• 19Apr 09

  the-to-be-edited-later quick review of Adobe Master Collection CS4

  Adobe cs4 is out and i just got my hands on it, the master edition, the new improvements introduced to its tools is immense, perhaps the most important tool i should be talking about is Photoshop but i think i will leave this to later and start with the new tools i am playing with right now.

  SoundBooth: in the past adobe sound editing tools were pretty straight forward, concentrated tool made to provide sound engineers with a set of modules that help them do whatever they needed done, that was offered through CoolEdit and later Audition, now in SoundBooth what Adobe has done is strip the program down from most of the more complex tools only used by hardcore sound engineers and instead put sets of tools to be used directly by regular sound editors and mixers such as myself. so if you need to do some sound mastering, sound effects you open up SB and click here and there and your done. although the lack of a proper mixing environment is a great flaw i think in the program but its not a big deal because you can always go back to Audition and do the sound creation/mixing part or use a proper mixing program to begin with like Abelton or Acid.

  AfterEffects: i have to admit this is the first time i get to work with AE, two weeks back i didn't even know what it was for, i cant really compare it to cs3 or anything before that because i am not very sure what kinds of improvements/enhancements were introduced in this new release, but i will tell you this, its awesome, i would suggest following [link] they offer the best tutorials for AE i have seen around.

  Kuler: if you don't know Adobe Kuler then your lost homey, Kuler is Adobe community's color theme creation thingy, you know a place where you can find the coolest palettes, see what the newest themes and colors. well thats [link], now Adobe has integrated Kuler into its applications so now you can actually access Kuler community from within your application, search for color themes, edit them on the fly and even upload and share them. this save a ton of lost time looking for color guides.

  Indesign: if you're amongst the unlucky few of magazine layout designers, the ones that get stuck with loads of text and spend all day long drawing tables and cutting down text so they would fit and you wont have widows or children hanging out then your in treat, the new ID is just amazing, it offers a ton of new enhancements and newly introduced features, you can get a full list of new features from adobe's website [link] but if you want the short version, well it handles text flow a lot better, auto placement of multiple objects has become a tad better and best of all it can export SWF. suck it Internet!

  Dreamweaver: weaving my dreams, i feel i need to be writing about Adobe AIR before going into the web part of the suite, but what the hell Dreamweaver CS4 is pretty much as good as CS3 except its better in so many ways, the new Live view is neat, very accessible, also the new code hint thing is great, you get all kind of help while writing in your codes so you can spot your errors right away and save time on reviewing the code and testing it, DW now supports Photoshop's smart objects. Loss-less web ftw!

  AIR: not exactly a product of a tool or even a program, its not even included on the Disk, AIR is adobe's runtime environment that can deliver rich internet related applications to work on your desktop, even offline using Javascript, Flex or even Flash, many have started developing applications that run on AIR .. and best thing is, they run great on any computer, try Adobe Media Player.

  Encore: Produces HD video, DVD playback and Editing, looks alot like Premiere, I wasn't quite sure what was the big difference between Encore and Premiere but from what i read, it offers more stuff for the Higher Definition formats.

  Premiere: same thing i am not a big fan of video editing so .. Skip!

  OnLocation: same still, but i just wanna say Recording straight to Disk never been as easy and great, one of my friends explained to me the pain he had to go through to record any movie, record, disconnect, copy and rerecord, now you can record everything on the fly, get 5 terabytes and record all the videos you need.

  Director: to be honest i haven't used Director since it was Macromedia Director, and i didn't even use it professionally so i would keep this short and say, if you need to keep track of your crew, use Director.

  Contribute: Perhaps the best new product by Adobe, Contribute is web design for noobs, if you want a website up and running in no time but you lack the knowledge of Codes and scripts use Contribute, trust me you wont regret it, Contribute has In-Browser editing, which means you can design your website from within Firefox, how easy can that be?, its also fully integrated with Dreamweaver so you can work with both of them simultaneously. the Reviewing feature which let you pass your work to your client, they review it and send it back to you with notes to tell you what to change and what to keep. bravo Adobe very cleaver.

  Fireworks: if you still think FW is Photoshop without all the cool things then you need to go away now, FW has long identified itself as Web graphics editor, but it has more built in ****, and content than photo shop, it edits vectors and pixel based files, but it remains directed to the web so no fancy prints can be done in Fireworks as far as i know, good thing now is that it has further support for AIR and it can now handle and export PDF.

  Flash: it will take me a whole week to talk about Flash, but i doubt anyone would be interested in reading this much anyways, so keep it short and brief, the new Flash comes with a whole new User Interface, Frames on the bottom like regular animation programs, and like other animation programs, FLASH now supports 3D animation, YES 3d Animation has finally made its way to everyone's favorite program Flash. i can see the founders of Macromedia having tears in their eyes seeing their baby growing up and offering 3d animation to people like me, but hey that's not even remotely the best of it, Inverse kinematic with Bones!, Google what i just said, IK is the bone structure for 3D animation where you can move a parts of bodies separately but as easy as moving the whole thing, there is more to it than this of course but i just cant explain it, what else Motion Presets and Motion Editor, i swear this gets better and better, Adobe has seriously exceeded my expectations this time, even though they haven't put any new enhancements or changed anything with ActionScript but i am cool with it, i never code anyways.

