The French Photographer Weblog

It’s coming!
I’m about to split this blog into 2 parts. I want to be able to write about my ideas and opinions and I understand that this is different from the articles I write about photography.
So, part of my currently in progress web site redesign, I will split this blog in 2 different sections.
My personal posts will remain here and everything related to photography will go to the upcoming blog on Mindworks Creation Web site. This will be effective as soon as the redesign of the web site is completed.
Stay tuned.

Well, let’s keep everything relative. It’s an historic time for the computer and mobile communication industry.

Google is holding its big Google I/o conference in San Francisco this week. Apple will have the WWDC in 2 weeks and from both events we can expect big announcements like the one we saw today.

What makes it an historic and interesting time is that the market of mobile computing is still totally open with some serious competitors fighting for their share of the market. I can see at least 5 serious competitors right now:

- Apple certainly got a head start with the iPhone and the iPad. They have already sold a millions of devices (can’t wait for their announcement of the 100 millions iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad).
It looks like they cannot produce enough iPad to keep some descent inventory in their own stores (75% of the Apple Stores were out of stock as of today).
iPhoneOS 4 should be available in a few weeks with more than 200,000 apps. Those are very solid numbers. The future sounds pretty bright for Apple with maybe a few clouds in that blue sky – the long term reaction of the end users to Apple addiction to controlling everything and anything and their overall attitude toward developers and opening the platform to contents not deemed acceptable.

- Google is the strongest contestant to Apple supremacy and come to the fight with some serious weapons. Their OS is slowly catching up, their browser is solid and they recently found their line of communication by pretending to be the white knight and our ultimate line of defense against Apple dictatorial attitude. By their book Apple platform is closed and managed by control freaks, they are our last hope of freedom.
The question is: how long is this going to last? For how long are they going to give away all that technology for free to cell phones manufacturers. If you look at some past experiences, Google always use the same strategy to enter a market – provide a service comparable to what is already existing but for free. Attract a large base of users and than align the price of their service with the competitors. If you want a confirmation of that look at Google Checkout. After a couple of years it is no longer free but charge the same transaction fees as Paypal.
Google is successful because they offer a FREE solution to cell phone manufacturers who want to propose inexpensive alternatives to Apple’s iPhone with a product that look similar.
Apple has never entered the market of discounted products. They have always favored the top end of the market (cellphones or computers) hence Google will most likely win the battle of the market share. But how long will they accept to not make money on this market?

- HP/Palm certainly the best thing that could have happened for both companies. Palm is finally saved (and about to dissolve into its new owner corporate maze) and HP acquires a much needed knowledge, patent and mobile OS. This move will certainly lead to an interesting development. Historically among all the computers manufacturers Apple has been the only one to do both the software and the hardware. Now in the mobile computer market HP will be the second company to control both aspects of the user experience. This move makes them independent from a software manufacturer (like Google or Microsoft) and place them on a course similar to Apple strategy. We will see if this was the right move.

- Microsoft: even if the company is way behind on this market they just cannot be ignored. Windows Mobile 6 was a disaster of a magnitude similar to Vista. Version 6.5 was not really better. Than for some strange reason the company announced that Window Mobile would arrive in about a year and would not be compatible with the devices running the current version. That was the best recipe to make sure that every cell phone manufacturer and end user (at least the one who pay attention to what they buy and not simply listen to a sales rep) walk away from their solution. So right now Microsoft is dead on the water in the battle and all they have to rely on is the hope that Windows Mobile 7 will be their salvation. Still, once it gets available it will require all the power of Microsoft’s marketing machine to reenter the market. At this time they will have to convince cellphone manufacturers that their OS is better than Google’s even if it has very little applications and it’s not free. Talking of an uphill battle!

- RIM: Is something different in my opinion. They are very strong in the corporate world but still seriously under attack. They were there before everybody else with their own OS (sort of), their own devices with their specific design, and even their own architecture to support the devices, but… they totally missed the evolution of the market they were sitting on. It’s only after they realized that Apple was coming up with a device and an OS so strong that it was a threat for them that they finally decided to react. And it was not a very strong reaction. Basically imitating the interface that was created by somebody else but falling short on a lot of aspects. Since everybody watches them losing market share and doing very little to stop it. They come last in the list of competitors because they are simply going down. It is another typical case of a market leader sitting on its position, not bringing any innovation and slowly losing its advantage. Wonder why? Try doing the same thing on an iPhone (or an Android phone) and on a good old blackberry and you will quickly understand that one look attractive and modern and the other is some sort of dinosaur of the mobile computing.

Now I can hear some comments and I would like to address those.
Why is not Nokia on that list? Well because they have nothing so far that can compete with Apple or Google. Nokia has been making cellphones for decade but they see those as phones maybe with a few added features. Apple like I explained some months ago did not created a phone, they created an eco system that includes prominently an OS but also an App store and the tools to support that phone. Google jumped in the same train relatively quickly and now HP is trying to catch up. Microsoft had an OS but it was so bad that they more or less had to abandon it and start again from scratch. RIM had a complete system but just forgot to update it and innovate. In the meantime Nokia is still making… cellphones with a few added functionalities.
And what about Motorola. Ah good old Motorola, remind me when was the last time this company did something right. They used to make microprocessors, they drove themselves out of that business years ago, they used to make cellphones, they still do except that they position themselves in the less profitable segment of this market. They had some success with the razor but them too missed the evolution toward the smartphones pretty much for the same reasons. Lack of a descent (you can say Touch based) operating system and lack of the ecosystem to support it. During the last quarter Apple sold more phones than Motorola. Motorola currently has a catalogue of 117 devices, Apple has exactly 5 references. Call that a victory of quality over quantity!

