WayWest

Lightroom 2 Beta: sweet & public

Adobe released a 2.0 public beta of Lightroom this morning that includes so many of the items we've been asking for:

• Support for multiple monitors, something Apple's Aperture has had from the start that stirred a lot of envy among Lightroom users
• A Detail pane so you get a real-close look while keeping sight of the full photo
• Localized adjustments, aka dodge and burn, without having to hop over to Photoshop
• Smart collections, which automatically gather up photos by your criteria, such as keywords, ratings

I'll have more details in the days ahead. In the meantime, here's a sample of what the multiple-monitor support offers:

Keep your overview using the Grid view on main monitor…
…while seeing the details, using Loupe view on a second monitor.

Daring Fireball hits 2-year mark

One of the Web's best Mac-related sites, Daring Fireball turns two next month. I say Mac-related, but really it's a must read for anyone wondering where this linked life is taking us. The journey from leap of faith to a true business is a tribute to John Gruber, its more-than-daring creator, who sums up:

"I’m pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished with Daring Fireball: a self-published, profitable web site for which I never borrowed any money, and have accepted only a modicum of advertising. This has only been possible because of the direct support of readers like you."

Read the full post and support his work with a cool T-shirt.

Paper publishers resist change (in profits)

Truer words have never been spoken about the financial reality of today's newspapers than this assessment quoted at Poynter Online:

Hearst vice chairman Frank Bennack Jr. says publishers have to get realistic about their business, and reset advertising, circulation and profit targets 'so we don't live in a constant state of depression.' He also warns that severe newsroom cutting will come back to haunt publishers. 'If newspapers don’t cover the news and do it with detail and context, someone else will.'

Newspaper staffers regularly get blamed for declining readership. But newstand sales and home subscriptions never paid the bills. It was all those department store ads, car listings, and classifieds that generated 30 percent profit margins year after year.

That money's gone, gone, gone. With their advertising monopoly/business model smashed, newspaper ad staffs remain dazed and confused a decade-plus into the Web era. But publishers keep slashing newsroom staffs, chasing yesteryear's margins. News sites larded with hep blogs and Britney videos don't solve that problem.

Read the full story. (Via Romenesko.)

Gunning for Earth

Every teen-age boy alive, it seems, loves to play first-person shooter video games. A couple of new games steer kids in a more hopeful direction: saving Earth in the battle against global warming.

The BBC's created Climate Challenge, where you as the president of the European Nations must decide the policies that do the most to reduce carbon emissions. The other, show above, is CO2FX, a multi-player game built on a model created at MIT.

Reality-checking your photos

As Richard Howe readily admits, his recent experiment comparing how closely his photo prints and monitor match reality, isn't scientific. Still, it's a pretty cool way to see how your mind's eye remembers the look of things vs. your actual eyeballs.

The setup is simple: Take a photo of what's just to the left or right of your monitor—and include a grayscale card. Bring the photo up on your monitor and tinker with it to match, then make a print and put it on the oppostite side of your monitor. Then look left, look right.

His take away:

1. My expectations and ideas about what 'looks realistic' have more of an effect on how I judge the fidelity of a photograph than anything else, including its 'true' fidelity or lack of it.

2. Getting a reasonably high fidelity result means balancing many trade-offs among all the available parameters, and can only be achieved if the reality is right there in front of me for immediate comparison (or maybe I just have a lousy visual memory, though there is some evidence that I'm okay on that score).

3. If the intent is to convey one's response to what one has seen, rather than to make the truest possible image of it, then we're in the realm of art, or one of its realms, anyway, and all bets are off.

All the details and caveats at TheOnlinePhotographer.com.

Climate news: It don't bleed, so it can't lead

The old newsroom saying "if it bleeds, it leads" sums up the media's understandable preference for dramatic, fast-moving stories. But, as one panelist in Missoula, Mont., put it Tuesday, climate change oozes and so defies that kind of coverage.

From NewWest about a talk at the University of Montana:

The media likes breaking stories, or at least stories that have a clear sequence of events, “but stories like those on climate and the environment don’t break, they ooze. They ooze over time,” said panelist Frank Allen, president and executive director of the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

They are also inherently complex. Translating the science for the public and exploring the varied contexts of an issue requires a lot more space and time than a normal-length news story, so many news organizations choose not to, said panelist Michelle Nijhuis, a contributing editor with High Country News.

“Selling a climate story to a national editor is a tough thing to do,” she said.

And this:

“Some scholars would argue that the primary purpose of media is to get eyeballs to ads. If that’s the case, you don’t want to tell stories that make people grumpy and sad” and have them stop reading, said [UofM] associate professor of communications studies Steve Schwarze.

