First Look at Adobe Photoshop CS3

Well, with no second thought I clearly shows Macromedia people are inside Adobe now. The user interface clearly reflects the tightness, ease of use and elegance of Macromedia Product line up. The floating pallets are too annoying to manage. Now they are elegantly docked. It will be very much help full to people who use single monitor. Not many people have the luxury to use dual monitor right !!!
Well the installation is smoother than ever before. And this time Photoshop comes with Host of other packages line new Bridge, Device Central, 70MB Fonts are few among others.

Installation looks very cute.



The first time PS3 launches, the first thing that will come to your mind is wow!!! it looks so organized. No floating palettes now, all docked nicely ... but a big change that will strike u instantly is single column toolbar. Well for me it's now a big issue, but I think few didn't like the change. But anyway you can always get back and it's only a click away.



There are host of new features, just switch your workspace to What's new in CS3 and PS will highlight all new menu items. One very interesting addition is Edit > Preference > Performance.



Need more workspace but don't want to hide all your palettes ??? CS3 is here to rescue. You can actually collapse the palettes to icons and the result is u get more workspace without moving the palettes out of sight. Pretty Cool :)



Well after all these if you don't like the new interface you can always get back to the legacy interface. And it's just a click away. Workspace > Legacy and you are back to good old Photoshop User interface. But well it's almost the old but still it retains the new look a bit.



So ... I am eagerly waiting for the launch date and I think upgrade is highly recommended if you want a better product than it's predecessor.

Hellgate London : It's coming

So finally it's comming. the most anticipated game of year , undoubtedly Hellgate London from EA.
Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) and NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. today announced a summer 2007 worldwide ship window for the highly-anticipated online action RPG Hellgate: London
It's the first original PC Title from premier developer Flagship Studio.

We are all committed to making Hellgate: London absolutely the best game possible, said Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios. The anticipation surrounding the game is immense and we are looking forward to its launch being a truly worldwide event.

Hellgate: London combines the depth of role-playing games and the action of first-person shooter titles, while offering infinite playability with dynamically generated levels, items, enemies and events. The player creates a heroic character, completes quests, and battles through innumerable hordes of demons to advance through experience levels and branching skill paths. A robust, flexible skill and spell system, highly customizable appearances, and a massive variety of randomly generated equipment allow players to create their own unique hero.

Hmmm sounds interesting. Sure it is ... check out http://www.hellgatelondon.com/

Don't forget to take a look at the screenshots.

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Happy New Year 2007

Wishing all of you a happy and prosperous new year. Well for us(workers) it's a year with least number of working days and maximum Sunday's and Saturday's ... so ppl enjoy the least working year in your life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007 a year with a difference.

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Adobe CS3 Icons

Honestly I don't like them. CS2 Icons are far better and yes eye candy. Now the creator might have many logics behind doing this, one of them might be make them look web 2.0 ish ... he he . Might be this is better. But I don't like them. Let's see what others say.

Some likes them ... Veerle Pieters and some hates them ... Jason Santa Maria

But when I compared the new icons with these babies I was confident enough to say the new ones are not at per the reputation of Adobe.
But anyway the representation of the apps with Periodic Table is a cool thinking anyway if you get the metaphor :)

Adobe Apollo

Once adobe acquired macromedia people were busy talking about which product will survive, what will fate of the discontinued producs and some talked about who will be the off spring of this merger. well it seems that we are about to get the answer.



Adobe Apollo



This technology has the power to redefine how web works ... web apps will no longer be dependent on Browser, they will have is own crome. seemlessly integrate with other desktop work flow, and even drag drop.



a whole new breed of apps and companies will evolve. And those who might question about the burden for Adobe about installing the apollo runtime in all machines ...well i would rather say adobe has a quite experience in that.



Apollo scheduled to release on Q2 2007 for developer. I am waiting in anticipation to get my hands dirty with it :P

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CSS is now a 10 years old boy !!! Happy birthday CSS

w3 first published CSS Level 1 specification on 17th December, 1996. And now its 10 years over. CSS have matured a lot and we are now on the verge of CSS 3. A lot has changed.

Although browserd still struggling to support proper CSS standards, but let's hope good days are very near when all major browsers support same standard.



