It sure didn’t take long for Adobe to answer Apple’s release of Aperture. Adobe has made a beta release of Lightroom, their new professional photography organization and post-processing application, available for download; and in a rare twist, it is available for the Mac first.The minimum system requirements are significantly lower than Aperture’s, and are as follows:

Adobe Lightroom Beta requires Mac OS X version 10.4.3 (Tiger) or higher, a 1GHz or faster PowerPC G4 or G5 processor (including iBook G4 or PowerBook G4), and 768 MB of RAM (although more is recommended), and 1 GB or more of free hard drive space. Windows requirements will be announced when that version is ready.

Adobe has posted the Lightroom FAQ for your reading pleasure; if you can’t wait to try Lightroom, you can download it from the Macromedia (well, now “Macromedia Labs") web site. Have fun!

My only question: why “Lightroom” and not ”Darkroom”?

As you already know, it is the holidays, which is an ancient Literalasion phrase meaning “a time when everyone makes lists to give to other people.” This, deep thinkers, is my list. This is a list of the things, big and small, that I would like in Windows Vista.

• Update the mouse pointers. The mouse pointers in Windows have been static since Windows 95. A little bit of color and some anti-aliasing will update the look without Microsoft having to go to the dark side of the issue (see this poster to get it).
• Make absolutely sure you have redone every icon in the new Vista style. I cannot tell you how annoying it is to see a Windows 98 icon mixed in with a Windows XP icon. By doing this, you can drastically improve the look and feel of the environment.
• Make the boot screen be good-looking and functional.Make the bootscreen true color in native resolution, and add a progress bar (a working one). Computer hardware has advanced enough to make this feasible, as far as I can tell. At least add a progress bar, since even Linux has one (at least Ubuntu does).
• Allow people to truly uninstall Internet Explorer. This is less of something that bothers me personally, but more the root of something that bothers me. I absolutely cannot stand it when people rant about how Explorer and IE are integrated, and somehow it’s so bad that it’s worth typing in Caps over. To quote myself:

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Like HP and Apple before it, Dell has recalled 35,000 laptop batteries that can overheat and start a fire. The batteries were sold between October 5, 2004 and October 13, 2005. The following products are affected:

Latitude line
D410, D505, D510, D600, D610, D800, D810

Inspiron line
510M, 600M, 6000, 8600, 9200, 9300

XPS
Second-generation models

Precision line
M20, M70

Alphabet soup of affected battery part numbers
3K590, C5340, X5308, F5132, U5882, U5867, C2603, 6P922, C5446
The batteries are made in Japan or China.

For more information, and to find out if you’re one of the poor souls with one of these batteries, visit https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/.

It’s official (almost): Macromedia and Adobe have become one. Or at least, they’re supposed to be come one.

According to an official press release issued by the two companies, Adobe is set to close its purchase and gobble up Macromedia today. Mmm, Macromedia on Rye. The buyout plan was announced in April.

Deep Thought’s Take: Silly attempts at humor aside, this buyout could have a negative impact on creative professionals stemming from lack of competition. It could result in less innovation, higher prices (as if high-end software doesn’t cost enough as is), and less choice (e.g. if Adobe merges the once-competitng products into one). Competition: it’s a Good Thing (TM).

Chances are that you, being a tech geek, have been or will be called upon to clean out someone’s gunked-up Windows PC. This tutorial will help you do so with relative ease. You will need these tools:

• A blank CD
• Installers for these utilities:
  
  • Microsoft Antispyware
  • Ad-Aware SE or Spybot S&D (I recommend Ad-Aware because it picks up tracking cookies)
  • Avast! Antivirus or or AVG Antivirus
  • Zonealarm or other firewall (optional unless the patient runs a pre-XP version of Windows)
  • CCleaner
• A CD burner
• Some basic knowledge on how to work within Windows (usually XP, maybe Vista once it comes out)

You may want to have an XP machine of your own to test and familiarize yourself with each of the applications.

It also helps to have (in case of extreme measures):

• A couple CD-RWs or a USB thumb drive
• The original XP CD that came with the patient’s computer
• Experience with formatting and reinstalling XP

The first thing you want to do is reboot into safe mode.  Hold F8 before the XP bootscreen appears, or click Start>Run, type in msconfig and hit enter, select the BOOT.INI tab, and check /SAFEMODE.

Install all of the applications under their account, and run Avast!, MS Antispyware, Ad-Aware/ Spybot/ Whatever else, and CCleaner, optimally in that order. Also run Disk defragmenter and Disk Cleanup, then restart into normal mode, and if the problem is still there, be prepared to either look up that specific problem on the internet, or reinstall.

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