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12 Nov 2021 - Podcast #769 - (22:06)
It's Like NPR on the Web
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Adobe's annual MAX conference at the end of October was held virtually for the second year. The excitement isn't the same without tens of thousands of attendees who use Photoshop, InDesign, Audition, Illustrator, Premiere, and others among Adobe's twenty-some applications, but the advantage is that the conference is free for anyone to attend.
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Most sessions and labs from this year's program will be available on demand until next year's program. Viewers need to sign up for a free Adobe account, and then the 400 or so sessions are viewable on the Adobe Max website. One of the highlights for me was a fabulous session on animation that included a cat taking a bath on a chair in the background.
Additionally, one big advantage of having an online virtual conference is the ability to attend while lying in bed, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, watching the conference on television, and being attended to by a cat.
Adobe's big annual conference comes with equal parts of excitement and dread. Excitement because the company invariably announces several huge new applications or features and hundreds of smaller enhancements. Dread because the company invariably announces several huge new applications or features and hundreds of smaller enhancements. There are simply so much that's new every year that it's difficult to determine where to look. Add to that the sneak peeks at new features that are still in development and it's even harder to put together a coherent explanation of what has changed.
So this week I'll describe a few of the actual changes that are on Creative Cloud users' computers now. Twenty-six downloads were available to users on 26 October, most as new versions or enhancements of existing versions, a few new components that are included in Creative Cloud, and several new 3D development tools that can be added separately. Adobe acquired Substance 3D in the past year and has now added the Painter, Designer, Sampler, and Stager applications as add-ons to Creative Cloud with an additional fee of $40 per month.
Acrobat Pro, Acrobat Reader, Adobe Scan, Aero, After Effects, Animate, Audition, Bridge, Capture, Character Animator, Dimension, Dreamweaver, Fill & Sign, Fresco, Illustrator, InCopy, InDesign, Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Web, Media Encoder, Photoshop, Photoshop Camera, Photoshop Express, Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush, and XD.
As impressive as these applications are in the hands of someone who knows how to use them, they are highly specialized and unlikely to be needed by most Creative Cloud users. For that reason, I won't be discussing them here. Perhaps now is a good time to talk about prices, too. Most of the individual apps such as Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, InDesign, and After Effects cost $21 per month. A photography plan that includes Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop on desktop and IPad, and 20GB of cloud storage costs $10 per month. The full Creative Cloud package, which includes all applications except the 3D components, is $53 per month. Paid annually, it's $600 ($599.88). Adobe Stock can be added for $30 per month and includes the ability to download up to 10 images per month without additional charge.
The photography plan at $10 per month is a great value, yet I know people who complain about it being a rip-off. Anyone who's old enough to remember buying film and paying for processing should think back to those days. Anyone who was even slightly serious about photography spent far more than $10 per month for those items and still had to accept prints that the drug store or photo store provided. Unless we worked with professional labs or had our own darkrooms, we couldn't even crop photos, much less modify color, brightness, contrast and any of the other things we can do on computers.
The full Creative Cloud package is also a good deal for anyone who needs more than two of the applications. So let's take a quick look at just a few of the features that are new in Creative Cloud 2022.
Photoshop introduced neural filters last year. The filters that were released then have been updated and improved and some new filters have been added. This is clearly a work in progress and not all of the new features work well, even with carefully selected photos. I tested an image of a man without a smile (left) and used a neural filter to add a smile (middle) and to make him sad (right). I was satisfied with the result.
These changes would be unacceptable for a personal portrait, because the teeth are probably nothing like the subject’s real teeth, but it would work for advertising or illustration photo that needed a man with a smile. There is a bit of artifacting above the subject's right ear in the third picture, but overall the results are remarkable.
One that didn't work well was an attempt to change the season from summer to fall. The filter missed most of the foliage and instead modified signs and buildings. Adobe says that these features depend on feedback from users and that the filters should be considered to be in beta testing. Beta filters might work really well on certain types of images, and not as well on others, but Adobe notes that they will improve with input from users.
