Originally I was impressed with Adobe Bridge and how it could handle Photoshop files just as it could with any other picture file types. Then I discovered Picasa and Picasa Web by Google and fell in love with its extremely easy to use and lightning fast interface. This latest release by Adobe titled Lightroom is extremely impressive with post image processing. Adobe Lightroom has an abundance of easily implementible Photoshop esque effects, but with a photography flare. It’s as simple to use as Picasa, but more importantly its depth in terms of image handling is exciting. The way Lightroom handles images is something to be seen. Adobe Lightroom blows post image handling programs out of the water. I still love how Picasa manages the bulk of image files, and their directory structure, but now I use a combination of Picasa Web and Lightroom. The version I downloaded here didn’t come with a web panel, sadly I was really looking forward to using this feature since it will output a slideshow Flash gallery with all the bells and whistles to navigate through it in one nice package. I can easily see Adobe Lightroom aiding in producing cutting edge looking web content.

On June 28th Adobe formerly Macromedia released its newest version of its Flash Player. Flash Player 9 is now available for download. A public beta version is available for Intel Mac users here Intel Mac Flash Player 9 Public Beta.

A taste of Flash Player 9, “Developers can now deliver powerful and dynamic multimedia content and applications via ActionScript 3.0 and a new highly optimized ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM). ActionScript 3.0 is a powerful, object-oriented ECMAScript-compliant programming language that provides a familiar syntax and compelling new language features such as ECMAScript for XML (E4X)” found here in its press release Flash Player 9 Press Release.

If you haven’t yet jumped on the Flash bandwagon here are some statistics to hopefully get the point across, Flash is here to stay - flash statistics.

For programmers, a new version of SWFObject is available, formerly known as FlashObject, but went through a name change based on a request from Adobe / Macromedia. Don’t know anything about SWFObject? This was grabbed from the FAQ’s on http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/:

A. Websites like The Library of Congress, Adobe.com (A slightly customized version), Windows.com, YouTube.com, skype.com, Snapple.com, it is included with Adobe Photoshop (in the Flash web photo galleries) and thousands of others. Colin Moock also suggests it as an alternative to the Macromedia Detection kit.”

I can’t recommend a better tool for embedding a Flash document into your website. Myspacers, the community is begging for you to use this tool. It’s simple, and its any knowledgeable web designers best friend.

The Macromedia website for quite some time since the merger has been displaying a “formerly Macromedia” Adobe logo. Recently, if you go to www.macromedia.com you’ll now be redirected to the new and improved Adobe site, seems they have decided to go with the original Macromedia design with the feel of Adobe. Personnally going through the site, it seems as if it needs a bit of fine tuning, but nevertheless, a phenomal site.

Microsoft recently released an Internet Explorer ActiveX update. Users are now experiencing a “Click to activate and use this control” message.

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