Saturday, April 17, 2010

Events, CS5 and life..

First..CS5

After watching numerous demos and videos posted on the internet, I was very eager to see the launch of the Adobe CS5 suite. Luckily, the launch timing wasn't too late and I got to see the whole thing. I am not so much of a designer, but, Adobe Photoshop CS5 really gets my hats off among the rest!

I remember that during one of our group discussions about product life-cycles and how a product loses market to another because the Nth feature has been added to it and the software actually gets bloated due to lack of innovation. It was sad that one of the examples that was sighted there was Photoshop (for whatever reasons!) and I am very happy to see that the Photoshop team @Adobe actually proved the theory wrong and made us realize the huge mistake. Photoshop CS5 kicks ass! The new Content-aware fill and HDR really makes me say "Duhh" to the example sighted the other day. Photoshop team.. u rock!

My favourite software – Flash is the next in my CS5 list. I was happy to see the improvements in the Flash IDE – improved code hinting and code addition, code snippets panel, XML-based FLA files, Flash Builder integration and the fact that you could publish content to any target now (including the iPhone) and other features. More on the iPhone part later! My pick of the list would be the code hinting and auto-code addition part. I've always wanted the IDE to automatically write the initial lines of my class file (package, public class.. part!). It was a real bummer that the earlier versions didn't have it and the feature is a real time saver. Of course, I also like the "publish anywhere" feature, but, I guess I would be using that lesser, so, it doesn't make my top feature.

Illustrator CS 5, Premiere CS5 and Dreamweaver CS5 also have good features, but, I cannot say much about them, since, they aren't a part of my daily life. The features, makes them interesting though.

The new versions - Adobe Flex 4, Flash Builder 4 and CF Builder were also released a few days earlier than the CS5 launch. Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 certainly makes my heart go wild! J

I am eagerly waiting for the release of AIR 2.0.


 

The tale of the 2 A's

To be honest, I have never liked Apple. Somehow, the very fact that their products use the pronoun in front of the product name made me feel yucky! I forcefully got myself an iPod, which I bought more to be used as my standby hard disk than a music player. I hardly used it, thanks to my Satio and my earlier W705. I kinda found it cumbersome to use. Somehow, iTunes never worked properly on my laptop and I wasn't very interested in trying to fix the issue. I did find a tiny plugin for Winamp, which I used for transferring songs. Stepping back into the topic, well, Apple's statements in the recent past were shocking and very silly! As a software developer, it is a closed opportunity. In my understanding of the world, I guess, we only grow when we are open and receptive.

For people, who thought they had a chance to get into the Apple development territory and find Objective C or any "supported" platform a bit difficult to learn, given the circumstances, the statement comes as a huge blow. I read in some post the other day that Mr. Jobs thinks that Flash is "slow and buggy" and the claim that the application store or "ecosystem" would filled with very generic and low-quality programs that will not be using the unique hardware of the iPhone and iPad and will hinder the progress of the platform.

Here's a fanboy with some "clarifications": http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/10/five-tremendous-apple-vs-adobe-flash-myths/


 

Other things..

I don't want to waste the page talking about half-bitten fruits. As mentioned in my previous entry, I will soon be migrating my blog to my own space. The development of the new site is going along fine, but, it is slower than I expected. I had to re-create my database from scratch to support some new features I have in mind for the CMS. Also, the development of the CMS is kinda stagnated a bit, coz, I want to use Flex 4 for it than Flex 3.

See you shortly!

1 comment:

Rakesh Vanamali said...

Looooooooool! Half bitten fruits.........! U raise contempt to a new level altogether!