In the interest of full disclosure, I am part of an Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Reviewer Programme.
(A secret gathering of people in the creative industry. Whoa!)
And so, the contents of my blog may be featuring content that is related to Adobe products. However this does not mean I am selling out – I still have to use what I have to use when I need to use it. Yes, you can re-tweet that. 😀
Due to the nature of my primary employment as an Android Developer and occasional employment as a freelance photographer (see, photographers are so common you can’t capitalize them) I asked for the Adobe CS 5.5 Web Premium Suite.
This should allow me to compare the Eclipse way to the Adobe Flash Builder via AIR way, to make Android apps. While a quick Googling will show that every Android coder talks Eclipse, a widely used Java IDE, there are some big apps built with Adobe AIR – Tweetdeck being one of them!
A quick headcount shows that Tweetdeck is the most popular client amongst my Android-using Twitter friends. Of course, I could write a Twitter client to count this. Hmmm. Adobe AIR experiment perhaps? (Personally, I love Plume as an Android Twitter client, although I post tweets via my own Twitter client.)
I should also be able to compare DxO Optics Pro Elite 6.5.6 to Adobe Camera Raw – if it is a fair comparison since ACR gets to open RAW files before anyone else.
Straight up, you gotta love graduated filters. DxO doesn’t have this. I end up doing the gradient fills in Photoshop before adding my watermark.
Representatives from Adobe, like Vicky Skipp (and the very knowledgeable product specialist – sorry dude I can’t remember if your name was Raj – who ran through the cool new features of CS 5.5).
One of the directions that CS 5.5 was going, was towards making 3D content easy (Photoshop CS 5.5 has a dedicated 3D menu!)
Note the extreme fill light used on this. This was one exposure pulled from the RAW file on the Sony NEX-5 with 16mm F2.8 pancake.
The other much bigger direction was towards the post-PC scene. Dreamweaver and Flash Builder all had various, easy ways to export to Android and iOS (with the preset screen sizes built in.)
The other interesting thing is how I corrected the perspective distortion so it looks like I was sitting right in front of the screen! This picture is actually shot from the same position as the picture above it. I just pulled the distortion bars in Adobe Camera Raw. It seemed a lot easier than when I had to skew corners in Photoshop. Much, much easier.
DxO lets you click on all 4 corners and it straightens it automatically. However it didn’t always look natural. I’d say it would be a tie here.
Automatic per-lens correction, once the unique selling point of DxO.
Straight lines for the breakout session – though I didn’t get to get a hold of the Adobe representatives to ask them if they would ever make a PDF library for Android that was as fast as their reader. I suspect JNI is at work as the Java-based implementations are a lot slower in decoding PDFs.
Oh and yes, I haven’t updated in almost a month – apologies! I have been stuck in the office even on weekends for a big project and for me to learn to leap the big hurdle that is Java’s OutOfMemoryError. In layman’s terms:
How do you put a giraffe in a fridge?
You open the door and put the giraffe inside.
How do you put an elephant in a fridge?
You open the door and put the elephant inside? No sir.
You open the door, take the giraffe out, and put the elephant inside.
How do you put a giraffe in a fridge?
You open the door, take the elephant out, and put the giraffe inside? Yeah but the giraffe won’t go in. Why?
The elephant took a poop in the fridge.
And that is the basic premise of Java and learning how to handle your first OutOfMemoryError. Figure out if the elephant gave birth or took a dump and clean it up before putting the giraffe in.
Let’s see how Adobe Flash Builder does with a similiar project – albeit in my free(er) time.