Photoshop Express
Everybody loves taking pictures.
Not everyone loves editing picutres..
Photoshop has long been the king of image editing - both on PC and MAC. Arguments can be made but no other software is as proven or feature-packed. The price tag is hefty (especially compared to GIMP). But for professional image editing nothing else comes close.
With the growth in online applications we’ve seen some newer sleaker quasi-image editing apps roll out. Google made the biggest splash years ago buying Picasa and making it freely available. Although not a web-app it integrates with Googles online image service and allow for simple, end-sure friendly image editing. Quickly other online apps of similar nature rolled out in the line of though - simple, end user friend, not as feature rich as photoshop by any means - but highly usable.
Adobe wasn’t sleeping.
Eearlier this year Adobe rolled out Photoshop Express. A web-based ‘lite’ version of their full application. Photoshop Express is more of a photo-sharing site that contains various worth-keeping image editing features.
To end users dismay, Photoshop Esxpress is not as competitive as one would expect. As much as we’d like it Adobe has no plans to add the premium features of Photoshop into the online application.
Instead, they settled for the usual simple editing available in many other applicatoins and online apps. Granted it is a free - but it just doesn’t meet our hopes.
The four main functions are:
- photo editing
- organization of files
- sharing
- community sharing
Competing with services such as Photo bucket, Face book, and Picasa, photoshop express has a way to go.
Flicker integration is not available as of the moment but sooner or later it will.
To give you an idea of what it is like, the program is a mixture of iPhoto and Adobe Bridge CS3 with manageable features that a first timer won’t find hard to operate!
Joining, of course is free and easy; all you have to do is to sign up for a free account and log in your username with password.
To upload, you can get your images either from your computer or from other services. Moreover, your files can be arranged into albums and put a caption on it for faster searching.
Soon after release Adobe came under fire for the TOS of the online app. Seems that they claimed ownership of any file that was edited using the system. They have since modified those terms and conditions to remove the claim of ownership (pretty rude eh..)
All in all another free online photo editing service is good - but Adobe disappoints us with the effort.
Photoshop Express took so long to roll out that we really hoped it would be slicker, refined, and more feature-full.
Perhaps the next revision.
To Pownce or crawl?
Everything Kevin Rose touches turns to gold right?
Well – I’m still waiting for Pownce to get the midas affect.
Launched nearly a year ago – Pownce has yet to see an upsurge in user acceptance.
Built on the adobe AIR framework and touting features such as message shares (ooh.. unique eh..), file sharing, event sharing and of course social community.
Set up as a competitor and superior product to AIM and all IM clients it ends up that the main competition comes from Twitter (and all those twitter-holics).
Of course Pownce is free to use for a basic account. You can send up to 10Mb file in the basic account. There are also specially made pages that are dedicated for each event so people would know about them and they will be given the privilege to sign up and take part of it.
You will in fact be given the opportunity to split your friends into sets so you can send messages to specific niches of people.
The site also features integration with other profiles in other websites so you will have the ability to import friend lists from other services. Pownce is a neat way to get connected!
What’s Lacking? No sms, No rss feeds. (come on.. what are you thinking Kev)
The client will only be as good as the community around it.
And in order to build the community they’ve got some work to do.
Pedigree can’t be beat with Kevin backing it – but I think he’s going to need to spend some of his hard earned digg-cash if he is going to get it to critical mass.
Google App Engine
Google and free are synonyms right? I mean - who isn’t tired of hearing about some google ‘product’ that is beta and free to customers.
Of course when I say free - I mean in exchange for your privacy and ad attention..
So Google announced its long-awaited App Engine a few weeks ago. The Google Application services will directly compete with Amazon’s ever-growing S3 and Db services. Think Cloud Computing.
What is Google App Engine?
Well, the Company described this as an application-hosting tool by which developers can make use of in order to put up scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. There are no servers to maintain. All you have to do is to upload your application and you are ready to serve your users through a free domain name on the appspot.com or simply use Google Apps itself if you want to serve it your own domain.
It is easy and you will have a choice whether to share it with others or limit access to members of your organization.
The free account can give you up to 500MB space with sufficient CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. If this is not enough for you Google offers a paid increase (price unknown).
Is it reliable? You are kidding, right? Has google every been down for you ?
The App Engine development environment comprise of outstanding Web serving, automatic scaling and load balancing, large space for better file storage, Google APIs for authenticating users and sending e-mail and a full packed local development environment. With all these, one can surely assume that the service is possibly reliable because Google is known for being almost invulnerable to widespread outages.
There are a few reasons to dislike the service - the most notable downside is the fact that developers can only make use of Python as their programming language. Google assures the public that Python is merely the first supported language, and that the whole infrastructure is intended to be language neutral.
Data Portability is increasing - as is the availability and ease of use of cloud computing services.
Amazon really set the pace with S3 and continues to lead in the area. Competition and choices are always a good thing - so we should all welcome google into the game.
NIN Releases Album via Internet : Free
It is no secret that we love Trent around here - and for very good reason.
Today NIN released The Slip via the nin.com site completely free of charge.
This follows Trent’s direct to consumer release of Ghosts - where he sold the album for $5 per full download. Fans can register via email address on the site and will receive a token to download the album. (Props go out to you trent - the site experience is much improved from ghosts).
Torrents are available both for lossless flac download and for purist audiophiles - wave format as well (1.2 gig download).
The internet boards are buzzing with fans begging for more, asking where to donate money and making all out fan-love to trent.
Go download the album. Take a listen to tracks #2 and #3 - my personal faves.
-
Recent Posts
- And pigs flew too: DRM-free songs from iTunes soon?
- Yahoo! CEO to step down, and leave a big mess behind
- Black Friday is coming, but are the deals what people are hoping for?
- Seven years for a patch? Say it isn’t so, Microsoft
- PC Makers, the Economy, and who will survive (and thrive)
- “Vista Capable”? Well, not quite…
- Reports: Windows 7 may not improve performance much
- iPhone 2.2 Firmware Update may be out on the 21st of November?
- Circuit City files for bankruptcy: And so the wheel turns
- MGM first to post feature-length films to YouTube
-
-
-