I appreciate the response. What version of photoshop are you using? I ask, because you're automatically registered for CS Review if you own Adobe CS5. You can also try the service online, without purchasing CS5 here. CS Review can even be used with programs like Photoshop and is especially convenient if you use it for business purposes. The service allows you to set up online reviews, where collaborators can give real time feedback on your work, and you can act directly on these comments, with the use of other Creative Suite programs, such as InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Let me know if you check it out!
Make Flash not suck. Seriously, it can't be that hard. It shouldn't take 40% of all sixteen of my processor cores to have two SWF files open.
Hey Tallest Skil, sorry to hear that you have experienced difficulty with Flash. It sounds like you are having prolonged difficulties--if that's the case, please check this Adobe forum for assistance. http://bit.ly/aagUjL
do you mean that reviews as a comments ? you said page is showing products to sale no place for place a review ....
Hey Fixpod, CS Review is a service that allows an author of a document to upload it for a review session with other invited users . During this session, users are able to create location-specific comments/ suggestions directly on the document, wherein the author can implement these changes with other Adobe software like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. If you want to learn more about CS Review, you can check it out here, or feel free to let me know if you have any questions. http://bit.ly/cNIsQ1
The problem I see with these small apps like CS Review, OnLocation, Bridge, Device Central is that they are just not that useful in a workflow. It's bad enough managing workflows between the big apps, it just ends up complicating things when you add these small apps into the mix too when they are built the way they are.
The idea for CS Review is good because say a designer wants to approve content in Indesign, it's a pain having to manually export a PDF and notate it and attach it to an email, then get the response email with notes in the email. But having clients sign into a website just isn't practical. The designer has to setup an account and one for the client and enable access.
The UI is way too cluttered and complex for this task for projects that have tight deadlines. How I'd see this working is the following:
A designer is using Indesign, they aren't sure about the copy on page 3 and need to contact the client. Inside the app, they'd use the function to contact them and it would upload a version of it somewhere. This would just be a random link like http://adobe.com/csreview?project=78...=j8378bhu33b89.
These links would be saved automatically on the designer's computer and tied to the project document. The above link is emailed to the client or clients and they open it up. They can then attach comments and the comments are tagged with the email address they used to open the page or they can manually insert a name per comment.
They'd hit a submit button to notify the designer of the comments. While the designer was working on the file on a separate part, a notification would just say something like "minor changes on page 3 but the rest is fine" and there could be a button that they click to "show modifications" and the comments could show up on top of the Indesign page so they can be shown/hidden while working.
No logins, just a seamless addition to make things easier.
The same should be the case with bridge. Just have the whole thing in-app with no standalone and then have better integration with the standard filesystem metadata. The biggest problem I see people having is just being able to copy items from one app to another because that's how projects work. It's rare that people work in Illustrator on one day and save some files and manage them in a filesystem app and then another day open Indesign and look at Bridge to get those assets back again, it's usually the case that as soon as you are working on an illustration, you just need that copy/pasted into Indesign directly.
That could be improved by having a function that allows you to pull data from one Adobe app to another without using the OS copy/paste buffer. For example, I'd just select a bunch of objects in Illustrator, jump over to Indesign and then right-click 'paste selected items in Illustrator' and it could paste into a size I choose instead of being placed at full size so it has to be scaled down. Cross-document linking would be kinda neat too so you don't have to keep pasting back and forth.
Overall, I think the CS Suite needs to stop with adding features like it's what you need to do to justify selling a new version. Take a cue from Snow Leopard. Trim the fat out, optimise/streamline the apps, integrate them more tightly together and even merge some. Why does Fireworks even exist? The features it has that Photoshop doesn't should be added to Photoshop.
And on a side-note with Photoshop, is there any way that you can develop a feature to allow infinite pixel images to be opened without using all the RAM in the machine? You might have to develop a new file format similar to Maya iff that supports scanline rendering but basically it should be possible using some form of tiling/LOD system that lets you open an infinite sized mage even if it takes up GBs of space and be able to edit it. Like textures the use in games or gigapixel scenes. Also being able to quickly open/edit/save huge images would be nice. So for example break an image down into maximum 512 x 512 pixel image tiles then store them separately on disk so if you make a change to one small area of a 30,000 pixel image that's 1GB in size, it just saves the small parts you changed. When you open the image, it does so instantly because at full size, it can process the small tiles quickly to show the image in parts.
