Work(ing Title)

Bill Crow comes through with fantastic news about HD Photo. I’ll be trying this plugin in conjunction with Adobe’s built-in support for RAW image processing.

HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 and CS3 have been officially released for both Windows and OSX. They’re available now from the Microsoft Download Center.

Here are the separate downloads for Windows and OSX.

The Windows version is supported on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and works with Photoshop CS2 and CS3. While not officially supported, it will also work with limited features with older versions of Photoshop and with Photoshop Elements. The included README file has details.

The OSX version works with both 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard), and supports Photoshop CS2 and CS3.

The features supported on Windows and OSX are identical. The files created with either version are fully compatible with each other and with Windows Vista, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the HD Photo Device Porting Kit, and several other applications that support HD Photo.

I previously posted information about the features provided in the plug-in and an overview of the encoder parameters and what they do. Take a look at previous blog entries here and here. I also gave a presentation at WinHEC 2007 about HD Photo Best Practices. While targeted primarily for hardware developers, the presentation contains a lot of information that may be useful for Photoshop users that want to best optimize their encoder parameters. You can find a copy of the presentation here: WinHEC 2007: HD Photo Implementation Guidelines.

If you’ve been using the beta version released last summer, you won’t find anything new here (other than the removal of the expiration date and the absence of BETA in the name.) All the changes we’ve made since the last beta are under the covers, fixing a couple minor bugs, addressing several theoretical security vulnerabilities and generally bringing the code up to current Microsoft standards for released software. But on the surface, the released plug-ins look and act identical to the most recent betas. Don’t forget that the BETA versions will expire on December 31st, so you should definitely download and install these new released versions.

Once again, I’d like to acknowledge and thank Pegasus Imaging Systems for their participation in the development of these plug-ins.

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(Bill Crow)

The other night the Meebo crew through a second birthday party for themselves, mostly to play Guitar Hero and munch, but there was a larger goal: to announce the next iteration of Meebo as an online platform.

Having spent the past few years building one of the best web-based IM clients in town, team Meebo decided to make themselves available to developers with one simple phrase, “I want to _____ with you.“

Scrape together some Flash or JavaScript into a way to watch, shop, frag, (or eat?) all within the Meebo universe. They’ve organized a Lunch 2.0 + all-night dev camp on 27 November to kickstart the ecosystem. The team will even set up a video conference if you’re interested but can’t make it down to Mountain View, CA this month.

Emre Sokullu has rolled up the Office 2.0 space for Read/WriteWeb including Meebo’s entrance. The productivity-on-the-web market would appear highly lucrative from all the companies diving into it. From Yahoo’s purchase of Zimbra, to the current crowd favourite Google Apps, and even Adobe’s Virtual Ubiquity, Meebo’s rocket has taken off for a very desirable planet.

All of this puts Microsoft in a very delicate position. The continued investment in free, online productivity tools certainly represents shots across the bow of the Office Armada. While the Office Live tools are mostly about the storage of data in the cloud, everyone else seems to be banking on the ability to do their work online; We’ll have to wait for Ray Ozzie’s other shoe to drop. Even after all the kimonos have been opened and all the offerings have matured, who knows what humans actually want.