CS3 and the great Bill and Steve love-in
01 June 2007

"Much as it was interesting to watch what appeared to be a mutual appreciation society, I was yelling at the screen "Go on, admit it, you hate each other really!""

This week saw a rare event. Not a totally unique experience (like a laugh out loud funny scene in EastEnders, for example). No, I'm talking about something more rare than hen's teeth. It was a joint interview with Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft. Mr Cool meets Mr Geeky hair cut.

The interview covered the history of the two companies and how they've affected each other's development over the years. For example there was the long forgotten story of Microsoft supplying the floating point module for the Apple II because Steve Wozniak didn't have time to do it himself. There was talk of the revival of Apple after the return of Steve Jobs when they had looked like going bust in the mid 1990's. Jobs was quick to point out the similarities between the two companies in that they both develop software even if their approaches to this task are somewhat different.

Much as it was interesting to watch what appeared to be a mutual appreciation society, I was yelling at the screen "Go on, admit it, you hate each other really!" It was pretty obvious that while they actually do like each other they are serious competitors. And, boy, Steve Jobs is a funny guy. You can watch video replays of the interview (split into 7 parts) or a single reel highlight at http://allthingsd.com/

CS3 at last
After a 4 week wait, my upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 3 arrived a couple of weeks ago. First impressions are that the interfaces have been radically improved - especially in Photoshop and InDesign although Dreamweaver remains virtually unchanged from version 8. The palettes in the majority of the Design Premium Suite are cleverly arranged into groups making locating those you don't use very often that much easier. While the interface may be unchanged, Dreamweaver has some neat tie-ins with Photoshop allowing you to copy and paste from a PSD file straight into the program applying image optimisations along the way. Very good, especially as I do all my initial designs in PS.

The most notable improvement is the speed at which all the CS programs launch. On my Mac Pro, Photoshop (now native to Intel processors) starts up in under 10 seconds compared to closer to 45 seconds for CS2 (which ran under the PowerPC emulator Rosetta). So far, very happy - which is just as well because it cost me a bleeding fortune.

Parallels
Just a very quick footnote about Parallels Desktop, the Windows virtual machine for the Mac. Version 3.0 is due out soon and if, like me, you're running version 2.5 you can get a 20% discount on the new software. Be quick, though, the offer runs out on 6 June 2007. This makes the upgrade to version 3 a little over £22 which isn't bad. The biggest improvement looks to be the addition (finally) of 3D graphics support - ie Parallels will use your graphics hardware instead of a poor virtual graphics driver. There are also improvements to Coherence (the mode that lets you run Windows applications right on your Mac desktop). Coherence 2 will allow you to launch programs from the right click context menu. For example, in Windows Explorer you could right click on a TIFF file and send it straight to Preview on OS X. Very clever.

For me this Parallels update is just about worth it for the upgrade to the graphics (Vista Aero support is due to follow). But as I only run 2 programs now under the virtual machine (Microsoft Money and Microsoft Publisher - the latter being to do volunteer work for a local magazine) I don't know if I will continue to buy future updates.

The end
Time to go now, next time I'll talk a bit about a very interesting beta program I'm involved in at the moment that looks to be the future of broadcast media. Watch this space!