Flash just looks to be going in the wrong direction entirely. Now we have Flash Catalyst as a separate app to be able to make interactive content without code. The rest of the world is waiting for Adobe to do this for websites. Designers don't want to write code for those either and developers don't want to do pixel-level CSS coding either. Think outside the box and come up with a standard UI format for the web that is open sourced like an XML document like .xib that forces people to separate UI from development then have PHP, ASP.Net APIs that use them.
Integrate it with the Flash application but don't call it Flash because Flash won't be around for the long term. It's a plugin. Even tie it together with Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is just a coding app right now because the web UI part of it is largely useless until the way web UIs are built changes. With XML UIs, you can integrate it with CMSs so that end users can built very nicely styled forms that are accessible.
The best features added to CS5 were content-aware fill and multi-page layouts in Indesign. Most of the other features are just bloat and this looks like it's the focus for future developments. One of the stats quoted between one of the CS Suite revisions was 16 million lines of code changed. At first it seems like an achievement but if you have to do that much work to make so few noticeable changes to the suite, it needs to be built in a more refined way and focus more on workflows than the apps and features independently.
Hi Marvin, thanks for all of the great feedback you have provided, I will be sure to pass your opinion on. You seem to know CS Review and other Adobe software in great detail--How long have you been using CS Review, and to what end?
Hi Marvin, thanks for all of the great feedback you have provided, I will be sure to pass your opinion on. You seem to know CS Review and other Adobe software in great detail--How long have you been using CS Review, and to what end?
I don't use CS Review - I checked out the demo videos. It actually does seem to behave more like I described than I thought after checking out a more detailed video - at first it looked like a staff collaboration tool rather than client/staff. I'd still rather it was controlled in the CS Suite more than on the web. The steps right now would be that you use the CS Live extension menu to create a review and then upload it. But then you have to come out of the app and go online to send the email to clients. Ideally, that would just open an email program because all my correspondence and email addresses will have been there already and it would just include the link into the body text.
Then comes the aspect of the review text. Ultimately, the changes will have to be done inside one of the CS Suite apps so rather than look at those suggestions in the browser, it would be good to see them on the document and have in-app notifications while working. So Indesign might have a comments layer where reviewers have added suggestions and it can be flipped on/off while working. This would help most in the video packages as you don't need to scrub the online video as well as the offline video.
I've used Browser Lab, which is part of CS Live before a number of times and while that works quite well, it doesn't go far enough as you generally want to test loads of pages. Ideally, you'd be able to control a remote version of a browser on a server. That might have some scalability issues but when you use AJAX animations on a site, a static image doesn't let you see if it works so a virtual machines is better but it's difficult to test on multiple browsers that way.
Lastly on the topic of the CS Live pricing. It seems the wrong way round. People pay huge up-front costs to buy the suite and then the CS Live is an additional subscription up to $20 per month, though it's free for now. To me it makes much more sense if you make the whole suite a subscription package but you pay per use and the CS Live features come with it.
Consider a startup company, you basically say to them, you get all apps in the CS Suite for $70 per month per installation. If they start out with 10 designers, rather than pay $2600 x 10 = $26000, they start out paying $700 per month. This might seem worse from your point of view but it's not because the company won't ever think about whether or not to upgrade to the latest version. The latest version is free, they just keep paying. It changes the CS Suite from being a company asset to a service a company uses.
This means your support headache is greatly reduced as you never have to support anything except the latest version. It also means you can protect the product more easily as it can do a monthly online verification to validate the copy. It means that volume licensing is easier, it means if an employee leaves, the company just lowers the payment level. You can do it per app so that home users can afford the full Photoshop and not just Elements and it can be charged on a month to month basis so if you only use it at Christmas to make your own cards or something, you just pay for that period of time.
Hey Marvin, thanks again for the feedback. You have a lot of strong ideas and suggestions that I will be sure to pass on. With regard to CS Review, you are right that it is ideal to use as a tool when working with clients, but in my opinion, could also be used amongst staff members to regulate workflow.
Also, I'm glad to hear that you have had success with BrowserLab. Is this the primary service that you use to test pages?
Also, I'm glad to hear that you have had success with BrowserLab. Is this the primary service that you use to test pages?
Unfortunately no. I'd like it to be though as it saves having to run Windows in a virtual machine but it's not flexible enough. The main issues are that I can't test a local server that is inaccessible from the internet and I can't test dynamic content as it renders static pages. So right now, it's kind of a last resort.
