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Adobe MAX ’08 Sneak Peaks on Flickr

Fuad Kamal — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:31:48 +0000

I just posted my photos of the Sneak Peeks session from San Francisco to Flickr from Lightroom 2 using Jeffrey Friedl’s plug-in again (how useful it is!). The sneak peeks (and other general sessions) opened with a video DJ performance by Mike Relm. While the news of the massive layoffs at Adobe after MAX Milan may seem on the surface as bad news, the fact is that the RIA market and the potential for the Flash platform is stronger than ever. I am sure that most of the folks leaving Adobe will have exciting ventures to move on to, while Adobe itself will be leaner, meaner, and more primed to deliver some of the most exciting technology to the world.

Adobe MAX Awards on Flickr

Fuad Kamal — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:01:53 +0000

I used Jeffrey Friedl’s plugin for Adobe Lightroom 2 to export my photos of the MAX Awards to Flickr rather than outputting yet another Lightroom web gallery. While the metadata is included in the images, I don’t have time to link and/or comment each image to the appropriate descriptions which I am sure lots of folks have already written. So hopefully by using flickr not only will they be searchable but also perhaps folks can annotate them. In case anyone is curious these were shot with a Canon 5D with a EF35mm f/1.4 fixed length lens. I should be posting the photos from the Sneak Peeks presentation shortly.

Macromedia Man

Fuad Kamal — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:36:27 +0000

A week since Adobe MAX NA ’08 closed with its last sessions, and yet I am nowhere near caught up with work, email, leads, etc. I was just doing the post on my pics from the MAX Awards / Sneak Peeks session when, like one of those darkroom scenes in an old detective movie, guess who popped up in the foreground a couple of rows in front of me? It was Macromedia Man! I saw this guy from the back everywhere at MAX – across the lunch room, in my sessions, in the hall, at the party…and now in Adobe Lightroom. Who are you, Macromedia Man? Catchy shirt.

Pictures of Adobe MAX ’08 Customer Appreciation Event

Fuad Kamal — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:08:15 +0000

Here’s the slideshow, done in LR2

Adobe MAX Sneak Preview days -2, -1

Fuad Kamal — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 06:49:15 +0000

So we flew in to San Francisco on Virgin America. My first time ever flying this airline, and I have to say it was the best domestic airline I have ever flown. Sure, to save on costs / maximize on profits, they and many other airlines now charge for meals even on a flight like this from one coast to the other. On the other hand, this is the first time I was able to order free beverages using the touch screen at my seat. It was also the first time I sat in an airplane cabin with purple mood lighting and the first time I was able to chat with another passenger using a chat application in the said console. But perhaps the best, and most unexpected perk: regular power outlets at every seat. I bought the airline power adapter for my Macbook Pro just in case one day by some crazy chance I would find a power outlet in the main cabin of an airplane, but now I feel like that was a waste. Every seat in the main cabin of Virgin America has a full size power outlet that works without having to pay for anything. There is also USB and some type of network port, but the USB didn’t seem to have any power so I’m not sure what you’d use it for; perhaps its there for future use.

We arrived Friday night and our hotel is next door to Moscone West so we passed by and noticed that much of the signage and other preparations for MAX were already complete. I wanted to take some pics of it that night but we were exhausted from the flight. The next morning I came by, snapped some images on the outside and then noticed that the doors seemed not to be locked so wandered in and was about to start shooting away when the guy in charge asked me to leave, saying it was ‘private’ and no photos or anything could be taken. Hmm…so I came by again tonight and got plenty of pictures of the inside through the glass. For some reason the Moscone seems quite similar in architecture to me to the newer half of the McCormick place where MAX was held last year.

Here’s the Lightroom gallery of my MAX preview exposures.

Some things to note:

there is a designated area for the free Unconferences. I have heard about them here and there on folks blogs but don’t really know anything about it. I suppose there will be more info available upon registration tomorrow or on Monday.
There seems to be a booth that is a big multisided chalk board for folks to put share ideas on. Hmm…
Level 2 of Moscone West has: Adobe Support Lab, MAX Playground, MAX Store, Sessions, Unconferences
Level 3 of Moscone West has: General Session
Ground level of Moscone West has: registration, Community Pavillion, and that showcase area they had last year, what’s it called???
They had been working on hoisting up a huge MAX sign onto the side of the Moscone since early Saturday morning. I guess they finally got it up. I overheard some MAX staffers as they were exiting the building Saturday night and apparently its a big deal they are really proud of.

A few other observations I had so far:

people seem really friendly around here. It’s kind of like, the further you get from New York, NY, the better the temperament of people are…and this is just about as far as you can get. Well, maybe that’s not always true – I found the temperament of folks in Kentucky to be amazing and that’s only half way across the country from NYC. But really, strangers in the elevator told me to have a nice day…how often does that happen on the East coast?
There are a few homeless folks who seem to actually live along the Howard street side of Moscone West. If you’re feeling charitable maybe you can help one out by giving him some bottled water or buying him a meal.
if you have time while you are here in SF, go visit Muir Woods. The redwood trees are awe inspiring and help you to realize your place in this vast universe by putting things in perspective. There is one tree there they dated at 1,021 years old.

