Something Interactive

Leaving in two days for London England has got me very excited. Not only for the trip itself but also for the fact that I picked up a new iPhone 3G to help me along the way.

Like many, I have wanted to buy one of these beauties for quite some time. But I wasn’t able to because of two reasons.
The first was because of the little problem that began when Rogers launched the iphone in Canada; that being their inventory allotment from Apple. This in turn caused a halt on all purchases of the iPhone from any employee (that’s me!) trying to acquire the device until further notice. (something about Rogers’ commitment to putting the real customers first)
The second problem was due to the everpresent financing required to purchase the iPhone.

Well today was a great day for me as I realized that my resignation from being an employee of Rogers came with a dual benefit. Working seven years at The Shopping Channel didn’t go unnoticed. I did my job very well, and out of appreciation, I received a personal gift from the staff towards purchasing an iPhone.

Then, as I negotiated relentlessly with a sales rep at a Rogers Video store, I came to find that employees are gradually being allowed to purchase the devices!

Now, as I lie here in bed, all synced up with Wordpress’s iPhone app free from the Apple iTunes App Store, I post my
first post of many, detailing my trip to the UK and my team’s progress through the IGLFA World Cup of Soccer.

Stay tuned!!

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.

When I work in Photoshop I usually have my screen mode set full screen, so that I can use my screen to it’s maximum potential and edit artwork that bleeds off the edges of the document area.

I recently turned off my rulers (PC: CTRL+r MAC: Command+r) for even further maximum viewing area, and noticed that grabbing the page and moving it around was much smoother!

I think the rendering of the measurement numbers and the scaling marks on the rulers in photoshop take some GPU or CPU rendering power away. Whenever I have the rulers on, it just seems to make the redraw of the entire window sluggish and choppy when I manipulate the document.

I’m leaving rulers off from now on.