Very subtle but looks amazing!

One thing I love about living in 2008 is that digital photography has become such a ubiquitous part of people’s lives. Remember the days when digital photography was clunky and you had no real options to share or print or manipulate your photos? Software like Adobe Photoshop cost hundreds of dollars and your alternative was MS Paint.

Now we have digital photography storage and sharing services like Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa. And the nicest development has been an increase in cheap or free photo software that gives you the tools to customize, brush up, resize and touch up your photos. These free suites are surprisingly powerful and easy to use.

As a hobby point-and-shoot photographer I personally use Picasa, which I am highly satisfied with. But I heard that Adobe is now offering a free online-application version of Photoshop, the grandaddy and king of photo editing software. I had to check this out for myself. It’s called Photoshop Express and can be accessed through your free Photoshop.com account. In addition to the editing, its also a photo sharing suite which integrates with third-party sites and applications like Facebook.

So how’s it measure up?

First things first– the thing takes a very long time to load. A very long time. Once it starts up, most operations move along reasonably well, but the long initial start time is a pain when you have a lot of photos to work on.

However, once you’ve gotten through the slog of loading, you will find a well-designed interface with some surprisingly robust tools. Again, Adobe knows what they’re doing with photo editing, so it’s nice to see them bringing that standard of quality to a free online tool. However, there are some bugs, and quirks that pop up from time to time that are an annoyance and drag on productivity. There are also some missing features; no keyword search/tagging ability, no printing options (!) and no support for pictures higher than 12 megapixels.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the direction Adobe is moving in and will definitely keep my eye on how Photoshop Express continus to refine itself. It’s still a very early release, but it has a lot of potential.

I’ve been using the Google Chrome browser for the past month or so. Verdict? It’s got its good points, things I definitely think other browsers would be wise to adopt in the future. But overall, it’s just too raw a product right now to switch to on a more permanent basis, especially when Firefox beckons me with my comfortable host of AddOns. That being said, there were some features of Chrome that I really liked and miss.

• The Omnibar. This was great. Figures Google, the kings of search, would make searching easier than ever. The single URL / search bar was more than meets the eye; once you search on a page, say Youtube.com or Amazon.com, you can then search that site directly from the Omnibar without having to navigate to that page or click a button. All you have to do is start typing the site, hit tab and enter your search query once Chrome recognizes it. Very slick feature.
• The Start Page. Chrome displayed a thumbnail grid of the pages you visited most, as well as recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs, and all relevant search bars. There are Firefox addons that emulate this, but none of them do it as elegantly as Chrome did.
• Blazing speed! This is something no addon is going to give you. Chrome was FAST! There was one major annoyance though; Chrome had trouble with Flash, particularly videos. Youtube videos would stutter or freeze up the browser.

In the end, I think browser competition can only be a good thing for the end user. Hopefully this leads to increased creativity in upcoming browser updates across all major browser platforms.