In recent years, competition from the Internet media has made deep cuts into print media ad revenue. These declines coupled with debts accumulated from a string of recent mergers and acquisitions have led many newspapers to lay off staff in order to maintain profit margins, Allen said.

Still more reasons to avoid Flash

Oh how designers love to load up websites with Adobe Flash elements. Headlines swoop in, graphics spin, animations rule. Nevermind that it makes pages slow to load, chokes Web-enabled PDAs, and breaks Web standards right and left. Flash's bling bling apparently leaves many visual designers powerless to resist its surface charms.

Of course, many designers use to swear by multi-sliced Photoshop images or nested tables chock full of shim GIFs. CSS is finally replacing those hinkie practices—and hopefully it'll eventually vanquish Flash as well.

That diatribe may not convince you to avoid Flash, but consider: Apple's CEO Steve Jobs said yesterday there are no plans to build Flash support into the hot-selling, Web-browsing iPhone.

The gist from AppleInsider:

Flash just works because most [computer-based] web users have the required plugin already installed; Adobe has bundling agreements with both Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Mac OS X. Users who don't have Flash pre-installed can download it for free, and Adobe now even offers a Linux version of the plugin.

...Adobe has moved away from attempting to port the full Flash runtime to other mobile phones. Instead, the company developed Flash Lite, a simplified scripting runtime designed to provide a user interface layer of interactivity that could be used to design basic phone interfaces. [But] Flash Lite doesn't run any of the Flash content found on websites, rendering it worthless to iPhone users.

...That's why Jobs said at Tuesday's shareholders meeting that Flash Lite 'is not capable of being used with the web.' It simply is not a web plugin technology and only bears fleeting relation to the desktop computer Flash, which Jobs said 'performs too slow to be useful' on the iPhone.

...The company is pushing the use of standard H.264 video [as seen in the iPhone's YouTube player], advocating the future development of standards-based web applications with WHATWG [Web Hypertext Application Technologies Working Group] and HTML 5.0 along with partners Firefox and Opera (and increasingly Microsoft), and using Ajax technologies centered on open standards including JavaScript and CSS right now. In fact, Apple has removed nearly every vestige of Flash from its corporate website.

Keep two things in mind: No one argues that Apple's site looks dowdy, and lots of folks believe the iPhone will become a major way to browse the Web. Still want to lard your site with Flash?

The full story—and the 50-plus comments it's drawn—are worth a good look.

Bigfooting the oceans

It's hard to really grasp the global effects of the human race. This graphic, one of six remarkable images on the New York Times site, shows our collective impact on the world's oceans. The colors mark the routes of 3,374 commercial and research vessels in a single year—and this is only 11 percent of the total merchant ships at sea that year.

Other images depict the spread of invasive species, temperature changes, acidification and other changes driven by our presence. Such big footprints make the prospect of global warming a lot less abstract.

Aperture & Lightroom speed: Now neck in neck?

Speed was my top concern last spring when I was debating whether to adopt Apple's Aperture or Adobe's Lightroom as my main photo tool. One of the reasons I ultimately picked Lightroom was that it did not demand the latest, fastest chips to run smoothly. In contrast, reviewers' tests back then found that Aperture had a major CPU appetite. In fact, my one-year-old Macbook wasn't fast enough—and it was my fastest Mac machine.

So I passed on Aperture. (The other big reason being that I find Aperture's controls quite awkward, in the same way that its little cousin, iPhoto, feels like a computer tool instead of a photo tool.)

In his review of the just-released Aperture 2, Fraser Speirs says the update's speed is now on par with Lightroom. Although I'm now wedded to Lightroom, his take and stats are worth a look.

Xactly the right tool

This week I discovered a magical machete called xScope for rethinking/redesigning my jungle of a web site. The $26.95 program does just one thing—but it does it extremely well. It instantly measures anything on your screen. Toggle it on from your menu bar and your cursor becomes like a little laser beam. Roll the cursor over a Web site's navigation bar and, bam, you immediately can see that each tab is 18 pixels high. Curious about image sizes set in a sidebar? A roll of the cursor and you see the readout: 91x108 px.

Oh the Mac-only program has lots of other ways to measure stuff: a caliper-like ruler, a zoom box, etc. All that's icing on the simplest of cakes, however.

Sketching grand designs for a web site often bogs down when you begin trying to spec out all the little pixelated bricks and mortar of nav bars, tabs, column widths and image dimensions. I'd been researching how to use design grids with CSS divisions when I stumbled upon xScope. I downloaded a trial copy, expecting to find it hard to use or hard to understand or just generally not worth the brain ache of new software.

Instead, it was obvious how to use from the get-go. Now as I rework waywest.net, I can zoom around my Photoshop comps, see how other sites handle every little detail, and just generally cut to the chase.