Tag Archive for 'Editor'

The definition of free

Adobe’s Photoshop Express is a great online photo editor, no doubt about that, but it’s not free (as in free beer). In exchange for using Photoshop Express, Adobe wants your photos.

If you read the General Terms, you’ll find under point 8. Use of Your Content. letter a. the following paragraph [via SPON]:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

As I understand it, Adobe, for instance, reserves the rights to sublicense your photos in Adobe Stock Photos to third parties. Without sharing the revenue with you of course. After all, Adobe already offered you its service Adobe Photoshop Express for “free”.

To me, that’s a show stopper for using Adobe Photoshop Express. Luckily there are other excellent online photo editors around who don’t claim such farreaching rights on your content like Adobe does: picnik, pixer.us or flauntR to name only a few of them.

Out for a Picnik

m-dorfIt took a TechCrunch post to direct my attention to Picnik, an amazing online photo editor. Among other photo services, it already integrates very well with Flickr using the Flickr authentication API. You can retrieve from Flickr, edit in Picnik and save back to Flickr seamlessly. Apparently the Flickr user interface will get another button soon to make the editing process with Picnik even more easier.

My first thought was that I won’t need iPhoto anymore. Ever since I bought the DSLR I only use iPhoto to manage the snapshots I take with my smaller camera. If I’m going to upload directly from my smaller camera to Flickr and do rudimentary editing like cropping and basic color adjustments there in Picnik, which does an excellent job as I found out last weekend, I could skip iPhoto entirely. The Flickr-Picnik workflow should work at least as good as the workflow in iPhoto.

Technically no problem but there would still be this unpleasant feeling in my stomach region of giving the control over my images totally out of my hands. Stomach says no, so I rather stay some more time with the local iPhoto library as primary library and the Flickr account as secondary “fun” library.

However, Picnik will be a great addition to Flickr and I’m pretty looking forward to it!

Early spring cleaning

TextMateI never thought I would license a text editor for 39 Euros. After reading quite fantastic reviews of TextMate I decided to give this supposedly divine editor a try. Turned out to be a terrible mistake as I know now.

The first impression was like “OK, it’s a good editor, but 39 Euros while TextWrangler is still free, no way!”.

10 days later I already was knee-deep in TextMate projects, accustomed to its keyboard short-cuts, had the blog-editor configured, let alone all the the bundle-features (discovered the secrets behind FIXME, CHANGED and TODO!!) and was overall very impressed by TextMate’s slick and fast usability. To make a long story short, I couldn’t imagine switching back to another text editor again.

However, TextMate was very helpful today when I changed my blog-theme from my badly hacked and messed up Unsleepable to a clean K2 setup, doing search&replace orgies in my database dumps and WordPress files. K2 is surely one of the best available WordPress themes. It offers an excellent reading experience and nifty features like archive pages sliders or sidebar modules.

Main reason for my clean-up was the migration from UTW to the Simple Tagging Plugin, which I couldn’t get to work very well on my former theme. On K2 it basically works, but for full support (e.g. archive pages) some of the K2 files have to be edited too, not a big problem though. I put the changed files in a zip-file, so if you didn’t modify your K2 installation, just download it and overwrite your existing K2 files.

Simple Tagging Plugin performs better than UTW, comes with built-in features like type-ahead tagging, tag suggestions, related posts and is, unlike UTW, still under ongoing development.

Update
Changed files for K2 v0.9.6 are available here.

Draw Freely

Thanks to Google’s Summer of Code an Open Source project is bringing up the best SVG editor I’ve seen so far – Inkscape. Since I’m not doing very artistic work in SVG I can’t comment those features. We are drawing maps and trying to make them usable online with the help of SVG (c.f. my ArcGIS SVG export macro). It’s a rather technical approach and for that reason I really appreciate the possibility to see the graphics (well, of course the visual work is vital as well) and browse/edit the XML tree at once.
As you can read in their FAQ Inkscape is not supposed to be a replacement for any big commercial vector graphics editor like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia (Adobe) Freehand. But when it comes to SVG Inkscape is playing in the same league along with them.
Keep up the great work!