Two days from now a few hundred thousands iPad will reach their end users but the industry has already been thinking about what innovation the device could bring to the partially dying publishing industry.

I complied 3 examples, in the form of videos, to demonstrate what could be the shape of our magazines of the future.
Will the iPad (or the tablets in general) save the magazines? You can give your opinion in the comments, anyway I found those 3 examples quite interesting.

The first video was created by Adobe and Wired Magazine. It certainly makes a lot of sense for Adobe, being the #1 provider of publishing softwares, to wonder how the needs of their clients will evolve. This is part of their vision (with a touch of self satisfaction too).

The second one is a concept for a new magazine created specifically to be viewed on a computer. Quite an innovative approach. I found that the creators have an interesting way to mix video, still photography and text.

VIV Mag Interactive Feature Spread – iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

The last one is a demo of what could be the cover of your next travel magazine and I have to admit that I really like the way it looks. Because it is close enough to what we are used to, it still looks familiar but at the same time it really goes one step further and clearly provide more than the paper magazine experience.

iPad Sunset Mag Cover Spec from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Are we going to buy more magazines thanks to those new way of telling stories? Wait and you will know.

February 18th 2010 marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Photoshop. This is probably the piece of software most used by photographers over the last 20 years so I wanted to mark the event by reminding you of the story of this marvel of photo editing.
Here we go for the first 20 years of the story of Photoshop.

1987 – The story actually starts with version 0.67. Thomas Knoll wrote this version on a Mac Plus at home as a side project (he was than working on his doctorate). in 1988 about 200 copies of version 0.87 of Photoshop are distributed with scanners distributed by a company named Barneyscan. The company will later be bought by Pixelcraft, a subsidiary of Xerox, in 1993.
They still deserve the credit to have been the first to believe in the relevance of Photoshop.
In April of 1989, Adobe will be presented with a more finalized version and a distribution agreement will be signed between the Knoll brothers and Russel Brown and John Warnock of Adobe.

February 1990 – this agreement leads to the introduction of Photoshop 1.0. The major features are curves and levels (already), color corrections, image optimization and the clone tool.

June 1991 – Photoshop 2.0 adds support for CMYK, paths, rasterization of ESP files and a pen tool.

February 1993 – Version 2.5 adds palettes, support for 16 bits files and in April Adobe releases the first Windows version (2.5). For 3 years Photoshop has been a software for Mac only.
1993 – Photoshop 3.0 is released in September for Mac and November for Windows. Major new features – the layers.

1994 – a year later, in November version 4.0 brings non-destructive photo editing thanks to adjustments layers and automation with the actions.
So as you can see non destructive photo editing is not exactly a new concept.

May 1998 – Version 5.0 adds the editable text fields, the lasso tool, the history palette (multiple undos) and Photoshop now supports ICC profiles.
At this point Adobe will starts the cycle of one new version about every 18 months.

July 1999 – Photoshop 5.5 includes Image Ready 2.0 and the ’save for web’ command.

October 2000 – An updated user interface is introduced with Photoshop 6.0. It brings vector shapes, layer styles, blending options and the liquify filter.

April 2002 – 18 months later, version 7.0 introduces the well appreciated healing brush and a few other refinements (file browser, new painting engine).

2003 – We have to wait another 18 months but in February Adobe becomes the first software manufacturer to support the RAW photo format. Version 7.0.1 is a small increment but a big step in digital photography.
In October this feature becomes part of Photoshop CS improvements with the real time histogram, new slice tool, hierarchical layer groups and match color command (among many other improvements).

April 2005 – With Creative Suite version 2 (CS2) Photoshop comes with Bridge 1.0 and a lot of new tools and features – spot healing brush (I’m still not convinced of the relevance of this one), red eyes tool, lens correction smart guides, support for HDR, vanishing point and the very valuable smart objects.

April 2007 – Photoshop CS3 for Mac now support natively Intel processorsit also includes smart filters, automatic layer alignment and blending, refine edges tool.

October 2008 – Version CS4 bring the product to a new level of sophistication with advanced tools like content aware scaling (if you have never seen that feature look at the examples video on Adobe web site). The interface of the Mac and windows version are now identical. It’s a very mature product.

Soon – April 2010 – CS5 is coming soon and we already know that one of the major improvement will be a 64 bit entirely rewritten version for Mac. Adobe finally converted Photoshop to Cocoa (the native Mac toolbox) after being criticized for taking so long to make the switch. This should bring a new level of performance and stability.
Although I’m honestly surprised that a software as sophisticated and rich as Photoshop suffers from relatively very little bugs. It’s well known that there is no bug free software development, so it’s pretty amazing that a product which is now 20 years old and has evolved through so many stages turn out to be so remarkably stable.

To finish with a touch of nostalgia, this is the icon of version 0.67 back from 1988.

and the about box.

Oh BTW, Thomas Knoll cannot be reached anymore at this number.

If you read my previous article on this topic and everything I wrote about RAW software converters you already know that Aperture has been a topic of equally great enjoyment and disappointments.
Version 3 is out and so far it sounds very promising.

In no particular order version 3 brings
- Faces, already introduced in iPhoto. It’s about time!
- Places, an awesome support of GPS metadata and geotagging. So far it’s the best support of geo localization I have ever seen in any software.
- Video and audio, the DSLR have included that functionality and Aperture is following this evolution. The support of audio files attached to the pictures is also very welcome. As far as I know, no other software have this.

Expect a full review soon.