TTI COM Visual Media

Great Adobe Developer Connection article/white paper: H.264 for the rest of us.

The direct link to the PDF white paper is here.

That's gotta hurt. The original shirt is of course without the bloody knife. That's an iron-on.

First of all, this is for video folks. Print and web people, breathe easy. I think.

The instigator of the shirt thing is planning to wear and distribute these shirts at the Adobe booth at NAB next week. Here’s some background, from the Avid-L2 yahoo group:

Premiere is the biggest villain.
You should do a review of Premiere and then you’d see clearly the
frustration. Lots of nice talking points for marketing, but no real
substance.
Encore is just as bad as Premiere. It is the only Adobe product that is not
cross-platform. Soundbooth and Audition are decent. Photoshop and AE are
very good. But Adobe only seems to care about selling suites, and not how
good/bad an individual product is. As long as they are selling well, they
could really care less about the issues that face editors every day. I
haven’t called Premiere “Pro” in quite some time. In fairness to Adobe, two
years ago at NAB a group of us called “Make It Pro” met with senior
management at NAB. They listened intently and upper management followed up
quite a bit, but the product manager of Premiere NEVER did. Apparently he
has been too busy with his Master degree in business to properly oversee
Premiere’s development. Not a single thing we discussed was addressed in
CS4.

The real issue is this: you cannot edit anything with clients over your
shoulder. CS4 is as flaky as a box of Post Toasties. It is not even close
to the stability of Final Cut or Avid. So Avid should be very happy that
Adobe has missed the boat. Sure all the metatdata sounds nice. So did
“dynamic link” but it reality it is totally useless. Avid or Apple have
nothing to fear as far as editing. What I wish is that Premiere would be
dumped completely and then that Adobe might work with Avid and/or Final Cut
to create links with Photoshop, Soundbooth, Illustrator, & AE. AE is a
wonderful product that continues to develop (even though they still don’t
understand fields for previewing and probably never will).

Sadly after all these years, there is NO ONE that “gets” the editor’s point
of view. That’s why I use several programs to achieve what I’ve always
wished one program could deliver. Having been on many different betas, and
even an employee dealing with 3rd party developers and technical support for
a major NLE company, I feel I can voice my displeasure based on a lot of
experience. Avid is the ONLY software that was designed from the ground up
AROUND the every day editor. I’d bet you would be hard pressed to find a
single manager of product development in this industry who has actually been
a professional editor with client supervised sessions. You know who does?
Avid and Autodesk. It clearly shows in their products.

I was “a professional editor with client supervised sessions” for a bunch of years, and what he is describing gives me the willies. Please fix, Adobe!

(update 4-18: found the full collection of Mike Rohde Sketchnotes on Flickr, so you can see them big and/or do a full-screen slideshow).

From the article “A Graphic Look at SXSWi 2009“:

Sharing notes at this year’s conference went beyond Twitter — there were a few folks at the SXSW Interactive Conference who took sketchnotes. Sketchnotes are elaborate notes with handwritten lettering and sketchy drawings of what is happening during the talk. They are an artform; a combination of comic strip and information design.  It takes a good listener and fast illustrator to get down a good sketchnote. The popularity of taking sketchnotes has grown and many people are now scanning in the pages of their moleskin and uploading them to flickr. I thought I would share with you a few of my favorites from this year’s conference.

One commenter said: “I’m so glad to see people ditching their laptops and doing something as audience members more interesting than just regurgitating text into documents and blog posts.” Maybe I need to ditch the laptop more often and try this since the highlighted part is describing me pretty well…

I found this article especially interesting because the session that’s continuing to make me think the most was “Shift Happens–Moving from Words to Pictures.”

Where to begin…

• the main conference site. Includes the full session list, which were all recorded and are being posted here. Additional material from various sessions is being put online as well; let me (Mark) know if you’re looking for something specific and I’ll try to help you find it.
• My notes (still being compiled and cleaned up). I’ll add links to materials from the sessions I went to in my notes. I’ll also try to cull some of the attendee twitter posts for each session as well here.
• My YouTube videos (just a few; check out the Photoshop tips)
• My twitter on the event. You’ll see a few retweets and replies on this list also.
• the full SXSW twitter blast (very noisy; especially since it will include the music and film festival discussions). Specific hashtags (search terms) were created for various sessions and subjects; for the sessions I went to I included them in my notes (above).

Dare to dream. From Mike Rohde of Rohdesign.

Sitepoint has this very useful list. Some obvious, some I didn’t know. The idea is to resort to as little extra stuff as possible to accommodate IE6′s strangenesses. A few points from the article:

• Set position:relative
• Use display:inline for floated elements with a margin
• Set an element to hasLayout

A few useful points in the comments, too.

Web Design Ledger, another excellent web design site, has a roundup of the 14 most useful web design cheat sheets. Some of these are worth printing out and wallpapering your office with:

• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts (they have CS4 too, when we get it)
• Adobe Pen Tool Cheatsheet (the pen tool rocks)
• CSS Cheat Sheet
• (X)HTML Elements and Attributes
• jQuery 1.3 Cheat Sheet

There are others; check ‘em out.

Layer Tennis:

Two competitors will swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a “volley” and then we post it to the site live. A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action, as it happens. A match lasts for ten volleys and when it’s complete…

But I’m still agreeing with people who say the CS4 logo looks like a TV station’s (mentioned ~4:00 in):

I RSS a feed from fullasagoog, a conglomeration of mostly Adobe-related articles from various sites. On it I came across one from User Eccentric titled The Four Qualities of Successful Design Researchers.

Nice quick read; here’s the four he describes:

1. Inquisitive
2. Empathic
3. Articulate
4. Ornery

Worth checking out. The author is himself a Design Researcher for Adobe Flex.

Highlights

• updated version of the Web color palette (jpg)
• unofficial templates (suggested starting points for customization)
• content recommendations (some good points here)
• resources (they list and link to us–COM–directly here. Cool!)

Interesting that the new A&M web style guide came out the same day as an article called 10 things a web designer would never tell you. Note particularly #6: enforce style guides to the letter, and the link to the article illustrating its point.

While remembering what comes with great power, it sounds like responsible designers should treat branding guides like the pirate code—more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

Hmmm. So you must be a pirate for the pirate code to apply. How should that relate to a style guide?

Remember those days when a website consisted of about 2,700 nested tables? I sure do. Luckily those days are a thing of the past. With the introduction of CSS2 years back there was no good reason to keep churning out table after table in your layouts. With CSS3 and HTML5  around the corner (hopefully) things are only going to get better.

I find myself so anti-tables, I often trying to get rid of tables – for tabular data!

Even though it’s 2009, apparently some “web designers” still don’t buy into the whole no-tables movement. This past week an article titled Why CSS should not be used for layout has spread like wildfire. If you are are moderate at CSS, you will quickly realize that most his arguments are off base, but it’s any interesting read never-the-less.

Luckily, an article has been written in response to the first, Why CSS should be used for layouts. I might be a bit bias, but I find myself agreeing with the second article.

Moral of the story: let tables die already (at least for layouts). Now if we can just kill off IE6…