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With the release of the Apple iPad web developers have jet again take a look at Adobe Flash and mobile web browser Safari, the debate of whether Adobe Flash is too processor intensive for small devices has revived and some tech-driven people are making more noise than usual. Back in 2007 when the iPhone was released, Apple even had class actions suits about the phrase “the internet in your hands” because of the widely use of Adobe Flash on such device.

The story is repeating all over again, this time with the focus being the new Apple device, it looks like Apple has no plans to include Adobe Flash on their portable devices and whether they end up doing it or not, a good web developer should look at other alternatives to properly place code on websites.

I’m not an expert on the field but I have work enough as a web developer to know that you can set browser specific content on a web site to load separate code depending on the web browser used to visit your site. We see this everyday when you visit a site on your iPhone and it looks different from when you visit the same site from your computer. With this in mind I ask myself, how hard is it to code browser specific content to load beautiful websites on the iPad, iPod touch, and the iPhone.

The idea is to load non-flash objects on your site when they are visited from and “i” device and regular Adobe Flash when not. With WordPress, more than often, developers use browser specific hooks to display different design elements or “CSS” files depending on whether you are smart and use a regular web browser or you are locked into using IE6. The simple code looks a bit like this:

With this example in mind we can tell exactly that what I’m proposing is not far from reality or a crazy idea. Instead of arguing about whether Apple is going to allow Adobe Flash on the iPhone, iPod, or even the iPad, we can create an environment of good developer skills and fix the web to our advantage.

In the next installment I will be explaining the idea in more detail, give a few examples of the implementation, and discuss any comments that we have from you, our readership. Expect to have the 2 part of this article in the next couple of weeks. I’m creating a forum to discuss any ideas you may have or you can simply leave your comments here on this post.

Adobe BuzzWord is a web application that allows you to write documents similar to Microsoft Word. Of course it doesn’t have all the functionality that MS Word have but at least you can set your mind to writing no matter where you are and whether you are on your computer or not.

I created an account sometime ago but it wasn’t until recently that I decided to give it a try, I’m writing this small review on it now. The menu system is very basic, you can change your font style, the size, and set up bold, italic, and underline text. You can also add colors, and set other parameters like paragraph style, lists, add an image, a table or a comment, these are again very basic functionality. Read the rest of this entry →

Adobe Reader is the most popular software to read PDF documents and many people have them installed on their computers even without them knowing it. Some time ago, news surfaced about Adobe Reader having a security flaw that allows a hacker to infect computers when they try to read a PDF document. Here is a link to Adobe’s security bulletin where they explain what the flaw is, the best way to protect yourself from any vulnerability is to stay informed.

The security flaw is caused by the ability of Adobe Reader to run JavaScript, if you are worried about this you should know that you don’t need the JavaScript option for most PDF’s to be readable. In fact, I haven’t come across any document that takes useful advantage of JavaScript. If any of my readers know of a good a JavaScript implementation inside a PDF, please send some information to see what is that all about. Read the rest of this entry →

As soon as I learned about Photoshop Elements 6.0 (PSE) for Mac, I posted my impressions on my business blog. With the intention of being more informal about it, I’m revisiting the topic here on my personal blog (here.) One other thing that made me think about it was an interview that Victor from the Typical Mac User podcast did to the product manager of PSE.

Some of my complaints that I had back then when PSE was announced, were that Adobe.com had the announcement tied with photos from PSE for PC not for Mac, this was somewhat confusing. They have updated the images since and now you can how this new version is looking.

Victor touch on some topics about this new version that are making me very anxious about upgrading, the first and not discussed item is the fact that this time the application is universal (PPC and Intel compatible.) The interview touched on the guided edit functions, I’m hoping I got the idea right because having a small help video that shows you systematically how to get the desired results is awesome.

The group shot feature is cool and all but I don’t think I’ll be using it a lot, the concept is that sometimes you try to get a group shot and someone closes their eyes. Then another person don’t even smile, and so on, you can now with a click of a button merge images of the same group shot to create a perfect one. Clever, but I don’t take that many group shots anyway.

One thing I didn’t get from the interview was how they made a big deal about layers on PSE, that has always been there and PSE is not the only software that works using layers. I love the flexibility of having the layers option because it’s so easy to add and/or remove elements when you are just playing with your images. That feature alone makes PSE worth the expense.

