30 September 2017

What am I waiting to be released?


Affinity products have a lot on the horizon, some things are closer than others for release. Updates to Photo and Designer could come out at any time as the beta versions have been through a few iterations already. As the year come closer to an end though, I am very anxious to see some sign of their new Digital Asset Manager and I am really hoping for the promised reveal of their Publisher program that could finally be competition for Indesign. Affinity does not hide its development which has 2 results on it's users... 1) you feel in the loop and can plan for what is coming and 2) the ultimate frustrations of waiting for the crushing amount of time it takes to get a program right before release. They are pretty good at squashing bugs and releasing very usable apps so it's worth the agony of waiting, it's just not easy! hey are not promising a ton of new features in the next update but what they are promising I am looking forward to using - such as the drawing tool and font menu improvements.


The Room 4 will be released this fall... sometime. I really love the earlier games and so far each one has been different and challenging in different ways from those before it. I re-played all three previous games this summer and still loved them all.


MAC OS High Sierra has been released - sort of. It was released with no support for fusion drives and apparently has some issues with Indesign, which I still use so I won't be updating until I am sure those issues and some Metal 2 bugs I've heard about are handled.


X-Particles 4 : the Cinema 4D plugin has become an essential part of my work and this new update looks amazing. When they introduced fire and smoke a while back, the effects were underwhelming. This new release integrates a new fire/smoke simulation system from a company they bought out and it might decrease or end my dependence on Turbulence FD for this effects. Right now I have to use X-particles and Turbulence together to get decent results.  I would prefer it all in one package and it looks like I'm getting just that!


Pixelmator Pro has been announced for this fall, again... sometime. While I won't use it for photos, the little I saw of it's new drawing and painting tools might lure me away from Sketch, which Autodesk has put into the hell that is the Adobe pay us every month subscription "service". So my version will eventually stop working and I won't subscribe so I will need a replacement for my preferred drawing app. If Affinity Photo was more advanced intros area I would be happy to stay there, but I don't think drawing is priority in their future plans.

The long goodbyes:
I might be deleting a few programs as well. Flash is already gone and when I update to High Sierra eventually, Final Cut Studio will go as mentioned las post. There are a few others that I might just give up on. Dreamweaver I haven't touched in 2 years, Hype 3, and great app for html 5 animations I haven't used since I started with Sparkle web design. I still have 21 Adobe products sitting on my disk I almost never touch... some I've never used even once. Titanium Toast, DVD creator, Disk Cover... will I really use these once essential programs again? I like to keep my system free of apps that just sit there, taking up space.

12 September 2017

Final goodbye to Final Cut Studio and Flash


Not a surprise to anyone, but Adobe is pulling the plug on Flash, the animation turned practically independent OS application originally developed by Macromedia. I have along history with Flash, and loved using it under Macromedia. When Adobe bought Macromedia, it was almost exclusively for obtaining Flash which it saw as the future standard of the internet and aggressively pushed it way beyond it's limits and original functions into a space no one asked for. They also pretty much abandoned all the other great Macromedia products, including Dreamweaver which had become the best WYSIWYG html editor around.

At first, mostly because of the advantages for flash video, the newer version caught on but quickly the hack-ability and lack of stability became apparent to anyone opening a Flash file. Steve Jobs notoriously banned the format from Apple's mobile devices and the long, slow death knell began to sound. HTML 5 and other new internet advances soon took over most of the functions only Flash could offer and to be frank, I haven't opened the program in about 5 years.


Sadder for me is the knowledge that the next Mac OS update will kill Final Cut Studio for once for all. I actually used it just last week to export a video in a format for Amazon Video Direct that Final Cut X can not do... for reasons I'll never understand and Amazon refuses to explain. The Final Cut debacle is well known and hate for the Final Cut Studio replacement isn't unfounded, or wasn't unfounded at the time. The application has changed a lot, bringing back old functionality and new better workflow over a slow development period but without demanding an upgrade fee in all that time. I still use some of the suite as well. While programs like the DVD creator and Colour have been obsolete for a long time now, Sound track Pro still has been very useful to me time to time. I have the new Motion X and it's a slight improvement over the studio version (why won't Apple give that software some real love?) but I haven't bought the new Compressor which exports to different formats... and I might have now that the old Final Cut will be no more. Adobe's premier Pro has become what Final Cut likely would have been in some respects but it's also stuck in older ideas about editing and part of the heinous Adobe Creative Cloud ripoff, so I won't be using that and keeping Final Cut X at the top of my video editing list for now.

05 September 2017

Recent photography work


I was recently in Colorado taking photos and the photo above shows the massive difference working in RAW can have on a final photo. The amount of detail that was extracted turned a nothing, dark boring image into something much more interesting.


One of the feature in Affinity Photo is the de-hazing filter and it's pretty amazing. Since I was running around taking photos of distant vistas, haze can be an asset but also a problem. This show the difference that filter can make. There is a lot of control over the strength  and look of it so it's up to you as to how much or little haze you want to get rid of.


I was also, with my brother's advice, able to finally crack the problems I was having with night shots. I was WAY overthinking what I needed to do and he had a simple solution for my most vexing problem - focusing at infinity and keeping it there when you can't see a thing because... well, because it's dark outside.