of lassoing there. Sorry, don't have screenshots of this.
Speaking of hardware acceleration (which is a really cool feature, and I'm sure works flawlessly on Macs), there is no software fallback for canvas rotation. On my home machine, the embedded Intel chip is not up to snuff for hardware (using shared graphics RAM), so I have no hope of ever using this feature there. A bit lame, since that's where I would use it the most (where I color comics). The obvious solution is to upgrade my machine, but I don't understand why even a crappy-performing software rotation couldn't have been included. Given that these guys are graphics programmers working on an image editing tool, I can't think of a good excuse for not including it.
Guess which one is the actual window. None of them are, actually.
At the office, I had to hack my driver files just to be able to upgrade them so that hardware acceleration would work at all. Now that it works, I still get strange visual artifacts from time to time that tells me maybe this feature wasn't as ironed-out as Adobe would have you believe.
This button does not have a drop shadow. Or does it? No, it's Photoshop.
There is a drop shadow around every document by default, unless you're in fullscreen mode. This drives me crazy for buttons and the like, especially ones that already have drop shadows. For full-size canvases, it's a nice effect, but rather pointless. You can disable this by going to Edit > Preferences > Interface, and changing all "Border" dropdowns to "None."
Photoshop still has limited PNG support, which is strange for two reasons: 1. Adobe owns Fireworks, which has far more PNG features included. The code is already in Adobe's codebase, somewhere. 2. This is around the fifth or six major version to Photoshop.
Update (8-26-2009): Many plugins still don't give visual feedback on what they're doing, and don't present a uniform interface. Radial blur doesn't offer a preview, so you just have to guess where it's going to apply, or center your artwork on the point you want it to be applied. This interface hasn't changed since I've started using Photoshop, since version 6.
I actually had nothing to complain about in Illustrator, and encountered no problems. Its UI highly resembles Photoshop and Flash.
I did not get a chance to review Audition CS4, but CS3 seemed way too bloated for normal use. I ended up using Sound Forge for my needs, which starts in 1/3 the time and I don't need to wait on the interface to load.
In Adobe Bridge, you can't specify UNC paths. I'll take a shot in the dark and say this is because of Adobe's Mac roots. To load anything from a network, I have to have a location mapped to a drive letter. In this era, with multiple NASes and large networks, this isn't a very feasible option. I already have some 10 locations mapped to drives because of our domain policy, so I don't get a choice. It becomes a bit inconvenient to dedicate more drive letters solely for Bridge.
Flash is my specialty, so I use this software quite a bit. The CS4 version has shown huge improvements in stability and features, and I had no issues using it so far, other than its really slow startup time (starting Flash 8 and CS4 at the same time was an interesting experiment). Like Photoshop, it uses custom window chrome. Actually, Flash and Photoshop are the only two applications in CS4 that have any sort of consistency.
Update (8-25-2009):Ah, yes. How could I have forgotten? Flash still has the problem that if you delete things from your library and re-save the file, the filesize stays the same, forcing you to use the clunky "Save and Compact" command (which is a hack on Macromedia/Adobe's part for the process of "save as a different filename, then copy this newly compacted file over the old file"). This sometimes causes problems on network drives, as the temporary intermediate file won't delete automatically.
Flash still has the odd unexplainable issue, such as certain movies not displaying bitmaps because "one or more items in the scene could not be displayed because of insufficient memory." I have a machine with 2 GB of ram, and it's a 30 MB file, so I assume it's a different error with really undescriptive text. It's the same error that Flash 7 displayed on the same file. Whoo, progress!
Standard window chrome, and different panel controls.
Like previous versions, Premiere Pro uses standard window chrome. It looks nearly the same as previous versions, save for darker UI. It uses dockable panels like the rest of the CS4 products, but unlike Flash and Photoshop, the panel titles are not in uppercase, and use a different font. It's clear the UX guys for the web and video product teams aren't communicating.
Enough already! Isn't there a maximum setting?
Also true to the Premiere Pro legacy, CS4 leaves files scattered all over my various drives. On each export, Premiere Pro copies the .prproj file to my Temp folder, renaming each subsequent save. I found files named Project_Name_25.prproj (with all previous versions there too). Normally, this isn't a problem, but at the office we work with .prproj files that are 15MB and more. It adds up.
Not in the working folder, not in temp, but ANOTHER folder.
Add to this, there are numerous files cached in Documents and Settings/[user]/Application
Data/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files, and also Documents and Settings/[user]/Application
Data/Adobe/Common/Media Cache. After wondering why I kept running out disk space on C:, I have my answer (before you accuse my disk of being too small, we use C: as an OS/programs drive, and D: as our working drive).
Not only does it cache these media files in multiple locations, conformed audio files (.cfa) are cached in (depending on your version) Documents and Settings\[user]\My Documents\Adobe\Premiere Pro\[1.5|2.0|4.0]\Adobe Premiere Pro Preview Files. These files are stored in addition to your actual working folder (where you saved the .prproj file), autosave, and preview folders. That makes...what, five different locations that Premiere Pro uses to store files?
Like previous versions, you still cannot defer conforming audio when loading new media into the project. It runs in the background, which is nice, but when you have on the order of several hundred media files, it would be nice to defer a large chunk of them later if I'm not working on those files. Additionally, every time Premiere Pro conforms audio, it cracks and pops my headphones enough to be painful. So I get to either wait for conforming to finish, or disable my audio.
In CS4 (and I don't know if this was the case in CS3 or not), there is no keyboard shortcut for Export, which is the new replacement for Export [Video|Audio|Image|etc]. I now see it has Ctrl+M as a shortcut, so maybe this was addressed in the 4.1.0 update. To export any media, you use the same command: File > Export > Media..., which opens Adobe Media Encoder. Even for a still image.
