This is a brief round-up of Adobe-related news from the past days. Last week, a screenshot and some additional details leaked confirming there will be a free, web-based version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Express (see above). Let´s see what that will be like compared to it´s big brother. You can find infos here, here or here (oder auf deutsch: hier).

If you are working with “the real” Photoshop, you might find some shortcuts or tipps & tricks on the Web Designer Wall. I do admit I found some I didn´t stumble upon troughout the years. Thanks to Dennis for this hint!

Since the iPhone was introduced earlier this year, Apple finally offers a handheld device capable of text-input. Now the all-new iPod touch adds an alternative just lacking the phone-capabilities. Is this Apple returning to PDA-business almost 10 years after the Newton Messagepad was discontinued? Is this the iNewton long howled for? I was hoping so, but then after reading about the iPhone-PIM-applications on Macworld I was a bit dissappointed. It seems both devices are equipped with nearly the same software for managing your personal data and that these apps fall short in syncing all information seamless. No support for syncing Notes to the Mac or all iCal-calendars being merged into one file on the iPhone/iPod touch is not what many of us are expecting from a Palm- or PocketPC-substitute. Seeing the iPod touch even lacking some features the iPhone ships with (Google Maps or Weather-widget) to me means, it is clearly positioned to be an iPod with some add-ons while it´s not meant to digg off iPhone sales in the more business-oriented world. Despite these drawbacks, both devices with their fascinating techniques and features are a groundwork for future developments of a more refined Apple-PDA reintroduction. This you can also see from the new iPod leading the list of most popular PDAs on Brighthand.com. None of the competitors can offer devices with better screens, multi-touch technology, higher storage capacity or more intuitive interfaces by now. Cupertino, start you webbrowsers now and read the fixes we want to see!

UPDATE: As the first “touchs” have been delivered, it´s no longer any doubt: The iPod´s software has been crippled compared to the iPhone´s. No calendar-entries or modifications can be made on the new iPod, whereas contacts can be added or changed (but no calls can be made obviously).

It´s a bit disappointing to see that camera vendors don´t put more effort in a simple yet useful technique like geotagging. If you´re a serious photographer you will most likely try to keep the metadata of your photos up to date thus adding keywords, a description or where the picture was taken. I know that Canon offers a Wireless Transmitter for their DSLRs which is able to connect to a third-party GPS-receiver via USB. I know Sony offers a dedicated receiver. Also the latest Nikons come with an adaptor. But why do I not see an all-in-one solution? Strange…
So this seems to still be part of the post-production process. I´ve gathered several links to Mac OSX compatible software for geotagging images. My aim was to find applications aware of tagging photos without having any GPS-data handy. There are special programs to sync GPS-track-data to a pile of photos, but that´s not what I want. I´d like to find a clean, neat interface with a map like Google Maps, a way of drag-and-drop adding coordinates to my files (wether they are .jpgs, .tifs or .cr2s) and auto-filling of the IPTC-fields for town, state and country. Here´s a list of software I´m going to examine when I find the time:

• GeoPhoto
• PhotoInfoEditor
• PhotoGPSEditor
• GeoTagging Automator Action
• HoudahGeo
• RapidoMap
• Geotagger

Oh, by the way, I also found a german podcast on this topic. If you have any experience with geotagging, please feel free to leave a comment!

Another nice link to a huge pile of tutorial videos about Adobe Photoshop (ranging from version 7.0 to CS3 extended) can be found here. Russell Brown presents videos on “Auto magic blending” or “Smart filters” for example. He also provides you with scripts you can download. A (german) review can be found on Digitalkamera.de.

Just earlier this week, Apple Inc introduced a new generation of iMac computers. The 2 models come with 20″ or 24″ glossy screens and a new aluminum housing, 2.4 or 2.8GHz processors, faster video-cards, larger harddrives and the new iLife ´08 software collection. It´s not that I am getting paid by Apple to write this post, but after my G4-Mac is about 4 years old now, I´m feeling like updating the hardware soon. And comparing prices for a mid-range MacPro plus a new TFT to the new 24″ iMac, the latter seems more and more appealing to me.
In fact, after my new Canon 2.8/70-200 L IS USM arrived a few weeks ago, after having ordered a Canon EOS 5D plus BG-E4 some days ago, after just having confirmed the delivery of a new Epson V700 scanner I will probably delay that iMac-thing a couple of weeks until the first jobs are paid Here´s where you can find additional information about the new iMacs:

Macnews.de
Welt online
Heise online
ars technica

While still lacking an iPhone, I´m bound to use my old Palm device for making appointments and having my contacts at hand. Therefore I highly appreciate the further development of a program I´m using since years – The Missing Sync for Palm OS. It´s almost the only way to sync a Palm device with the Mac´s built-in PIM-apps iCal and Adressbook. Though still some features are missing (option “handheld overwrites desktop” or support for those nice iCal banner-events spanning two or more days), it´s pacifying to see the guys at Mark/Space haven´t given up this old-fashioned handheld-OS yet. I have to admit that I´m really keen on getting my own iPhone in winter though, as up to now this seems to be the holy grail for Mac-users. Seems like from next year on, the Tungsten T3 will be downgraded to run TomTom only… Some new features are:

• Call Log (newer Treos only)
• SMS Log (newer Treos only)
• Video conduit (download videos from Treo, encode Videos for Palm-playback)
• Improved Notes sync (new Notebook application, sync with Yojimbo)

Version 6 ships for 39,95$, users of previous versions get a discount for upgrading.