Truly deleting images from Adobe Lightroom

Fuad Kamal — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:25:17 +0000

Hitting the ‘delete’ key in Adobe Bridge and Lightroom used to bring up a dialog offering options like whether I wanted to remove the image from the collection or permanently delete the image from my hard drive. Since upgrading to Lightroom 2 I no longer get this dialogue, and I couldn’t find a setting in the preferences to make it come up. After a bit of searching on the web I found this page that says “To remove a photo from a collection as well as from the catalog, select the photo and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Delete (Windows) or Command+Option+Shift+Delete (Mac OS).” Now to me, removing from a collection and dumping something in the trash are two totally different things, yet when I used this shortcut it did give me a prompt offering to move the image to the trash.

So there you have it, if you want to actually delete an image from your drive from Lightroom, you need to use the above key combination.

Anaara.com just went LIVE

Fuad Kamal — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:01:07 +0000

Well this has been a month of new things being implemented; Barack Hussein Obama won the presidential election, Adobe MAX SF is around the corner, and our web site is finally live! For ages now we have only had our blog on the site; our workload has been such that getting a decent site together has been beyond scope…but a little over a month ago we finally put our collective feet down and declared, enough is enough! Developed with Adobe Flex, of course…enjoy!

Lots of thanks to everyone who participated in the alpha release.

We decided to deploy in phases…so stay tuned for lots to come still.

Sunrises over Doha

Fuad Kamal — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:01:44 +0000

…so I did more than drop my phone in the gulf…

shot with a Canon Powershot Pro in Doha, Qatar.

Adobe releases Lightroom 1.3 SDK on Labs

Fuad Kamal — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 02:47:17 +0000

this one begins to address a much felt gap…SDK for lightroom that lets you create plug-ins to enable Lightroom to work with many third party apps, web sites, etc. There seem to be a lot of errors thrown from the discussion board, maybe that will be worked out soon since this was just released on the 15th. There is an interesting looking discussion thread on Flickr export from lightroom, unfortunately I couldn’t get to it due to all the errors thrown (four in total for this link alone, but there seem to be about 17 posts so some people must be getting through).

sony ericsson s500i flash lite, leopard, After Effects

Fuad Kamal — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 03:41:50 +0000

OK, I just got a Sony Ericsson s500i yesterday, I got it because it seemed like a really decent phone, had no idea it’s OS was Flash Lite until I just happened to see Scott Janosek’s blog post on MXNA, about Mark Doherty’s post on the phone. As far as I can tell, the UI is identical to the UI on my 790a, which as far as I know is NOT Flash Lite. Also the two games that came on the phone are Java applications, not Flash Lite apps. Mark’s post was interesting, though, especially since he mentioned that Sony is making the phone open to third party developers. Hmm…I was never too enthusiastic about developing flash lite apps, because there weren’t many phones in the U.S. supporting it, on top of that, the main vendor, Verizon (Chocolate phone, which doesn’t even come close to the s500i) apparently has made it such a headache to get applications published that doesn’t really seem worth the effort. In the face of that all the hype a while back on Adobe’s site about “make money – build mobile apps for Verizon” seemed like just that – hype. But hey, if in theory I could publish a flash lite app and just load it onto the phone…that does seem interesting, even if just for tinkering.

Which is yet another reason in my list of reasons NOT to get an iPhone…no Flash support (yet). How can you make a phone that can run Safari but doesn’t support the Flash plug in? Completely kills the whole ‘it’s just like a regular web browser on your phone!’ theme in my eyes. What is the web without the flash platform? Gasp-!

There was also a lot of hype and excitement over the release of Leopard, as everyone knows, but I recommend developers and post production people download and read through the PDF Adobe has released on compatibility with Leopard before upgrading. I use Acrobat 8 but honestly could live without it for a few months until the update is released (one of the awesome things I realized when I switched to Mac was how easy it was to create PDFs without Acrobat) but After Effects won’t be updated until December and that could put a stint in my post production workflow potentially. Hm…guess I won’t be upgrading my main work Mac for a while nor the Mac that the s500i syncs with…

ah, yeah, turns out the s500i isn’t natively supported by iSync on the Mac. That was a momentary bummer as a prior Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung user, I had been ecstatic at the performance of my 790a and also how well it sync’d with my Mac. Moments (and $6) later though that issue was in the past, with a plug-in from feisar.com. However another cool feature I had no idea about previously – apparently you can dial numbers on the phone straight from Address Book – won’t work with Leopard since Apple has disabled that feature in the latest Mac OS release. Not that I would likely ever use the feature, but just the thought of it…

Ah, and apparently Lightroom is not certified to work with Leopard, either – photographers beware! btw anyone know how to move folders of images around and keep the Lightroom develop settings with the images? In Bridge there’s an option to keep the Bridge settings in the same folder as the images. I didn’t find something similiar in Lightroom. Kind of a major pain since I don’t always lug around my external drive where I keep my images long-term; on a shoot I store and develop on the laptop local drive and then move them over later. I also would really like to see more integration between Lightroom and Bridge…