The object selection tool has been improved. It's now better able to detect objects within an image. Selection uses Adobe's Sensei artificial intelligence machine learning models. Better doesn't mean perfect. When selections work as intended, the user will save a lot of time. When selections don't work as expected, they usually are close enough that the selection needs less manual work than before. And for those situations in which it doesn't work at all, the traditional manual methods are still available.
Lightroom and Lightroom Classic both have better selection tools that open the door to more realistic local modifications. Advanced masking tools can make selections based on color and luminance to allow editing of specific areas so that the resulting image more closely matches what your eye saw when you created the photograph.
Adobe released seven premium preset packs in the mid-year update and the October release adds eight more categories: Black & White, Food, Landscape, Urban Architecture, Lifestyle, Retro, Travel II, and Cinematic II. Presets give photographers the ability to make overall changes to images so that they'll have more time to spend with individual smaller tweaks an enhancements.
I used a photo of a pizza from 600 Downtown in Bellefontaine and applied one of the specialized food filters. The result (right) is a subtle change that places emphasis on the pizza.
Illustrator and Photoshop will both have new online capabilities. Both the desktop and IPad versions enable users to access the applications on various devices without having to install the app. Both will have web interfaces with limited editing capabilities. This is currently a beta program. Although it's a public beta, users still need to sign up on Adobe's website.
Illustrator supports share for commenting so users can show a document to others for quick feedback. Illustrator generates a web link that can be sent to others. Because the review process is conducted entirely on the web, those the link is shared with don't need to have Illustrator installed.
Private betas hint at features to come. Creative Cloud Spaces are intended to improve collaboration across teams by putting everything team members need in one place. This includes project files, libraries, and external links so all team members have access to project resources from start to finish. Spaces will be accessible in desktop and mobile apps via Creative Cloud Web, and available in Photoshop, Illustrator, Fresco, and XD. Creative Cloud Canvases will allow teams to lay out, visualize, and review creative work in real time using a web browser. Canvases can hold shapes, text, images, stickers, and links to documents from Creative Cloud apps. Users can make quick edits to the original asset online or in the appropriate app on their computers.
Deeper looks at the new applications and improvements to existing apps will follow as I have time to analyze them.
Sometimes, even if you do everything exactly right, you can still be victimized by criminals. A recent edition of Mozilla's Internet Culture blog described a seemingly unlikely series of events.
The victim wasn't named, so I'll call her "Lucy". That might be her real name, but it's probably not because, as I said, the blog didn't name her.
Lucy received a text from her bank one morning that said her credit card account had what appeared to be a fraudulent charge. Scammers use phony notices like this to trick people into revealing their login credentials, but a call to the bank revealed that her credit card had indeed been used for a fraudulent purchase.
Then she received an email order confirmation for an electronic device she hadn't purchased. It was to be shipped to an address that turned out to be a local hotel. The order had been cancelled by the bank, Lucy's bank issued a new credit card, and she changed her login credentials, but she wondered if someone had managed to install key-logger software on her computer.
The thief had tried to ship the fraudulent order using FedEx, with the fee being billed to Lucy. FedEx wanted its money even though the bank had flagged the transaction as a fraud. It took several phone calls, but Lucy eventually convinced FedEx to stop harassing her.
The problem began earlier when Lucy clicked a link on Instagram and bought an item as a gift for her husband. The item arrived and the family enjoyed the personalized gift.
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Three months after placing the ill-fated order, Lucy received a message from the merchant. The hosting company the merchant used had misconfigured the server, and that gave crooks access to data in real time. Why did the hosting company make such an error? Why did it take the merchant three months to announce the problem? Why did FedEx continue to demand payment despite knowing the charge was fraudulent?
