iSights.org

Apple's Secret Conspiracy Against Flash

Lover's of Adobe's Flash development environment were dismayed at a recent statement by Steve Jobs that Flash was a resource hog and that Apple had no intention of pigging out the iPhone.

Immediately, Flash fires erupted around the web as supporters came out of the closet (yes, that kind of love) and scurried out from under the rugs, declaring to one and all that Apple had a secret agenda.

Flash, you see, was the secret weapon that would allow bright and untarnished access to all of the worlds content, thwarting Apple's dastardly plan to funnel every precious byte of content through iTunes.

My take? Steve's right. Flash is a resource hog, on many levels.

And for that, and for other reasons, I do NOT want it on my iPhone.

Leopard Update Fixes Some Photoshop Problems

According to Senior Photoshop Product Manager John Nack, the 10.5.2 update fixes some of the issues that have been plaguing Photoshop users. Among them:

• Typing values into the options bar in Photoshop (e.g. to set brush size or crop dimension) is no longer problematic.
• Prior to 10.5.2, some Apple apps (Finder, Aperture, iPhoto, Preview) could crash or fail to read some complex XMP metadata, such as Lightroom develop snapshots. That problem has been fixed.

Based on my own testing, I can say that the text entry problems appear to have been fixed.

Unfortunately, I can still consistently trigger the "flickering cursor" issue that prompted my original entry on the subject back in October.

Adobe Discontinues Stock Photo Service

As of April 1, 2008, the Adobe Stock Photos royalty-free image service will be discontinued. According to Adobe, they made this decision in order to focus their efforts on other areas.

Translation: With iStockPhoto and all of the other inexpensive photo services out there, Adobe's offering simply wasn't competitive, and as such wasn't making enough money for Adobe to make doing it worthwhile. Here's the FAQ.

I, for one, won't miss it, primarily because the stock photo software insisted on creating directories in my Documents folder, regardless of whether I used the service or not. Delete them, and boom, they reappeared like cockroaches the next time you ran any Adobe program.

Talk about bad manners. After all, applications have the Library folder in which to put their trash. The Documents folder is mine. Hands off.

(Are you listening, Microsoft?)

Oh, and if you can't wait until April, uninstallers are available now.

Video Printing Tutorials For Photoshop

Russell Brown has created three new video tutorials on printing from Photoshop to several popular "semi-pro" printers from Canon, Epson, and HP.

Each video is roughly eight minutes long, and focuses on properly setting up color management and obtaining and using the right paper profiles.

Adobe Lightroom Updated To 1.3.1

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has been updated to version 1.3.1, and fixes many of the problems that have been plaguing Mac users of the product.

This includes several of the printing issues that caused Lightroom to crash under Leopard, image importing failures under Leopard, and numerous other fixes.

The update also includes additional camera support for the Canon 1Ds Mark III, Nikon D3, Nikon D300, and the Olympus E-3.

Visit the Lightroom download page for more information.

Leopard's Photoshop CS3 Issues: Update Coming

Hot on the heels of today's updates, a post on Adobe's user forums confirmed that the toolbar text-entry issues have NOT been fixed in either Leopard 10.5.1 or in Photoshop CS3 10.0.1.

Kristen Harris, Support Manager for Photoshop, stated in her post that "Apple is collaborating closely with us to get this fix incorporated into a Mac OS X Leopard update. No public schedule is available at this time, but both companies understand the urgency of this fix."

The forum post, with a complete list of affected tools, can be found here.

Noteworthy is the fact that the solution will be coming in a Leopard update, which tends to indicate that the bug is somewhere on Apple's side of the fence.

[UPDATED - 02/11/08]

Some problems have been fixed in 10.5.2.

Adobe Releases Trio Of New Updates

Apparently not wanting to be left behind, Adobe today also released a trio of updates for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Bridge on the Mac.

Significantly absent from the Photoshop change log was any mention of a solution to the odd cursor and toolbar text-entry issues that have continued to plague some users of the product. [UPDATED]

A complete list of Photoshop fixes appears after the jump.

Leopard's Photoshop CS3 Issues: The Saga Continues

Photoshop Product Manager John Nack has acknowledged that the issue with the cursors and toolbar text entry fields are known bugs and should be fixed in an upcoming software update.

To quote, "All I can say is that Adobe is working on an update for Photoshop (addressing printing problems, as mentioned previously, and a few others), but it's not designed for Leopard specifically."

More On Leopard's Photoshop CS3 Issues

I've had number of users leave comments about the strange flickering cursor that interferes with the drawing and selection tools in Photoshop CS3. It appears, however, that our previous diagnosis was incorrect and that the TextExpander extension is NOT to blame for the problem.

Quitting and relaunching Photoshop can sometimes cure the situation, but isn't guaranteed to do so.

No word yet from Adobe support as to a solution, or even as to whether or not they recognize the issue. Stay tuned.

UPDATED: See Leopard Update 10.5.2 Fixes Some Photoshop Problems.

Photoshop CS3 Issues Under Leopard? [UPDATED]

Looks like Photoshop CS3 has issues with Leopard.

On my new 24" iMac, Photoshop runs, but many tools like the Marque selection tool and the Text tool simply don't work; the cursor flickering back and forth between the standard arrow cursor and the tool-specific one, with no "marching ants" selection nor any text entry.