Type Cast

The much anticipated web-based version of Photoshop has launched. It’s a public beta. Initial reports say it is vastly cut down from the original. Surely not? You mean you thought they were going to do an entire online version in Flex and Flash and do themselves out of $[insert, large, number] of revenue each year? They even need to be careful not to overlap with Photoshop Elements. They’re also offering 2GB of free web space - which is nice.

Photoshop Express Home Page 

I haven’t used it yet, but will no doubt give it a whirl in the next few days. Even though I have a fully CS3′d up machine, I’ll look on this in the same way I treat my MacBook Air. A lightweight nut cracker to crack a nut home-based tool. An iPhoto retouching replacement rather than a Photoshop replacement - if that makes sense.

I’ve had Leopard (or Mac OSX 10.5) installed on my machine for about five weeks now. And I have to say, it’s been a less than perfect experience. The installation itself was the usual, seamless Apple beautifulness. Simple to follow dialogue boxes that didn’t tax the imagination.

It’s using it in the real world which has thrown up the problems. Firstly, Firefox seems to have become very unstable. Get plenty of tabs open and start to flick between them. I’ve been met, on a daily basis, by the spinning beach ball of death and the need to force quit.

Some of Photoshop CS3’s palettes have stopped working. Try editing the type size or the corner radius of a rounded rectangle with the ‘Options’ tools along the top of the screen. It’ll work once and then never again, with rendering errors and all sorts of other brokenness.

Some things work, but seem to be a retrograde step in usability. In iCal the tray showing an appointment’s details has disappeared, only to be replaced by an ajaxesque pop up panel. There is no way to quickly view appointment details. You are forced to double click each appointment to show the dreadful popup and then click ‘Done’ to close it.

The dock, about which a lot has been said already, is fine but the blue fuzzy application active markers are too subtle for my liking.

Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of things I like, ‘Quicklook‘ being one of the best, but these issues are seriously hampering productivity and efficiency - something that I hail the mac for over a Windows machine.