Happy BirthDay CSS



Cascading Style Sheets ... Celebrating 10 Years with Style :)

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CSS Advisor Beta

Nice initiative by Adobe. http://www.adobe.com/go/cssadvisor

Some good advices from adobe guys . although no where exhaustive but good start.I really liked the Internet Explorer thread. Lot of good discussion and tips there.

A very useful piece of info goes here.



Background image flickers on hover. - http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails />

I wish I had this link few months before when this issue seems like impossible to solve for me.

But anyway somehow I fixed it , not in the method mentioned above though, but it would have saved a lot of my time than.

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Microsoft Website makeover

At last it came ..the new microsoft website is officially released. It's cute , its elegant and it's too DHTML :)



Things I liked :



1. Less clutter than previous design.

2. Excellent Navigation system design ..though there is definitely an one time learn.

3. Very nice placement of one liner news.



Things I didn't like much:

1. the navigation shifted to right side ...does we ideally have navigation on right side, and as a matter of fact I completely missed the nav bar at the first look ...I was wondering where it went.

2.Again a heavy image on home page looks cute ..very cute but not of much use.

3. the alignment at the top of the page can be improved i guess.



But overall its a huge change and the best this its completely CSS now :)

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Future is here!!!

From my small experience ...what I have derived is, our future is not going to be a complex use of technology. Where you can just wow your peers with the complex system you use.

But its going to be very simple. On top its just basic. Just meet your need, thats all.

The future is personalization and collaboration and sharing. It's already here and gaining maturity. We will be soon experiencing access and time anywhere ...doesn't matter, how when, why you are accessing content. You will just get it, just in the way you want.

More level of abstractions will come. If you take care of a particular layer of technology ...you gotta work there and only there.

Mobile and wireless technology is booming. And watch out the so called developing country market. It still untapped, waiting for exploitation.



Actually for technologists future is here , we just need to recognize the opportunity and leverage it.

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James Kim found deceased

http://news.com.com/2009-12-6141617.html?tag=rsspr.6141629



Very sad news indeed. 7 days of wait should not have ended this way :(

My deepest condolences to James Kim.

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Simulation or Real

Joshua, the “give a damn” is the key. You are spot on there. We’re not fans of simulation—we’re fans of real. And the only way to get real feedback is to launch.

I was going through this post and found this reply from JF(37 Signal)



http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/137-design-decisions-basecamp-help



The agenda is 37signal does not do usability testing with users as they think simulated environment is of no good. But this cannot be a universal statement I guess and not applicable everywhere too. As by nature 37signal products are web hosted and controlled by them, this looks quite practical and i am sure it works as 37signal is not just another company, they have really revolutionized web usability.



But I am pretty sure this doesn't hold true when it comes to product usability which is installed in remote client system, and you really cannot keep on releasing small usability change hot fixes. then there will be thousands of versions floating around. In such scenario, I believe usability testing still holds it's position. It's just the context where you are using.

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Back in business

Am back in business ...was very busy for quite a few days. Went home during puja, enjoyed a lot. Soon I will post some of the pictures. Going to Munnar in this Christmas, with my parents. Looking forword egarly for the day :)

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Magic Mirror

Adding secondary functions to mirrors isn't a new concept, but Craig Barr has literally made a dream -- or at least a fairy tale -- come true. The animatronics guru that produced the King Kong ride at Universal Studios Florida has channeled his creative powers to Themeaddicts, Inc., a startup company that makes it their business to turn wild fantasies into take-home products. The "Magic Message Mirror," aside from being a decoration of stunning novelty, doubles as a security monitor in which Basil, your on-screen tipster, gives you the low-down on what's happening on your premises. The mirror is connected to a series of triggers and cameras mounted around your domicile, and when those alarms are activated the system springs to life while Basil magically appears to alert you. This conversion piece is mighty sophisticated, and even Barr admits he's aiming this at "cribs like you see on TV," so we're not surprised that pricing is not disclosed. If you consider off on-the-wall security devices and home decor must-haves, then Basil should fit the bill quite well. You can catch the mirror and its inventor at the CEDIA Expo this September.

Very nice home decor binging fantacy to real world :)

Seminar at KASC

On saturday (14th July,06) I went to Kangu Ats & Science College for delivaring a seminar on MVC Architecture & PHP Framework.

