Vootie's blog

Compuserve may be a distant memory to most of us but we can thank it for popularizing the GIF file format that lives on in the form of web animations, having outlived the usage of both Java and Flash. While slick GIF cinemagraphs can still catch our attention, you can't beat a clunky, badly looped animation that uses appropriated content in a comical setting. The Digiday site, which covers digital media, marketing and advertising, recently posted an amusing GIF-infested collection of these entitled 20 Surefire Ways to Anger Creatives. Ranging from such classics as 1. Make Them Work on Banners through 20. Change the Office Dress Policy to “Business Casual,” the image above is from 13. Put Them On the Phone with a Client.

No, that's not a touch-based version of Photoshop. Instead, this is a still from a clip (shown below) in which Senior Photoshop Product Manager Zorana Gee is showing off new 3D capabilities in what will be, as of June, Photoshop CC, now that the Extended version is gone. But be still, my beating heart! Is that not Photoshop CS7 I see in the application title bar? Which would seem to indicate that scrapping the CS7 moniker and going with CC was a fairly recent decision. While raising another question — what will future versions of the CC applications be called?

Last month I asked what now seems like a prophetic question: Why Don't We All Love Adobe? My take was that Adobe had stopped listening to the concerns of its long-time customers. So when it recently announced that our future would be Creative Cloud-only, I wasn't surprised that more than a few customers responded with a blunt, "No thanks." Typical are the comments on NAPP president Scott Kelby's blog — hell hath no fury like a Photoshop user scorned. Then there's this thread in the Adobe forums and in the comments to John Nack's blog here and here. And of course the Change.org petition asking Adobe to continue providing a perpetually licensed alternative.

It's an old meme but as Homer Simpson once said, "It works in so many ways." As you might imagine, in the clip below Hitler isn't too happy when he finds out that in fact there will be no CS7.

You can poke it with a stick all you want but it's official — Creative Suite is out and Creative Cloud is in. Way in. Actually, make that all in. To the point where CS6 is now the final Suite and has been put on life support, with sales ending in the indeterminate future. Adobe made official yesterday what many of us had anticipated for some time, namely that its Creative Cloud service would become the focal point of its offering of tools and services to the creative and development community.

It was just a few years ago that scientists managed to user lasers to etch the Bible on the head of a pin. While that was impressive enough, the latest feat of miniaturization comes to us from good old IBM. It would seem that its scientists have created a 90-second animation composed of 242 frames, each of which depicts a stylized figure of a boy. Sounds dull so far. But the twist is that the figure is made up of individual carbon atoms. Now that's small.

THE FILM before THE FILM was apparently the result of a research project at the BTK (Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule) that took a look at film credits from the silent era through to the digital age. If you're a type aficionado, there's lots here to like. You can view it below.

So where do you go when you're in the mood to browse the design work of others, whether for inspiration or just out of idle curiosity? Behance would probably be your first place to start, perhaps followed by Dribble. After that you'd have your pick of second-tier sites, such as Designspiration, Fubitz and Minimalissimo. But what if you could search all these sites at once from a single point? That's the premise behind the Niice.co site, which aggregates images from all these, with more on the way. It's still in beta and doesn't always return the results you'd expect, as well as sometimes slowing to a crawl, but it would seem to be a move in the right direction.

Adobe is giving away 1,000 of these rather nice posters. Only downside is that it will cost you a Facebook Like and sharing your friends list.

Hyper-lapse videos — made by combining time-lapse photography with camera movements — have been popular for a while now. But digital experience builder Teehan+Lax has now released a free tool that makes it possible to create these using shots from Google Street View. Appropriately dubbed Google Street View Hyperlapse, it can be used as-is or the open source code can be tweaked to manipulate such things as frame rate, image quality and camera movement. The clip below shows what it's capable of.