As the mainstay for the majority of creatives the question for most is, what new features have Adobe introduced to entice me to upgrade?

Here is a brief summary of the major ones:

• The user interface: has had a major overhaul, including making it fully customisable and streamlining the panels
• Crop tool: with it’s first major revision in several years it now features non-destructive editing and a revised method of working similar to Lightroom
• Blur gallery filters: featuring the new Field, Iris and Tilt Shift modes
• Adaptive Wide Angle filter: a brand new tool, similar to Lens Correction but improving on it significantly
• Adobe Camera Raw 7.0: with improvements to the many of the core controls and the introduction of editing features
• Content Aware Move tool: no more cloning elements from a photo and back filling, just open a single layer file and move whatever element you want and Photoshop will do the rest
• Patch tool: now includes Content Aware functionality
• Type tools: now has paragraph and character styles, giving a similar level of control available in DTP packages like InDesign
• Vector Shape tools: with huge improvements in creating and editing
• Video: it now has many of the editing features you’d expect from packages like Final Cut Express and Premiere

I’ll have more details on these feature in upcoming posts – including videos showing the new features in action.  

You can download the beta from here…

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/photoshopcs6/

It’s been a difficult birth for this particular handheld, on paper it appears to have everything you could want with cameras, touch-pads, joysticks, wi-fi, 3G, an accelerometer and a promise from the Sony chief executive Kazuo Hirai, “…the whole world is really in play.” Seems I’ve heard that before!

But that’s where the good news ends – the original specs have been downgraded, you can’t use your existing PSP games on it, current price speculation puts the unit at £200+ and its main competitor the Nintendo 3DS has already dropped it’s price and will soon have Cloud wi-fi access.

The other challenge the PS Vita faces is a market which has drastically changed since the original PSP release in late 2004. Then it’s only competitor was the Nintendo GameBoy, but now you have Apple iOS, Android and Blackberry based handsets with vast catalogues of apps and games most which are far cheaper than the standard games available for the 3DS or PS Vita.

To its credit Sony identified this issue and launched a possible saviour with the promise of its own casual gaming revolution, enter ‘PlayStation Suite’, a set of tools similar to Xcode for iPhone development. How attractive this will be to developers is the big question – but with no details available on revenue structures, hosting costs on PSN servers, no install base and no handsets a hitting the market for over six months the odds are stacked against it.

Realistically I can’t see PS Vita being a hit, which is a huge shame because it’s an absolutely great piece of kit and does exactly what it’s supposed to – had they released this three of four years ago it might have been a different story. The market has moved on but PSP/Vita in real terms hasn’t, there’s been product evolution but what was needed was a revolution!

Monetising Mobile
Date: May 25th
Location: BAFTA, London

For those of you not familiar with the event to quickly sum it up, leading lights from the mobile industry give an overview on what their company is doing and where they see the industry heading followed by an open forum with questions being taken from the audience.

The event focused on three key areas:

1. Near Field Communications (NFC) or in layman’s terms contact-less payment using mobile phones
2.  In-app payment opportunities
3. Pay by mobile and mobile billing

Here is a summary of each area:

Near Field Communications (NFC)

Two speakers on this area, the first being Mary Carol Harris (VP of Innovation & New Product – Visa Europe Mobile). She gave an overview on what research Visa was doing into this area, the partners they were working with and initiatives they were planning to launch – an example being the 2012 Olympics. She also highlighted that Visa were receptive any new ideas or opportunities in this area. Overall a very impressive presentation and worth attending the event for this alone.

Next to present was James Davlouros (VP of Business Discovery – Mastercard). Unfortunately this was a re-hash of standard m-commerce business models and marketing initiatives – essentially nothing new was presented and no ideas on how NFC could be used. (At one point Mary even had to provide him with statistics to help with his presentation.)

NFC is an area that could be extremely lucrative and provide new revenue channels for developers but this will be dependent on finding a company that can help you find a way to monetize your new product. Based purely on the presentations from this event Visa is the company to work with – in terms of research, current business models, future initiatives and receptiveness to ideas they are way ahead of the competition.

In-app payment opportunities

This was also supposed to be one of the stars of the event with a presentation by Amanda Rosenberg (Associate Business Development Manager for Mobile – Google EMEA). Unfortunately Amanda was unable to make it – if I do manage to catch this talk at another event I’ll add a posting to the blog.

Mobile billing vs. pay-by-mobile

The majority of the remaining presentations focused on these areas. Overall the mobile billing presenters talked about the growing trend in developing territories of charging directly to the customer’s bill. The business model is simple, effective and easily implemented.

Next came the mobile transaction companies, they were the weakest part of the event with their presentations more like sales pitches. Interestingly they unintentionally exposed problems in their business models and tried to avoid the subject of app stores completely, referring to them as a temporary trend. However in the open forum a member of the audience pointed out that apps and app stores are than more a temporary trend and in real terms mobile transactions is the area most likely to disappear from the market because of the availability of alternative business models. The panel had no real argument to counter this point.

