Too Many Interfaces…?

That actually was my desktop this morning. My shoulder is killing me — had an operation about 2 weeks ago, presently I can be referred to as the “Titanium Edition” due to the spare parts screwed to my shoulder — and the fact that my hand moves BUT DOES NOT MOVE ENOUGH is driving me nuts. There are images to edit, video to cut, multi­media to be made… And I am trying but… Damn I’m frustrated!

So that’s about as much hardware as I can imagine between the fingers and computer — trying to make things work. :-)

Actually — and seriously: when the fingers moved, but basically nothing else in the arm did, I used the trackpad. Now I am back to the small wacom again keeping it in my lap, going for the mouse only occasio­nally. Much less strain for the injured shoulder.

But there is a small point to this post — in addition to just shouting out personal frustra­tions ;-) : CS 5.5 which I installed some days ago. Total disap­pointment in terms of photoshop: nothing really new, no point of updating from CS5 to CS 5.5 IMHO if your main use of CS is PS.

But I have to add immediately: huge leaps forward in terms of InDesign and DreamWeaver (I’m not even sure I even grasp the magnitude of it all yet…). I’ll get back to these later, promise.

The new Photoshop had one thing which got me curious: iPad integration so that you can use the iPad as an interface to commu­nicate with your computer. Couple of apps available in the App Store — 3.99 if I remember correctly — but the only one I consider worth mentioning for my line of work is called Adobe Nav.

Basically it is a touch pad which let’s you control the tools you use. It works, it’s nice, very easy to set up, robust in that sense… But still… no, not for me.If you do PS profes­sio­nally, you most probably have kinetic memory in your fingers for the keyboard shortcuts, and you are much better off with them. If you have an iPad and want to use it with PS, you are much better off using it thru Air Display (App Store) as a secondary display when on the road.

But then again: the possi­bility to hook into you PS like that promises a lot in the future with the Adobe/iPad integration area.Basically what happened now was that Adobe opened the doors for indie developers to come up with some cool stuff. And they will, I’m sure.

One bug (a major one) I found using the Adobe Nav: it freezes some functions of my PS 5.1 . Most notably one of the shortcuts which I use almost with every picture I do: “FADE” i.e. cmd+shift+f . For some reason, that does not work when iPad is set up with Adobe Nav and connected — not from the menus, not from the keyboard.

A feedback to Adobe could also be concerning the right side navigation buttons: whereas there is button for “screen mode” and “actual pixels” there is no “fit screen” button which would be essential to go with the “actual pixels” one. And the front/back color display which takes the whole of the upper right-hand corner is totally unnecessary waste of digital real estate.

But: interesting.