Something Interactive

UPDATE: Adobe has put this feature into their latest CS4 version of Photoshop!

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is a graphics designer’s Swiss-Army knife, bundled with an amazing set of tools like Camera Raw, Photomerge, Vanishing Point, Liquify,… the list goes on.
I’ve dreamed of a couple tools that might help me with my image resizing too.

Well by coincidence, one of my dreams has been put into application reality – it’s called Seam-Carving Content Aware Image Resizing.

Also known as Media Retargeting, rather than me use words to explain what it means, these geniuses have put it into a nice video for us to learn all about this new image processing technique.

There are two online examples that allow the public to upload and retarget their photos:

I assume that they heavily use Adobe Flash’s latest bitmap API to do the processing on the fly.
The concept of the programming is pretty straight forward, but the application is still computationally-intense.

Seeing as how it has already been built with Adobe Flash, and since it’s quite slow, I figure it’s only a matter of time before Adobe incorporates an offline adaptation into Photoshop’s next version toolset where they can really harness the appropriate computing power to make the process a bit more “real-time”.

And look at that, Adobe CS3 is less than a year out and I’m already looking forward to CS4.

I’ve come to use this nifty little keyboard shortcut combination for Reverse Layers within Adobe Photoshop CS or greater. And, it’s a safe key-combination to use from the default set.

1. Open up your Keyboard Shortcuts Panel.
2. Navigate to the Layer menu.
3. Further down to the Arrange submenu
4. Further-still down to the Reverse option
5. Bind the key-combination (MAC:) COMMAND+SHIFT+r (PC:) CTRL+SHIFT+r to this option

Now select a group of layers in your layers palette. Hit your new keyboard shortcut, and voila! Layers reversed.

Agency Fusion certainly had a fun time with this little gem of a video.
I have no problems identifying with their humour even if it is reality for me.

My fellow colleagues can often relate to the problems that we go through from time to time as a graphics designer at The Shopping Channel. Just imagine!

A regular designer’s job is two-fold: one being the creative geniuses that we are, and the other being a copacetic robot that endlessly pumps out restricted visual media.
In my case however, the job cuts back the creativity to about 20%, and the rest,… well let’s just call it patience worthy of sainthood.

Luckily, I am not the only one out there in my exact predicament.

There are many people who “need” their visuals to have:

• larger logos
• every last bit of white space filled up
• florescent or god-awful colour schemes
• starbursts
• call-to-actions on everything

Many unexplained phenomenon have resulted in these “needs”, and due to many other factors, the designer is forced to make them reality.
I’ve come to terms with these fundamental laws of the designing universe quite well.

Sometimes though, when I’m completed a job, I really wish I could attach a nice tube of “Do it yourself!” cream,… just in case.

Variable Variables may be a different concept for the need and result I came up with, but Variable Variables is what lead to my re-discovery of the powerfully dynamic set(); function in actionscript.

Discovery
I have been working on a small Flash CS3 project that imports and displays information stored in XML.
Like many, who wouldn’t want their actionscript to be:

• simple
• clean
• dynamic
• scalable

… all to the synchronous XML data and design requirements that might change down the road?

Everything was going fine until I hit a little roadblock in my XML parsing loop.
How do I get flash to create variably-named variables?

I found out my solution after some intensive research, here’s how …

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