From beginning to end, Lucy had done nothing wrong. The charges were credited by the bank. FedEx let the matter drop. But Lucy had spent a considerable amount of time dealing with a problem that she wasn't responsible for.
This is important: As frustrating as this was, it was far less severe than what could have happened. There was just a single fraudulent charge (plus the FedEx mess, of course). Lucy's identity hadn't been stolen. Privacy Bee says harm from identity theft can take years to resolve and be a drag on a victim's credit score. "In most cases, it's possible to get your credit back on track. But, you better be willing to put in serious effort to do so if you fall victim to identity theft."
If you don't have identity theft insurance, your out-of-pocket costs could be substantial. Privacy Bee quotes a 2021 report by Javelin Strategy & Research that says the average loss for a victim of identity theft is $1100.
So be sure to review your credit card statement every month. The bank caught Lucy's problem, and banks are getting much better at spotting fraud, but scam charges can go unnoticed if they're small. A crook who adds a $9 monthly fee to credit card accounts of 10,000 victims will siphon off a little more than a million dollars in one year. Do you look at every charge, no matter how small?
The Mozilla blog says "If you get snagged in a data breach, tie up any loose threads quickly to protect yourself, and stay on top of monitoring your accounts for suspicious activity." If you'd like to read the full account, it's on the Mozilla website.
Although most computer keyboards have lights that show the status of Num Lock, Caps Lock, and Scroll Lock, having a notification on the Task bar can be helpful. A free utility displays this information and more.
Some of the features of TrayStatus seem more than a little odd. For example, it's possible to double-click a status option to toggle the setting's state. Is it really easier to open the Notification area, locate the Caps Lock status indicator, and double-click it to turn Caps Lock on or off? Most people would accomplish this task by simply pressing the Caps Lock key on the keyboard, but that doesn't work for me.
That's because I detest ALL CAPS typing and have disabled the Caps Lock key with a Registry edit. On those extremely rare situations in which I need to type something in ALL CAPS, I have to hold down the Shift key while typing. That's OK for a word or two, but less suitable if extended sections of text need to be in capital letters.
This is not a common situation. In fact, I can think of only one use case. Long ago, I occasionally needed to modify text in a scripting application that depended on code being written in capital letters. In a case like that, being able to open the Notification area and double-click a Caps Lock icon would be much easier than having to hold a pinkie finger on one of the Shift keys while typing.
OK, so that's probably not a use case you'll ever need and it's completely unimportant if you've not disabled the Caps Lock key. But maybe you'd like a Notification area icon that shows how much disk activity is occurring. Again, most computers have a light that indicates when data is being written to or read from a disk, but the light doesn't tell us how much activity is happening and it doesn't indicate which disk has activity.
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My primary computer has several disk drives, the disk activity indicator in on the notebook, not on any of the monitors or the keyboard. Just seeing whether there's disk activity requires turning aside to look at the notebook and even then I don't really know what's going on. TrayStatus can show me that disks C and D both have concurrent read and write activity. When I hover the mouse cursor over the icon for drive D, I see that 2.1MB of data is being written to the drive each second and 2.6MB of data is being read each second.
CPU and memory usage can also be displayed, but only by the pro version that costs $10. Not per year, just $10. A $15 version allows installation on all computers you own. Selecting an item to display on the (1) settings screen adds a status icon in (2) the Notification area. (In the screen shot, I have placed a solid yellow line under all of the disk drive icons.)
Trigger is another feature that's available only in the pro version. Perhaps you want to ensure that Num Lock is activated whenever you launch a spreadsheet application. This is important on any computer that doesn't have dedicated arrow keys because many people turn off Num Lock in this case in favor of having access to cursor keys. The triggers can adjust Num Lock, Caps Lock, and Scroll lock whenever a specific application has focus. So when you're working with Excel, Num Lock will be on, but Num Lock will be disabled if you switch from Excel to Word, even though Excel is still running.