  Illustrator: Bleed, this may not be as important for you as it would be someone that deals with printing all the time, Bleed is where the print house would Slice the papers, so normally you would have to set your design exactly on the bleed lines for them to know where to slice and where is too far, now with Illy's new support for bleed you just set the marks for them and they just get it directly, now need to waste time readjusting your design so the idiots at the printer wont mess it up but millimeters.

  Bridge, Version Cue, Device Central, Dynamic Link: they take up like 1.5 Gigabytes of your disk space so they deserve to have a word or two about them, the new Bridge is just as good as the previous ones, it has support for all Adobe products' files, video audio and graphic, it can edit the Metadata of all kinds of files, navigation with it is very straightforward and save a lot of time opening the wrong files for previewing. Version Cue is the a server client that lets you handle assets and files globally in the work place, access all the files you are working on from different computers and collaborate on them in real-time. device central includes support for new phones and handhelds. and dynamic link is for Video rendering.

  Photoshop: when CS3 offered 3D Models basic editing everyone was like, wow slow down a bit this is too hard for me to understand, what Vanishing point how does that work, if that what we thought yesterday, then today we will be stunned, Photoshop has gone All the way 3D, 3D Painting and 3D animation, lights and Materials, just like in BodyPaint of 3ds Max. CS4 has a ton of enhancements on old tools, every single tool has been refined and redone, the Burn and Dodge tool work differently now, they don't just darken and lighten areas they actually work the way they were suppose to work in the first place, the new Levels Panel, Vibrance, Audio Syncing controls, and best of all, The full 3D rotation tools, and the improved Vanishing Point module, to talk about what Adobe has done to Photoshop will seriously take a lot of time, just to give you a little tip on what more to expect: Photoshop now can utilize OpenGL to run the interface, so now when you zoom in to whatever percentage you will always have smooth and clean edges, remember when you zoom to 33% or something not equal like that you always have Jagged edges? well not anymore, you can zoom in and out with out any loss in visual quality, also you can now rotate the canvas freely and on the fly, not flip it, just tilt it the way you want.

  thanks Adobe for all your work, i strongly suggest upgrading to CS4 whenever you have the chance, you won't regret it. all the new products have new interfaces that offers better accessibility and are far more user friendly than ever.

  cheers and thanks for reading

  • Posted Apr 19, 2009 5:34 am GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 4Dec 08

  feels like yesterday

  feels kind of weird to be back here, on gamespot, the place where it all started like 4 years ago, when i first came to this place it was still ran by a bunch of nerds that knew all about games and wanted to share their knowledge with the world, shortly after that it ran by a bunch of douches looking forward to satisfy their corporate boss. Well good luck with that!

  just to state the truth, I didn't go to jail, and nothing bad ever happened to me, after that day April 7th I started to look at life from a different angle, places like this -GS- didn't seem to exist anymore, I mean the anger and the hatred that spread through our society has reached critical levels and something needed to be done. unfortunately we never had the means to change anything we just knew we could shock the system with our unity and that's exactly what happened. We successful proven our point; what did we gain from that? -Absolutely nothing.

  anyways back to games and gamespot, I see this place has gotten quite different since my last visit, new games coming out as I am typing here, ordered a copy of GTA4 for the PC today and can't wait for it to arrive, Left 4 Dead is next on the To-Play list, the new Need for Speed Undercover doesn't look to promising I only had a chance to check it out for 10 minutes or so. been playing a lot of Crysis and Farcry 2.

  douf

  • Posted Dec 4, 2008 4:40 pm GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 4May 08

  A country on STRIKE

  everything is going as planned, prices are going down, corruption is now history, justice is served and everything is now fine.
  
  Of course this is a lie, nothing happened yet, its too soon anyways to start collecting rewards, today the 3 day strike has started, more than 70 000 of my e-friends have decided that it has gone too far and we should take a stand, form something that will form a threat to the system, we arent trying to bring it down but rather want their acknowledgement of our existence.
  
  our demands are simple and few, all we are asking for is this:
  
  1- setting a minimum wage to al workers in egypt, currently we have none, so you can image that people are still earning less than 200 pounds a months which is around or less than 50 dollars a month. not fair, eh?
  
  2- we want a sort of policy to govern the huge inflation taking over our lives in egypt, the prices are sky rocketing and some people are facing a serious threats of starvation if they sees to remain.
  
  3- we request that all our friends and brothers that been taking capture or prisoned for their political stands to be released immediately, too much to ask from freedom of speech, right?
  
  thats all, and as you can see they arent much to ask from a government thats been robbing us for over 27 years so far, with such an incompetent president that allowed a bunch of his followers to let crisis take place in a country so rich such as ours, an example is the huge queues of people trying to score subsidized bread from outlets, to the point when some people have actually died trying to BUY bread.[link]
  
  today we all wear black, we boycott all governmental products, we boycott their news papers, we boycott TV channels that call us a bunch of confused kids, we the ones fighting for our salvation and just life are being called confused.
  
  a couple of days ago the president came on TV and announced a 30% raise to everyone, which is very promising but still it doesnt meet our demand, and yesterday they released most of the people that been kept prisoned from the first strike last month. so I am happy so far and i am anticipating a better future for all of us.
  
  Justice Before Peace.
  d
  • Posted May 4, 2008 5:20 am GMT
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