It is sad such a interesting programming language such as PHP which has tremendous industry value is not tought in any university of India. We teach Java, .Net which is re-tought again upon joining industry where as if we could teach PHP we could have open new avenue for the professionals. The basic concept being the same and, PHP being relatively simpler than its parallal platform it would be possible to let the students understand actually understaing the underlaying the technology rather than investing considerable amount of time understanding mamoth programming laguages like Java.

But to my utter surprise the students of KASC responded very well. It was great to look at their enthusiasim and interaction with me and each other thats quite encouraging for me.

I was also moved by the participation of the ladies who usually remain silent ,participated very actively and brought up many new dimension to the discussion as a whole.

The workshop also seems to be very productive. I specially liked the way the students managed to setup eac and every system alloted without my intervention. I directed once and the students proactively took the responsibility and setup the other systems. I liked the thrive in them to learn a new prgramming methodology and put forword their opinion about it.

Really great experience and i would be more than happy to visit KASC again.

Protein-coated discs could enable 50TB capacities

We know that it shouldn't come as a shock anymore when researchersannounce new storage technologies that promise to hold tantalizinglylarge amounts of data, but we were still pretty stoked to learn that arecent breakthrough at Harvard Medical School may eventually lead toDVD-size discs whose capacities approach an eye-popping 50TB. Unliketraditional optical or magnetic solutions, the disc developed byProfessor V Renugopalakrishnan and his colleagues is coated withthousands of light-activated proteins called bacteriorhodopsin whichare found in the membrane of a particular salt marsh microbe -- andwhich temporarily convert to a series of intermediate molecules whenexposed to sunlight. That property allows the proteins to act asindividual bits in a binary system, but since they have a tendency toreturn to their grounded state after mere hours or days,Renugopalakrishnan and his team modified the requisite microbes' DNA toproduce proteins capable of maintaining that intermediary state forseveral years. Unfortunately we won't see this technology come tomarket anytime soon, and even when it does, 50TB capacities will stillbe a ways off, so it looks like we'll have to settle for thosedisappointing 200GB Blu-ray discs for the foreseeable future.

The only concern is how much scratch proof it will be and how many person other than media professional would need that amount of storage, maybe in the next few years. Let us just watch and see.

Million Dollar Bed

Well here is chance for a person to float, well really.

Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars has designed a magnetic bed that floats on air, basically suspended enatirely by magnet.

Well thats interesting, but hey what about the price. It's $1.5 million only. He he did I mention only. Now we need to look for a person who will be passionate enough to buy this and claim himself the only person who does not sleep on earth.

Mighty Microsoft proves to be sloppy here

Microsoft is also not always right. nad the pictures below clearly shows their lack of homework or testing whatever.
They just cannot ignore that there are many browsers other than IE.

Windows Vista Site in IE

Windows Vista Site in Firefox

Windows Vista Site in Flock

Windows Vista Site in Opera 9(Worst Among the lot)

Map mania

My House

My College

The last Samurai

I am SAD today ...really I am. We 35 guys came from West Bengal to Chennai... young, entusiastic, dream in eyes and now only I am left, staying still in Chennai. Everybody left ...everybody. Today one of my mansion mate(last bengali)is leaving and as he said I guess he is leaving permanently leaving his job :(.

I remember those early days now... lively, full of fun, training in SlashSupport was awesome. Excellent guys, and we have heard some trainers of Slash commented that this is the best batch in training ever in Slash. Yes really we were.

But the good things didnt last long. We seperated, somebody like me joined Sutherland. Some continued in SlashSupport.

Time passed and we started feeling homesick. Tamilnadu seems to be a foreign country me. The main problem here is lack of ability of adoptability of people. People are too conservative and self-community-centered. Language is one major problem apart from that food is also a problem.

I am still surviving and with this new job I will stay here and no plan to leave now. But I feel very alone, like lost in the woods.

Now again I recall what this BPO industry have to give to youth(most of my friends used to work in call centers) ... They are really ruining Indian youth, it's dismantalling a whole generation. And I hear that someday after 10-20 years our then President will utter "Opening too many BPO industry was a Historical Mistake" like our formar Chief Misinster Mr. Jyoti Basu commented, on the issue of abolishing English at school level syllabus in early 80's that eventually paralised a whole bengali generation and we are suffering now.

I feel lonely at the same time scared too .

Google Video free Today

Thats quite interesting. I saw few videos. infact this is the first day I visited Google Video. Wish it is free forever and I can watch all Charlie Chaplin movies ...