Report from MacWorld 2007: January 10, 2007

 
Jan 11, 2007

by Dee Sadler

Adobe User Group Breakfast

Last night was hysterical. Cheap Trick played the party. I hadn't heard them in about 20 years. We left early though, so I'm not sure what the big drawing was for, but I hope whoever won liked it. I'll find out later, promise.

We, Lisa Heselton and I, were both pretty wiped out after yesterday, so we slept in a little bit before the Adobe User Group breakfast this morning. Lisa started getting sick a few days ago, and this morning has no voice whatsoever.

The first presentation was on Apollo. I think it's a bit of a stretch to say the majority of the room understood anything the presenter was saying. 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 combination 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 about Sound Booth. For instance, if someone coughs, Sound Booth has an auto-heal effect that gets rid of the annoying sound. This would also help you get rid of ums and ahs in a podcast before publishing.

Terry White started talking about Acrobat. The crowd must have fallen asleep because Terry was having a hard time getting them to respond. He showed how to create a PDF out of multiple files and that you now have the choice in making a regular PDF or a packaged PDF, where other files you import can be a separate PDF within the PDF you made. You can make a PDF from InDesign files, images, text and more.

A lot of us Adobe user group people are used 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 that Acrobat now auto detects form fields. This is my favorite new feature in Acrobat because I do a ton of forms. There are only a few times you have to tweak the form. Acrobat really does an amazing job, even detecting signature fields. A digital signature is a legally binding signature. Anyone with the free reader can submit the forms.

Lightroom was next in the presentation, and Terry 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. In a nutshell, Lightroom is a Digital photo management tool for those photographers who manage a ton of photographs. There are five main environments: Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web. The last three are pretty easy to understand.

Any adjustments you want to make in Quick develop are non destructive. In develop mode you can see the entire image all by itself and darken 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 the panels reappear. The slideshow uses iTunes playlists for background music. There are other products that create more elaborate slideshows, but that's okay.

The print and web presets do a very nice job. The print preset can do things we only wished Photoshop would do before. It's intuitive and knows to readjust images to be landscape or portrait. Most things just work the way we think they should work. It can even handle GPS info from cameras that can use that attachment. 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 at how nice the interface was.

Of course Terry had to show the new Beta of Photoshop and Bridge. Bridge (which shows all Adobe files in one place) has a new panel called Filters. This lets you quickly access the image you want using keywords, date, document type and more. I am on the Beta, but I honestly hadn't explored much. I didn't realize it has a loop tool feature that lets me find the right file without having to open Photoshop, Adobe InDesign or Acrobat. If you move one panel, the rest will "self heal" by flowing into place. There's no need to resize any other panel.

I don't know how many readers here have downloaded the public Beta, but Photoshop 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 the vanishing point's angle and can be more precise.

There was the standard question and answer session and Dave Helmly showed the group how to get pre-recorded sessions to show at their user groups.

Meanwhile, Back at the Adobe booth...

At 11 a.m., 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 showing the products) always try to show things in Design view 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, 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 was 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 but 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. Heh... 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 user group program manager at Adobe so they can benefit all the user groups.

I spent quite awhile today in the Apple user group 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 MySpace. I had the FBI involved with my daughter and a sexual predator, so you won't catch me supporting MySpace. It certainly won't help us get younger kids into the meeting. More on this topic later, maybe. At 4 pm, we went over to see the diggnation guys doing their podcast from MacWorld. One of the guys was a Mac guy, while the other kept talking about Vista. Gutsy at a MacWorld convention. They were useless and talked about goats in trees and drank bear. You'd have to see their site! Now this concerns me. If two 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 pictures are up on Flickr).

Dee Sadler is an Adobe Certified Instructor in Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash and Dreamweaver, and hopes to add Acrobat to the lineup as soon at the newest test comes out. She is also the Adobe User Group Manager of two groups in Kansas City (http://www.kcwebcore.org and http://www.kcdesigncore.org), as well as the Vice President of the ColdFusion and Flex group, KCDevCore at http://www.kcdevcore.org. Fusion Authority readers will recognize her hand as the Creative Director of Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, where she is responsible for the look and feel of the ColdFusion publication that won a CFeMmy for Best ColdFusion Publication of the year.

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