Here is a comment-plus-tip comment about Bridge, and this application comes bundled with PSE. The function of this application is more of a photo organizer, for most of us, iPhoto is our only way of organizing photos because it makes it easy and convenient. The way I use Bridge is by only organizing photos that have nothing to do with me or my family, in other words if it’s client related, blog related, or anything else, I use Bridge.

Regardless of your taste in photography, unless you are a pro or work in photography for a living, I recommend PSE to everybody. I’m dying to get my hands on it, I’m sure it will be worth it. Chat with me about this, leave your comments on this post, I’ll make sure to replay to everyone. Thanks Victor for such a great interview.

Back in June, I wrote about the missing in action Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 for Mac, I complain and complain about Adobe not releasing updates compatible with Intel chips. The reason we needed Photoshop Elements to be a universal application is to gain some performance over the utilization of Rosetta to run Elements for PPC on our Intel Macs.

That was then and today is a different story, last week Adobe released Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac with some new features, new look and is a universal application that will work right whether you have a PPC or Intel Mac. I haven’t upgraded yet, my next purchase is Office 2008, but looking at the information found over Adobe’s site, I’m not too excited about it.

The first thing I do not like is the price, $89.99 USD for the full version and $69.99 USD for the upgrade seems a lot to me. While you can preorder now, there is no word on the download version, which was the way I bought version 4. To top this small details, whether you get into Adobe Elements site via PC or Mac the first thing you see is the PC version, shouldn’t they look out for this, you have to scroll down and select the “looking for Macintosh version?” link.

Adobe is smart about taking you straight to the new features to see if you can forget they change the user interface (UI) to what I call the kindergarten edition of Photoshop Elements. I know that if I want professional looks I should get a version of Photoshop CS but its ridiculous, it has more colors that a set of crayons. The dark gray environment reminds me of Adobe Lightroom, is not that bad but I hope there is an option to change that to a lighter tone.

Back to the UI for a second, the videos Adobe posted to show off the new Elements have the screen minimize, maximize, and close buttons that looks like the Windows one. This makes me think that this is no even the final version. The menus are in inside the screen as opposed to the regular Mac interface, what is Adobe up to, why would they show off screen shots of Windows software and advertise it for Mac.

About the new features, well they are all welcome, I’m impressed the group shot feature. Having the option to select multiple photos on a group and pick the best looking to build a perfect image is a killer feature. All the other features and just enhancements, you could do them with Elements 4, they just come to be easier for the novice user.

I think Adobe took too long to release this update, in the Apple campus Adobe now has more competition than ever. Programs like Pixelmator and Gimp, might get you to think twice before getting Elements 6 for Mac. Personally, I will wait to have more information to make my purchase decision. Share this post with your friends, subscribe to my feed if you haven’t yet, and thanks for reading.

QuickTime update 7.3.1 was released today, you can get this update by running your Software Update utility on your Mac or PC. The update seems to address 3 vulnerabilities in the player that could lead to a malicious attack. Apple release this update right after news where spread around the web about the attack and people complained about being hit by this bug.

The vulnerabilities seem to be triggered by buffer overflow errors when watching videos intentionally crafted with this purpose. The Real Time Streaming Protocols (RTSP) and QuickTime files (QTL) are the one affected by these vulnerabilities. At the same time QuickTime Flash media handler was the most serious of them with the possibility of leading to arbitrary code execution.

Apple credit Adobe and McAfee for the patch that takes care of the flash vulnerability, while all other code was handled from inside Apple. And gave special thanks to the people at Syseclabs for reporting the issue. Wait no more head to Apple.com and get you updates to keep you Mac protected from malicious attacks.

Ever since I got my copy of Photoshop Elements 4.0 for Mac, I’ve been in love with it. It has the most comprehensive suit of features any media enthusiast would want on any photography software. It does more than photography, I have created Web attributes, banners, etc, and many slides modifications for video clips. I subscribe to many Photoshop podcast, which has allowed me to learn and explore all the possibilities with this version of Photoshop, even when from time to time I get frustrated for not having the CS2 or CS3 version of Photoshop.

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The way I see it is that 64bit computing is just the next logical step after using 32bits for so long. A bit of history, the first mainstream computers available on the market around the 70’s were 8bit, what that means, processors and motherboards processed 8 bits of data at once per operation. Immediately was noticeable the need for speed, around the mid 80’s the first 32 bits processors were introduced. You can find lots of information around the web on what type of processors we had back then, but is the thing to notice is that ever since we have been using these technology exploiting it to speeds that were unthinkable back in the 80’s.

