MacWorld 2007 Day 2, Jan 10th
We, Lisa and I, we both pretty wiped out after yesterday, so we slept in a little bit before the Adobe UG breakfast this morning. Lisa started getting sick a few days ago, and this morning has no voice whatsoever.
Adobe User Group Breakfast
The first presentation was Apollo. I think it's a bit of a stretch to say the majority of the room understood anything he was saying. As a matter of fact, the integration of Apollo between the internet and a desktop program is something I certainly can appreciate, but it's too bad most people won't get how cool that is.The second presentation was from the Video guy. He showed a nice combination between After Effects, Premiere Pro for the Mac, Sound Booth (free right now) and Encore. If you are a video person this combo is essential to your work flow. I saw this presentation yesterday and was impressed. I'm sure if I were a video gal I'd be more impressed, but was pretty excited with Sound Booth. If someone coughs for instance, Sound Booth has an auto heal effect that gets rid of the annoying sound. This would also help you get rid of um's and ah's in a podcast before publishing.
Terry White started talking about Acrobat. The crowd must be all asleep because Terry is having a hard time getting them to respond. He showed how to create a PDF out of multiple files and now you have the choice in making a PDF like normal, or you can make a packaged PDF. That means the other files you brought in can be a separate PDF within the PDF you made. You can make a PDF from InDesign files, images, text and more.
Since a lot of us are UG people are use to seeing a Breeze presentation, now named Acrobat Connect, but it's really new to the Mac Users here at MacWorld. Terry showed everyone how to work a Connect meeting. Then he showed my favorite new feature in Acrobat because I do a ton of forms. Acrobat now auto detects form fields. It really does an amazing job. There are only a few times you have to tweak the form. It even detects a signature field. A digital signature is a legally binding signature. Anyone with the free reader can submit the forms.
Lightroom was next. He was showing things that aren't in the public beta version. The product is pretty self explanatory. The Lightroom team was told to not look at any other application and put it together the way it should be done. They did such a good job that a lot of the features from it ended up in Photoshop. If you aren't even familiar what Lightroom is, it in a nutshell is a Digital photo management for those photographers who manage a ton of photographs. There are 5 main environments which are Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. The last 3 are pretty easy to figure out what they do.
Any of the adjustments you want to do in Quick develop are non destructive. In develop mode you can see the entire image all by itself and darkens the rest of the panels by pressing L. If you press L again, the application goes into full screen mode and shows the image only. If you want to get back to the panels, just move your cursor to either side, and there are you panels. The slideshow uses iTunes playlists for the music behind the slideshows. It's a simple slideshow (there are other products that focus on making a slideshow) but that's OK.
The print and web presets do a really nice job. The print preset can do things we only wished Photoshop would do before. It's super intuitive and just knows to re-adjust images to be landscape or portrait. Most things just work the way we think it should work. It can even handle GPS info from the cameras that ca use that attachment. If so, it will launch Google maps and you can see exactly where you were when you took that picture. The web can either be html or Flash based. Terry made his images Flash based and I was surprised how nice the interface was.
Of course Terry had to show the new Beta of Photoshop and Bridge. In Bridge (shows all Adobe files in one place) Filters is a new panel. It lets you quickly get to the image you want using keywords, date, document type and more. I am on the Beta, but honestly I hadn't looked around too much. I didn't realize it had a loop tool feature. Lets me get super close without having to open in Photoshop, AI or Acrobat to get the right file. All the panels are liquid in both appearance and the how you can move one, and the rest will follow.
I don't know how many of the readers here have downloaded the public Beta, but PS is getting really cool. There is now a quick select tool, smart filters, image auto alignments and more. The auto align can do perspective, and auto blend layers. The panoramic features have been drastically improved. Vanishing point has also been improved so you have more control of where the vanishing point goes. The angle is what I am talking about.
There was the standard question and answer session and Dave Helmly showed the group how to get the on Demand pre-recorded sessions to se at their groups.
Meanwhile back at the Adobe booth...
At 11am Adobe was showing Flex. On any other presentation at the Adobe booth, there would be a standing room only crowd. Not at the Flex, building Rich internet Applications presentation. The presenter showed the different types of components. As usual, they (the developers they have show the products) always try and show things in Design views when they aren't comfortable there. He finally just showed the code, thank you. I gotta say, even as a designer, I am more comfortable working in the code. So, for all you developers out there, it's OK, designers aren't always afraid of the code. Show us. If nothing else, it will help us to understand it better.
Trying to find someone to interview
I admit that I am getting tired. Lisa can't even talk now and my back hurts from my Adobe bag being too full of junk. Not the, wow this is cool junk, the why did I pick this up kind. After thinking I was in the right place for the "news" I was getting from the parallels guy Lisa knows, I was in the wrong place at the right time. LOL I am pretty sure they got a MacWorld award.I walked around to the North hall and we talked to a few vendors about sponsoring the user groups. I got the sure we will, from Bare Bones, VISE and Fetch. I am going to pass their info off to the main UG program manager at Adobe so they can benefit all the user groups.
I spent quite awhile today in the Apple UG lounge. I was so tired I don't know if I would have cared who was talking. I did listen to Chuck Joiner of MacVoices talk about getting our groups into the 21st Century. I actually had it out with him about doing a meeting on My Space. I had the FBI involved with my daughter and a sexual predator, so you won't catch me supporting My Space. It certainly won't help us get younger kids into the meeting. More on this topic later maybe. At 4pm we went over to see the diggnation guys doing their podcast from MacWorld. One of the guys is a Mac guy, while the other kept talking about Vista. Gutsy at a MacWorld convention. They were useless and talked about goats in trees, you'd have to see their site, and drank bear. Now this concerns me that if 2 stupid beer drinking guys get this much attention, the youth won't care what we talk about in the meetings unless the topic suits them anyway.
Too, too tired. See you tomorrow. New pics are up on Flickr Dee