Now, on to After Effects. After Effects is like the Photoshop of video. At least, that's what I tell laypeople. Actually, the only issue I had with After Effects was having it crash numerous times when I taxed it too hard. At the time, I think I was using Trapcode's Particular, so can't conclusively lay the blame at Adobe's feet.
Like Premiere Pro, it uses standard chrome and non-caps font for panel titles, along with orange outlining of active panels.
So, speaking of Media Encoder, I had numerous problems with it on my first go-round, mostly relating to crashes and freezes. Whenever I would lock my workstation to step away while files were encoding, I would come back to a crash error in "PProHeadless.exe" relating to "[..\..\Src\AudioRender\StackAudioBuffer.cpp-58]" and my media would not be exported in the queue. Updating to 4.0.1 fixed the issue.
Because of the aforementioned crashes, I noticed that if output fails for any reason, duplicated files append "_1" even when no file of that name already exists. I guess it's keeping an internal counter? Not a big deal, but was annoying to rename output files numerous times.
Adobe Media Player was a package I had not seen before, but am glad it was included. It is a bit heavy for what is essentially an .flv player. I know it plays other media, but I have other players (Media Player Classic, Quicktime, etc) for that. To play .flv files quickly, you'd be better off using an .flv codec, or downloading a free, lightweight, standalone player.
I noticed on our subtitled .flv files that Adobe Media Player does not show embedded cue point information. I found that fact strange for a player included in a media development suite developed by the same company.
One application I was completely underwhelmed with was Soundbooth. Wow, this application is sluggish, and no longer resembles CoolEdit at all, in that it is slow and bloated, and CoolEdit was a lean, mean, audio editing machine. I actually wasn't going to make this comparison, as I know Syntrillium and Adobe have differing goals, but honestly, Adobe started it.
I found that Soundbooth was paged out of memory very quickly, even with a generous amount of RAM. This was noticeable because after leaving it minimized for a bit, dragging a file in from Explorer took quite some time.
Why the @#&! is this a tab?!
My biggest problem was the interface. There is a tab that shows the currently opened file, but it contains a stupid dropdown on the tab for switching files instead of, say, using more tabs. This design choice has the benefit of closing all open documents when you try to close a single one using the "Close" icon in the tab, which directly opposed to tabbing behavior in Adobe's two flagship components of CS4, Flash and Photoshop. Oh, and every other tab in the universe.
There is also a "Search Help" box at the top-right. This seems to be the only application in the suite to have this feature. Using this box opens up Adobe search results. On testing, I found faster results with Google, as I could find things actually relevant to my search terms.
'forfuture pasteoperations'
An issue I thought was horrible QA turns out to be simply weird font kerning. I don't know if it's my machine or poor font choice, but it looks awkward.
Now, onto a few positives, so you don't think that I just hate CS4 and change (get off my lawn).
If you are able to use the hardware acceleration that Photoshop provides, it's a pretty amazing experience. The canvas slides when using the hand tool, zooms are smooth, and of course you get the canvas rotation tool.
When I managed to crash After Effects (several times), it recognized a crash was "in progress," and immediately popped up the save project dialog. The crash warning is not modal, which allowed me to save my project before losing anything.
Routing every media export from Premiere Pro did annoy me slightly, but it does provide a huge productivity boost. While media is exporting, you can continue to work in Premiere Pro while Media Encoder does its thing. After Effects still uses its same Render Queue, strangely enough.
The features for photographers are too numerous for this already long post, but suffice it to say they are worth the upgrade cost.
Most of the problems I have with the CS4 suite are UI-related. For some reason, Adobe decided to completely throw away any semblance of using the native OS user interface (except, of course, those times they didn't). I do understand the need to have smaller dropdowns, trees, and buttons. I'd be fine with most of the custom UI if it were: 1. applied consistently, and 2. loaded quickly and was responsive. At the office, I'm not exactly on a slow machine, but many of these applications load their interfaces slowly. I can actually see various parts of the UI loading into memory. Isn't the point of the splash screen to do all this loading in the background first?
If you're a heavy Photoshop or Premiere Pro user, the CS4 package will most definitely serve you well. If you've got a top-end machine, Photoshop and After Effects will provide the most benefit to your workflow.
All your ads are belong to us
Earlier, we learned how to block ads at the OS level. Blocking ads through the browser is awesome, but advertising these days is all about making inroads to the desktop. Even though Microsoft claims that their business is software, Live Messenger seems to be an ad vehicle. I quickly became tired of video ads constantly showing up in Live Messenger (especially those insipid Tru dating site ads) that would play as soon as the cursor went over them, so I resolved to do something about it. I fired up Fiddler, a proxy that allows you to view HTTP traffic. I saw several random requests for rad.msn.com, and upon further examination saw that it was serving ad content, which depending on the content type, would be handled appropriately by Live Messenger's ad box.
I added rad.msn.com to my hosts file, and the ads were now blocked. Since there was now a blank box, I decided to go a step further and replace the image. I tried this before with a program that patched the ad out of the executable, but this isn't a long-term solution, since any software update will require waiting on a new version of the patcher, and a subsequent re-patching. If I just serve a different image up, it's fairly future-proof because Messenger is one the wiser. No matter what subdirectory or file is being requested by Messenger, this script will always throw back the custom image.
Using the index.php file we ended up with on our last ad-blocking adventure, we will add the following before the html is sent to the browser:
The exit() is added so we can bail out early after serving my custom image, and not serve up the normal adblock page (that I see in my browsers). The image size for the Live Messenger ad is 231x60 pixels.
I opted for an image that would blend in with the skin I use for Live Messenger, but wasn't just a "blank space here" image. The skin shown is Oil Slick for Messenger Plus! Live.
