Conrad Abraham

Adobe and McAfee siting on a tree, p-i-s-s-i-n-g of me.

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If you are an artist/striving to be one/a creative person or web designer or anything related to any of these categories and are not visiting JasonSantaMaria.com every day you are missing out.

CS3 suddenly does not recognise my license after about 3 years (possibly related with the recent update?). I basically have a $1500 piece of software that tells me I have a licensing issue. Adobe recommends “Uninstalling and then reinstalling”. Yes Adobe I have 3 hours to spare on something that might work. Google shows me that this is apparently a known issue Adobe provides other steps to address the issue and suggests calling customer support if it does not work. Sigh. Customer service at Adobe (like pretty much any other company) is non-existent. I hung up after being put on hold for over 30 minutes. This is 2010. When are we going to take customer service seriously?

Call with Adobe customer service

Aha! I was right in my initial review of the Jay Leno show. Rumour is that the Jay Leno show will be axed. However I don’t think moving him back to the Tonight Show is the brightest thing to do. Leno, once he moved out of the Tonight Show he was done. NBC is juggling with prime and it’s viewers. I say Let Len go and collect his 2 year pay. It is cheaper that way.

It is not quite the same. I was wanting to watch the new Leno show and after watching the one with Michael Moore it just seemed like two old men talking. The show isn’t as spunky as the Tonight Show. It almost feels like The View with one male host.

I love Leno, I think he is a funny guy and I used to watch the Tonight Show a lot. Jay Leno in his new show seems to have aged and mellowed out. It is the Florida of talk shows – where old people hang out and play bingo and talk politics.

The music with Kevin Eubanks is still kick butt however it seems like a blunt version of what he used to do in the Tonight Show. Maybe I chose the wrong day to tune in when the guest was Michael Moore – who doesn’t do much to light up the screen. Having said that I will probably watch it a few more times to see how it goes but my initial reaction was – bland.

As much as I would love to see Leno’s show do well, I have a feeling that it won’t last too long, at least in its current format.

I came across this neat little website that makes it easy to convert your handwriting into a font. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks promising and you bet I will be turning my chicken scratch into a font.

Go to FontCapture.com and check it out.

Instead of writing another post on Photoshop Etiquette, I’ll post a screen shot of what not to do. I received a PSD this morning and this is what the layers panel looked like. Countless number of layers of which a lot were hidden and almost every single layer was unnamed. All the layer effects were left expanded and so were the layer groups.

The layers panel was so long I had to break them up into four pieces – also some of the layer groups weren’t expanded so I don’t know what beast lies within those groups, yet.

Click the image below for a larger view. Hold on tight.

Photoshop Layer Nightmare

Read Photoshop Etiquette – Part One

I am prudent with the plug-ins I install. As you can tell from looking at my blog, I am prudent with installing random stuff, in fact, it also appears that I am prudent with regular updates – but that is a different topic all together. Today, I was compelled to even test out a plug-in and was impressed. Impressed enough to bend the rules and keep it.

The WPtouch theme is pure genius (yes, it is not spelled genious). Install the plug-in and it makes your blog fit in in the iPhone interface without changing the look of your regular theme.

Give the Wptouch plugin a try.

Here are just 3 basic “best practices” when working in Photoshop, even if you work by yourself. It is common sense but disregarded or blatantly ignored all the time.

1. Name your layers and groups. Probably mentioned a billion times but just as many times is not followed. We’ve all seen “Layer 1 copy 20″ too many times.
2. Collapse groups and effects. If you leave your groups and layer effects opened you will end up scrolling through a layers panel till your index finger falls off. Even worse you are scrolling through someone else’s file and they have multiple effects on every layer and about 10 layer groups. Collapse them all for better organisation.
3. Delete unnecessary layers. Accidental blank text layers, layers that are not in use any more. It helps for better organisation and work flow if someone else has to pick up the document.

That’s my three Photoshop rules for the week. Remember the basics!

I just might post 3 basic guides a week… but that is promising too much!

Boone Oakley’s website is nothing short of innovative.  But that’s the word you end up with. You start off with “Confusing” then “What the..” then “Hmm..” and then “really” and then “Haha.. nice” and then “That is a really great idea” and then you land on “Innovative”.

But really – it is an innovative use of You Tube. The question is, does it work, does it do the job. It would be interesting to see the results of this experiment.