Ah, one of those days… As I’m writing this, a whopping 500 megabyte update for Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder is downloading, which makes me yearn for the days, when we swapped software on floppy disks and developers competed for the best compression to get their programs among people as slim (and thus distribution cost friendly) as possible. Compare that to today’s gluttonous apps who seem to suck in extra bytes just to inflate file sizes… No wonder the internet is requiring more and more resources to keep up!

The latter also applies to Cinema 4D R12, whose demo weighs in with a hunky 1.6 gigabytes. I just gave it a spin for about 15 minutes, but there is really not much there to write home about. A few “me, too” features that competing apps have had for a while, but not really anything truly innovative. Feels to me like Maxon is the next Autodesk or in fact worse, because they hold on to their outrageously high pricing (strictly speaking about the only “complete” package, Studio), without being able to offer a similar return value to the user. Dunno, while I was willing to give them some credit on R 11.5 a year ago, I now again have completely fallen from faith. It’s certainly still a very usable and comprehensive package, it’s just technologically outdated in too many areas and nowhere near competitive anymore.

And what do we have on the hardware front? Yes, of course, Apple is presenting their annual updates to their iPod line of products. Now my 2 year old nano is showing signs of the battery getting weaker with every recharge cycle and a replacement would be due, but I just can’t wrap my head around this multitouch nonsense. The jog wheel was so much more practical – you could operate the damn thing blindly while it was in your pocket. Now you will probably have to take it out, unlock the screen and do some weird gesture every time you just want to skip a song. Mmhhh… at least they had the sense to add some buttons for volume control. In any case, I’ll have to take a look at the thing in a hardware store before making any decisions.

On that same note, Apple keep sending me those mails about “The best Mac Pros of all time” and indeed those new 12 core machines do look interesting. So who’s up for buying me one? ;-)

*sigh* Adobe really doesn’t know how to do these things. After their blogs had been mostly offline for 2 months now after some ill-conceived attempt to convert to WordPress prematurely, they are back, but what do we get? They actually made them even more ugly and more useless than ever before! I say: Damn you, Adobe! Really, it’s bad enough that you are boring us to death with Julianne Kost‘s repetition of the Photoshop manual, equally boring ponderings on Captivate and LiveCycle, weird ideas by product managers and pointless comments on usability and open source software, but the least you could do is to make it look nice and pleasing and actually have a proper navigation…. *argh*

While it may seem that Optical Flares has pretty much stolen the crown of lens flare simulation plug-ins (really can’t go anywhere these days without seeing those J.J. Abrams style flares from Fringe and Star Trek; on the bright side: the more it’s used, the quicker it wears off and we will one day see better intros without excessive flares again), it never hurts to have options. One has always been Knoll Light Factory and it now continues to be also for Adobe‘s CS5 products, meaning that at long last a 64bit version is available. Of course it still has the uglier editor, but on the other hand just as well renders a few elements much nicer than the competing product. if you can afford both, this makes the ultimate duo. If you can’t, either one can still be beefed up with elements from my After Effects projects download pages. As a useful side effect, there’s also now a 64bit version of Unmult. In other related news, Color Finesse, whose LE version is also included with your After Effects, has received a minor update to version 3.0.2 that fixes a few issues that didn’t make it in time for the initial release.

Doesn’t anyone else think it’s weird, that a company that makes a good deal of money by selling software for creating web stuff, seems to have no clue on how to maintain their own pages? I mean, we all know that it’s a colorful patchwork of thrown together sub-systems and most of us by now probably have accepted the slowness of the forums, the dysfunctionalities of the knowledge base (I truly do understand the frustration of users there when moderating their comments; it’s just a bloody mess) and even the ugliness of the store, but now even their blogs don’t work properly anymore. Maybe switching to the bitch that is WordPress wasn’t that good an idea, after all? At least the main landing page hasn’t updated properly for several days now. *yikes* That is one of the reasons, why I’m posting that little bit of info here or else you probably wouldn’t find it: Head master of all things After Effects doc, Todd Kopriva, has updated the foreign language versions of the online help to reflect some of the CS5 goodness that English users already have. And really, Adobe, when you can spend 185 millions on gobbling up another web company, clearly you must have those few thousand bucks to hire a WordPress expert to keep your blogs straight, don’t you?

Recently I had several contacts via my contact form and through private message systems on forums. While I appreciate everyone’s trust and adoration as much as the next guy, let me be candid: These means are not meant as a way of providing individual support for problems you may have with Adobe software, Maxon‘s Cinema 4D or any creative issues you may have. Yes, I maintain a site that is 90% After Effects centric and yes, at some point in my life I did those tutorials on creativeCOW that somehow still are popular, but my life consists of more than that and I have moved on in several areas (including currently not using C4D). I’m also not in any way affiliated with Adobe or Maxon beyond my voluntary work on forums and a few other places. It’s not that one of them sends me 2000 Euros a month just so I can advise their users… So with all due respect, take your questions elsewhere and post them publicly in forums or on mailing lists. There is no reason to be shy about it and you may even get better answers than you could ever get from me, especially with regards to software that I haven’t used in 5 years. If I pick them up there, that’s a whole different matter, but otherwise I really don’t feel like replying to PMs and filling in the gaps of the companies’ support systems, much less on a day like today where it’s 36 degrees in the shade.

Episode 279 of the Apple vs. Flash TV saga: Back to the 90′s. At least that’s the impression you get when looking at this ad (PDF) Adobe apparently had printed in a number of reputable US magazines. You may think whatever you want, but this really is funny to observe from a distance. Now even the granddaddies of Adobe, John Warnock and Charles Geschke feel the need to chime in after current chief honcho Shantanu Narayen gave a more immediate response a few days ago. Will any of that put anyone’s mind at ease? Probably not. People are still scared like shit and if nothing else, that is the big danger in this whole discussion – it paralyzes what otherwise would be a more organic, natural development of the Internet. Thank God I never bothered to make a living with Flash or I wouldn’t get much sleep these days because worried clients would call me all the time…