The online service can rectify that by using remote browser sessions instead of rendering the page once and then giving a screenshot. Look at what OnLive is doing now with full remote Windows installations:
It also lets you see Flash content on the iOS devices. You don't have to run the full OS for browserlab but just a specific instance of each browser that is fullscreen. I can work round the local server issue by forwarding ports and using my IP address but if the service could help with that, it would be even better e.g. using UPnP.
Comments
Make Flash not suck. Seriously, it can't be that hard. It shouldn't take 40% of all sixteen of my processor cores to have two SWF files open.
Hey Tallest Skil, sorry to hear that you have experienced difficulty with Flash. It sounds like you are having prolonged difficulties--if that's the case, please check this Adobe forum for assistance. http://bit.ly/aagUjL
do you mean that reviews as a comments ? you said page is showing products to sale no place for place a review ....
Adobe has support pages for feedback. He didn't mean for that link to go there. The page itself is fairly easy to find.
do you mean that reviews as a comments ? you said page is showing products to sale no place for place a review ....
Hey Fixpod, CS Review is a service that allows an author of a document to upload it for a review session with other invited users . During this session, users are able to create location-specific comments/ suggestions directly on the document, wherein the author can implement these changes with other Adobe software like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. If you want to learn more about CS Review, you can check it out here, or feel free to let me know if you have any questions. http://bit.ly/cNIsQ1
The idea for CS Review is good because say a designer wants to approve content in Indesign, it's a pain having to manually export a PDF and notate it and attach it to an email, then get the response email with notes in the email. But having clients sign into a website just isn't practical. The designer has to setup an account and one for the client and enable access.
The UI is way too cluttered and complex for this task for projects that have tight deadlines. How I'd see this working is the following:
A designer is using Indesign, they aren't sure about the copy on page 3 and need to contact the client. Inside the app, they'd use the function to contact them and it would upload a version of it somewhere. This would just be a random link like http://adobe.com/csreview?project=78...=j8378bhu33b89.
These links would be saved automatically on the designer's computer and tied to the project document. The above link is emailed to the client or clients and they open it up. They can then attach comments and the comments are tagged with the email address they used to open the page or they can manually insert a name per comment.
They'd hit a submit button to notify the designer of the comments. While the designer was working on the file on a separate part, a notification would just say something like "minor changes on page 3 but the rest is fine" and there could be a button that they click to "show modifications" and the comments could show up on top of the Indesign page so they can be shown/hidden while working.
No logins, just a seamless addition to make things easier.
The same should be the case with bridge. Just have the whole thing in-app with no standalone and then have better integration with the standard filesystem metadata. The biggest problem I see people having is just being able to copy items from one app to another because that's how projects work. It's rare that people work in Illustrator on one day and save some files and manage them in a filesystem app and then another day open Indesign and look at Bridge to get those assets back again, it's usually the case that as soon as you are working on an illustration, you just need that copy/pasted into Indesign directly.
That could be improved by having a function that allows you to pull data from one Adobe app to another without using the OS copy/paste buffer. For example, I'd just select a bunch of objects in Illustrator, jump over to Indesign and then right-click 'paste selected items in Illustrator' and it could paste into a size I choose instead of being placed at full size so it has to be scaled down. Cross-document linking would be kinda neat too so you don't have to keep pasting back and forth.
Overall, I think the CS Suite needs to stop with adding features like it's what you need to do to justify selling a new version. Take a cue from Snow Leopard. Trim the fat out, optimise/streamline the apps, integrate them more tightly together and even merge some. Why does Fireworks even exist? The features it has that Photoshop doesn't should be added to Photoshop.
And on a side-note with Photoshop, is there any way that you can develop a feature to allow infinite pixel images to be opened without using all the RAM in the machine? You might have to develop a new file format similar to Maya iff that supports scanline rendering but basically it should be possible using some form of tiling/LOD system that lets you open an infinite sized mage even if it takes up GBs of space and be able to edit it. Like textures the use in games or gigapixel scenes. Also being able to quickly open/edit/save huge images would be nice. So for example break an image down into maximum 512 x 512 pixel image tiles then store them separately on disk so if you make a change to one small area of a 30,000 pixel image that's 1GB in size, it just saves the small parts you changed. When you open the image, it does so instantly because at full size, it can process the small tiles quickly to show the image in parts.
