Adobe launches Photoshop Express
Abobe launched there new Photopshop Express web application the other day. This is a completely online version of Photoshop power by Adobe’s Flash.
“Crop, rotate, tweak, and show off your photos here on Photoshop Express, on your blog or Facebook page. Give your friend a tragically oversized head or get rid of the mole on his cheek that’s the size of a small asteroid. It’s totally up to you.”
With an account you also get 2 GB of storage space for your photos. There is also an online test drive, I only tried out the gallery, but it is nicely animated and very slick looking. I don’t think I’ll be dumping the full version of Photoshop anytime soon, but I’m sure an app like this will be great for a lot of people out there just looking to touch up and show off their photos.
Earth Hour – Tomorrow
I wanted to remind everyone that tomorrow is Earth Hour in a lot of cities and places around the world. This is a World Wild Life initiative and it is to make a statement about climate change.
“Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.”
For more details visit the Earth Hour website.
IE8 will interpret web content in a standards compliant way
There’s an interesting post on the MS IEBlog about how Internet Explorer 8 will render in a standards compliant way by default. If you want IE7 rendering you will have to explicitly ask for it in the html document. A List Apart has more on this topic.
Overall I think IE7 was pretty disappointing. I still have a lot of problems getting things to work properly, and I usually get things to work in Firefox and Safari long before I get them to work in IE7, not to mention that some sites that work in IE6, break in IE7. Let’s hope 8 will be different, but now web designers and programmers will have three Internet Explorer browsers to support and deal with, at least for awhile.
Interoperability is the future with more and more clients out there. I believe that hand held browsing will become a major part of many people’s lives in the very near future as WiFi becomes more widespread and cell phone bandwidth prices drop. More and more people will be accessing pages on many different platforms, so web standards and interoperability are more important than ever. Microsoft seems to understand this and is listening to the web standards experts more and more and this is good.
Microsoft offers $44.6-Billion for Yahoo
This announcement did not leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Right now there are really only three big search engines, with Google being the dominate one; this would narrow it down to two. Whenever Microsoft can’t get something right, they just buy someone who has done it right.
There is a very interesting discussion on Slashdot about why Yahoo is so popular. A lot of the reasons for it’s popularity are things that Microsoft has never really understood, like interoperability. How many of Microsoft’s offerings fail to work properly on anything but a MS platform?
I see the Internet moving away from propriety software solutions. For a long time Internet Explorer was king, but that is all changing, and as web usage moves more and more towards handhelds I don’t see this trend changing. We have this thing called “Web Standards”, and they work.
If this deal goes through, I just hope Yahoo doesn’t end up like Hotmail. For me, Google is king, but I like Yahoo the way it is and would hate to see it become an IE only, or even IE enhanced platform.