Summary

The event overall was an interesting one and provided some valuable insights into NFC and it’s future potential. It also had the unintentional effect of showing the problems with mobile transactions as they currently stand and the importance of evaluating alternative business models in this sector.

However there were two issues:-

1. Battery life which in this case I think is down to over use of my laptop (but I have Applecare so not worried about this).
2. Wi-fi connection issues, beginning with random disconnections and eventually being unable to connect at all – a major problem and one that seems to have happened to a lot of other people.

Like the others suffering from this issue I tired all the standard solutions:

• Switching the Airport card on and off
• Re-setting the Airport card
• Wiping and re-entered all the settings (including everything relevant in the preferences)
• Re-setting the modem (which temporarily seemed to work)

Unfortunately none of this provided a permanent solution and resulted in a trip to the Solihull Apple Store, who as always were able to provide a solution and explain why it happened.

The cause of this issue is a machine with OSX Lion installed tries to get as much bandwidth as possible when connecting to a wireless modem. It doesn’t sound like this should cause a problem, however the firmware on many modems will begin to read this as some form of attempted intrusion or attack which results in your machine being disconnected from the wi-fi network.

The solution is simple – you need to log directly into your modem and manual allocate a user slot to your machine. This will permanently remove this slot from general use, but in real terms this shouldn’t have any detrimental effect as there should be loads of available slots left.

I used this method to solve the issue and I’ve been to connect without any issues for the last week.

In my case I’m fortunate enough to have a spare machine I could install it on – just in case the promised perfection from Apple was overstated. It’s turned out not to be the case!

For those contemplating the upgrade allow about two and half hours for the download – obviously this may vary on the speed of your connection. Another 45 minutes to install the new operating system and then you’re up and running.

All the data from the previous system transferred successfully and I was immediately able to start working. A couple of minor updates were required but on the whole the process was completely painless.

There are immediate differences in a number of interfaces and Spaces has radically changed – with launch programs supposedly allocated there own desktop. This so far has not worked as smoothly as I liked but it’s a minor quibble.

The biggest major change is the touchpad and gesture detection – lots has been written about this (so no point re-stating the obvious), my experience is after getting used to it I’ve found it’s definitely had a positive impact on the speed at which I work.

Another new feature is the OS remembering what programs and documents were open when you closed down and immediately re-opening them next you start the machine. This I have so far found to be a bit of an oddity and not the aid to my workflow that I expected – it does however encourage you to develop a tidy method of working, closing down items and programs you no longer need.

The final note in this brief overview is after about a week I noticed odd management glitches – these result in the battery never being completely charged and major problems with the Airport/Wifi. So my only recommendation is if you going to install Lion on your laptop and wireless is a must, it might be worth waiting for first or second update until you install it on your machine.

Apart from that overall OSX Lion has been excellent and I’ll continue to update you on my progress with it.

In any recession the most common area to suffer as organizations look to economize are the creative and arts related sectors. So any event giving an overview of funding opportunities is particularly welcome, particularly when it comes from the traditionally opposing aspects of arts and technology:
Arts Council England (ACE)
Represented by Richard Russell (Director, Strategic Partnerships) who talked about ‘Digital and the arts and cultural sector’.
NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts)
Represented by Hasan Bakhshi (Director, Creative Industries for Policy and Research) who talked about ‘The Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture’.

The ACE briefing focused on the type of projects they’re looking to fund and highlighted useful resources for planning applications. The first of these being the ’Little Pink book’ giving an outline of their 10-year plan for arts sector funding.

http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication_archive/strategic-framework-arts/

They also plan to launch a digital opportunities programme website to increase awareness of projects and opportunities – as soon as there is more information about this I’ll post it on the blog.

Another of the resources highlighted was the BBC Academy – providing media training to the industry at large. In addition to the training events being held, videos are available of the sessions
Website: http://www.bbctraining.com/

The main focus of the briefing was on their ‘Digital R&D fund’ and their commitment to making arts organizations more focused on creating imaginative digital content and attracting audiences – this fund is solely intended to help in these endeavors.

Taking public funded organizations from their disconnected bricks and mortar existence and developing online hubs of creativity with digital content for the whole community.

Also highlighted was the experience of other organizations and what could be learned:

• Looking for other partners, particularly seeking investment from technical and creative media/industries
• Creating a diverse audience experience
ACE are also looking to fund artists using technology, not just organizations, they see this is an area where they want to see real growth.

Over the next four years there will be £20 million of funding – designed to increase the capacity for building skills, content development and R&D.

For more information on all their activities go to http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/.

NESTA’s approach focuses on six broad themes:

1. User-generated content and social media
2. Distribution
3. Education and learning
4. Mobile, location and games
5. Data and archives
6. Resources

Through its R&D fund, the knowledge and learning gained in these areas can help bring additional value to the Arts. The approach to developing projects is slightly different to ACE and I’d advise reviewing the documentation available on the NESTA website (http://www.nesta.org.uk/).

If you are interested the next deadlines for applications are fast approaching:

7th June – 2nd September: Test digital proposals
16th September: Informed of outcome
24th – 25th September: Two-day collaborative workshop
15th October: Start projects