Flash just looks to be going in the wrong direction entirely. Now we have Flash Catalyst as a separate app to be able to make interactive content without code. The rest of the world is waiting for Adobe to do this for websites. Designers don't want to write code for those either and developers don't want to do pixel-level CSS coding either. Think outside the box and come up with a standard UI format for the web that is open sourced like an XML document like .xib that forces people to separate UI from development then have PHP, ASP.Net APIs that use them.
Integrate it with the Flash application but don't call it Flash because Flash won't be around for the long term. It's a plugin. Even tie it together with Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is just a coding app right now because the web UI part of it is largely useless until the way web UIs are built changes. With XML UIs, you can integrate it with CMSs so that end users can built very nicely styled forms that are accessible.
The best features added to CS5 were content-aware fill and multi-page layouts in Indesign. Most of the other features are just bloat and this looks like it's the focus for future developments. One of the stats quoted between one of the CS Suite revisions was 16 million lines of code changed. At first it seems like an achievement but if you have to do that much work to make so few noticeable changes to the suite, it needs to be built in a more refined way and focus more on workflows than the apps and features independently.
Hi Marvin, thanks for all of the great feedback you have provided, I will be sure to pass your opinion on. You seem to know CS Review and other Adobe software in great detail--How long have you been using CS Review, and to what end?
I don't use CS Review - I checked out the demo videos. It actually does seem to behave more like I described than I thought after checking out a more detailed video - at first it looked like a staff collaboration tool rather than client/staff. I'd still rather it was controlled in the CS Suite more than on the web. The steps right now would be that you use the CS Live extension menu to create a review and then upload it. But then you have to come out of the app and go online to send the email to clients. Ideally, that would just open an email program because all my correspondence and email addresses will have been there already and it would just include the link into the body text.
Then comes the aspect of the review text. Ultimately, the changes will have to be done inside one of the CS Suite apps so rather than look at those suggestions in the browser, it would be good to see them on the document and have in-app notifications while working. So Indesign might have a comments layer where reviewers have added suggestions and it can be flipped on/off while working. This would help most in the video packages as you don't need to scrub the online video as well as the offline video.
I've used Browser Lab, which is part of CS Live before a number of times and while that works quite well, it doesn't go far enough as you generally want to test loads of pages. Ideally, you'd be able to control a remote version of a browser on a server. That might have some scalability issues but when you use AJAX animations on a site, a static image doesn't let you see if it works so a virtual machines is better but it's difficult to test on multiple browsers that way.
Lastly on the topic of the CS Live pricing. It seems the wrong way round. People pay huge up-front costs to buy the suite and then the CS Live is an additional subscription up to $20 per month, though it's free for now. To me it makes much more sense if you make the whole suite a subscription package but you pay per use and the CS Live features come with it.
Consider a startup company, you basically say to them, you get all apps in the CS Suite for $70 per month per installation. If they start out with 10 designers, rather than pay $2600 x 10 = $26000, they start out paying $700 per month. This might seem worse from your point of view but it's not because the company won't ever think about whether or not to upgrade to the latest version. The latest version is free, they just keep paying. It changes the CS Suite from being a company asset to a service a company uses.
This means your support headache is greatly reduced as you never have to support anything except the latest version. It also means you can protect the product more easily as it can do a monthly online verification to validate the copy. It means that volume licensing is easier, it means if an employee leaves, the company just lowers the payment level. You can do it per app so that home users can afford the full Photoshop and not just Elements and it can be charged on a month to month basis so if you only use it at Christmas to make your own cards or something, you just pay for that period of time.
Also, I'm glad to hear that you have had success with BrowserLab. Is this the primary service that you use to test pages?
Also, I'm glad to hear that you have had success with BrowserLab. Is this the primary service that you use to test pages?
Unfortunately no. I'd like it to be though as it saves having to run Windows in a virtual machine but it's not flexible enough. The main issues are that I can't test a local server that is inaccessible from the internet and I can't test dynamic content as it renders static pages. So right now, it's kind of a last resort.
The online service can rectify that by using remote browser sessions instead of rendering the page once and then giving a screenshot. Look at what OnLive is doing now with full remote Windows installations:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/May...Pad,11763.html
It also lets you see Flash content on the iOS devices. You don't have to run the full OS for browserlab but just a specific instance of each browser that is fullscreen. I can work round the local server issue by forwarding ports and using my IP address but if the service could help with that, it would be even better e.g. using UPnP.