Or maybe you want both Caps Lock and Num Lock to be active when you're working with Excel and both to be off when you're working with Word. A $10 or $15 one-time payment seems like a reasonable cost for this functionality. To see more about TrayStatus, visit the Binary Fortress website.
Microsoft started rolling out a new version of its Store app four days before Halloween. Initially the new version goes to Windows Insiders on Windows 10, but it should be on all users computers "soon".
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The store has been around since Windows 8, but has never been very exciting. The new store offers access to more applications and makes it possible for users to pay for apps with payment methods other than Microsoft's. So Microsoft no longer takes part of the payment if users choose another option.
Instead of limiting apps to those only Microsoft's frameworks, the new store supports apps built using frameworks such as Win32, Java, and .NET. It also supports more traditional installer formats such as Microsoft installer (MSI) files and executable (EXE) installers. The store will eventually host Android applications that will run on Windows 11 using an Intel Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) to x86 emulator. Oddly, though, those apps will be delivered using a hosted version of Amazon's App Store.
This may also affect how software is delivered to corporate users. Microsoft Stores for business and education will be shut down in early 2023. Users will be migrated to a new Windows Package Manager (this may sound familiar to Linux users) and the winget command (this will sound even more familiar to Linux users).
Research by KnowBe4 shows that social engineering attacks continue to be one of the top ways malicious hackers breach organizations and cause damage. This shouldn't be a surprise, but underlying facts are interesting.
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KnowBe4 CEO Stu Sjouwerman says businesses are seeing "a continued increase in phishing, including more use of common HR types of communications and less reliance on obvious social media phishing campaigns." The report lists to top ten email categories used by crooks:
Top phishing email subjects were also broken out. In the United States, the top five subjects were Vacation Policy Update, Password Check Required Immediately, Important: Dress Code Changes, Acknowledge Your Appraisal, and Remote Working Satisfaction Survey. The most common subjects in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa were Your Document is Complete - Save Copy, Stefani has endorsed you!, You have requested a reset to your LinkedIn password, Windows 10 Upgrade Error, and Internet Capacity Warning. Capitalization and spelling are shown as they were in actual subject lines.
Scammers want your data, your credentials, and your money. It doesn't matter whether you run a business or a household. Caution is essential.
In 2001, one of the major side events at PC Expo was Infotrends Imagescape 2001. If memory serves, it was held at the Manhattan Center on West 34th Street. The excitement that year was about digital cameras that would be good enough and priced low enough for consumers. Conventional wisdom held that good enough would be two megapixel images and the acceptable price would be around $1000. My report from back then:
I've been a fan of digital photography for the past few years — since about the time affordable digital cameras reached what a lot of us thought would be the 2 megapixel plateau. Even the manufacturers were suggesting that consumer cameras wouldn't exceed 2 Mpxls for several years.
About that time, 3 Mpxl cameras became available and now the upper end of the "prosumer" model lines is increasingly occupied by 5 and 6 Mpxl cameras. Those in the industry say that we'll have basic 2 Mpxl cameras for less than $100 before 2005. Because a 2 Mpxl image will make a photo-quality 4x6 print and an acceptable 8x10 print, look for film to do what 8mm movie film did when video cameras took over.
Some pros will continue to use film for the foreseeable future, but many will switch to digital. Some already have. For personal use, digital cameras have a lot of advantages.
Serious amateur photographers will find a camera like the Olympus E10 enough to pull them away from their 35mm cameras. The E10 is a 4 Mpxl camera and the already released E20 is a 5 Mpxl camera. These cameras capture enough information to make a photo-realisitic 8x10 print — even an acceptable 11x14 or 16x20.
The E10 started out at $2000, but it's widely available now for $1600 to $1700 and, with the E20N now shipping, the price of the E10 might drop a bit more. This isn't the kind of camera you'll buy on a whim. But if you're looking for near-professional quality features at a consumer price, this is one model you should certainly consider.
The E10 was a great choice by 2001 standards. Times have changed.