Mid 2003, companies starting playing with 64bit technology, AMD was ahead of the game but always kept a low profile until the AMD64 was release to the public. In a sense a processor that could process 64bit of information at 32bit increments was giving us the very first dual-core architecture we enjoy these days. Of course that dual-core now means totally something different but you get the point, the big questions is do we need all these power. Of course, why not we have been trying to double processors speeds, data execution, etc. so the next logical step is to go 64bit.

This is happening already, the big advantage is that while 32bit processors allowed us to have read access memory (RAM) systems with up to 4gigs, a 64 bit technology doubles that to 8gigs, and on top of that dual-core technology is giving us access to have up to 16gigs of ram. Some people as skeptical about this numbers, the truth is that not many software applications are able to take advantage of this processing power yet. But is just logic tell us that we will need it the way we are going, with 3D application and audio-video companies depending more and more on systems with big capacities 64bit is the right solution at the right time.

Operating systems like Windows only become 64bit aware on the middle of 2005, when Microsoft introduced Windows XP 64. Apple, Inc. on the other hand, have 64 bit capabilities but only when their next operating system is released, is when they full potential will be achieved. In the software industries, only high-end programs had go 64bit, especially in the media industry. Companies like Adobe, NewTek and others are taking advantage of 64bit technology, making video processing, printing industry, movie studios, etc. get the big bang of power.

What about all the consumer application available today? No worries, when 64bit technology was first introduced there was no application to test it in real time, but all the 32bit application on the market seem to take advantage of it. In other words, is backward compatible with all the software we use these days. Don’t be afraid of 64bit computers as that is all you can find today, most Intel chip as well as all AMD are 64bit processors. Depending on the configuration you have your motherboard will determine the amount of RAM you can manage.

Want to see it in action click on this link to see a 64bit audio software employing lots of power features. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLBRyiEaF7s. Have questions? Head to the contact us page and drop us a message, also feel free to post your question on our forums, thanks.

Whether you are working on a photo slideshow, video project, or other consumer media work you will find yourself having to deal with sound, music, or plain audio files. As a media enthusiast, I think that one must take very seriously the audio in any project to get the best out of it. Whether you are working on a Mac or PC you must first familiarized yourself with basic audio software, some systems comes with audio software, some can be found free on the web, other you’ll need to buy it.

If you are working on a Macintosh, iLife comes with GarageBand a great audio solution for almost any purpose. On a PC unfortunately comes with no audio software other than “Sound Recorder” which is not good at all, but there are multiple solutions. For PC’s you have Audacity 1.2.6, Studio Buddy 1.0, and more to the Pro side Adobe Audition 1.5 among others. I invite you to share your favorite audio software with everybody, leave a comment on this post, and tell us what you use.

In the Mac platform, GarageBand 3 take your audio skills to the next level with easy to use controls that lets you take control of your audio on any other application within iLife 06. The solid integration with iPhoto lets you create breathtaking photo slideshows with almost any type of music. If you are importing music from iTunes, careful with copyrights, remember that it should be use only for your personal amusement. While in the PC platform is hard to find any similar integration, almost every photo slideshow creator lets you add your own music, as long as it doesn’t has any DRM, check out Picasa from Google.

Back in the Mac platform, iMovie add some interesting features like extracting audio from a video clip, sending your whole project to GarageBand, and two audio tracks to add effects, music, or anything that comes to your mind. In the PC platform, this type of feature can only be fund in software like Adobe Premier Elements, now this one I whish it was available on the Mac, the picture in picture feature drive me crazy, even thought you can do that with QuickTime.

Whether you are on a Mac or PC, your creativity can always be challenge with great software, audio management covers many fields on a media enthusiast life. You can do Podcasting, sound effects creation, movie scoring, record interviews or conversations, etc. The most important thing is to know what the final output is so that you don’t waste your time working on a file that may not be suitable for your project.

I will create a forum discussion thread for all your audio questions, visit www.lumencreativegroup.com/forum for all the questions you may have. Digg this post, add it to your delicious account, become a forum member, and participate in great discussions. You can also reach me at lumencreativegroup@gmail.com. Thanks.