Yes that's right. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is now available for public beta testing at Adobe Labs.

And it's very cool.

For those of you who don't know, Lightroom is literally a digital photo darkroom.  Where Photoshop has many workflows - digital imaging, creative design and pre-press - Lightroom has a truly singular workflow: digital photography.

It combines many features of Bridge, Camera RAW, and digital image correction/enhancement in a very slick package. It also offers multiple output workflows: slideshow (with music, even), print (single images and packages) and web (photo galleries and direct to flickr upload).

If any of this has piqued your interest, be sure to drop by Adobe Labs for the beta, and to watch some excellent Lightroom 3 videos by Julieanne Kost

Yes that's right!

Adobe has released the very long awaited patch for Fireworks CS4 for both Mac and Windows. The updater addresses some of the big issues related to text and stability.

You can download the update from http://www.adobe.com/support/fireworks/downloads_updaters.html.

After applying the update, please ensure that the version screen now shows as shown below.
 
http://blogs.adobe.com/sarthak/FwCS4_update_about.jpg

You can also read more details about what was fixed in the patch by reading the release notes.

W00t!

A very exciting day, yesterday; I received my shipment of books and I must say, I'm very happy with the overall production quality of the book. It's pretty cool to see all the illustrations in full color!

Sporting a bright banana-yellow cover (you almost need sunglasses!) the book definitely stands out. Kinda like some of my shirts . . .

In the next few weeks, I hope to release a few excerpts of the book here on CMX, so stay tuned.

It should be in bookstores soon, so if you're interested in learning FW from the ground up, make sure to check it out.

Well, MAX San Francisco has come and gone. What an experience; 5000+ geeks attending a single event!

Seriously, it was a great event and I had the opportunity to meet and mingle with many new people. There were also a few networking opportunities as well. Both my Fireworks Mock Up labs were full, and I saw several other very interesting sessions and labs. I for one, was very impressed by the number of Fireworks sessions that were available.

Yep, the secret is out! :-)

On my return, I was informed by a very happy publisher that 28 copies of my book sold in the MAX Store during the event, which made me very happy as well.

I know I promised pics much earlier, but I've just gotten around to getting them online. So if you want to see a few shots from the event and a few from the aquariums at the California Academy of Sciences, head on over to my flickr site.

Enjoy!

Well day 1 has come to a close (for me, anyway) and it was quite a whirlwind!  The keynote session this morning was pretty cool. There's some pretty amazing stuff happening with AIR, FLEX and Flash in terms of development projects from companies like Disney Interactive and the New York Times Company.

I thought MAX was big last year; the attendance this year is even higher! I'm told there are over 5000 people attending the event.

I ran my first Fireworks Mock Up lab this morning and it went over very well. I'm very happy to not ethat both labs are at capacity (50 people per lab). It is so awesome to see this kind of interest in Fireworks!

It's been a blast hanging with friends; Danilo Celic, Joe Lowery, Alan Musselman and Aaron Beall, Stephanie Sullivan and Greg Rewis and may others. I haven't seen some of these people for months (or longer) so it's nice to get a chance to talk face to face.

This evening, Alan and I tooled around a bit in his car, taking a few night shots of the Bay Bridge and just enjoying the local scenery.

I'll post some photos soon on Flickr and update you when they're online.

Yes, I've been meaning to put this up for quite some time but my schedule of late has made it tough to get much blog writing done. Before Adobe MAX starts, while people are deciding on their sessions, I wanted to make a quick post with more info about my sessions and other MAX happenings. Here they are in order of occurrence:

Greg Rewis (my co-author) and his fellow CS4 Web Tools evangelists will be doing a full day session on Sunday called, Designing Across Media with Adobe Creative Suite 4. This was an extremely popular session last year. The evangelists show how to use the tools in an integrated manor and really get the most out of then to benefit your web projects. Believe me, after writing a book with one of them, I can testify that they know stuff about these tools we never even thought of. ;) You must sign up for this in advance, so act quickly.

Monday, Greg Rewis and I will be doing a book signing at noon. Yes, the CS4 version of our book won't be out till December, but you can pre-order both the book and the upcoming videos. (I've done one for Pearson/Peachpit about Structure and Presentation -- along with CSS tips and tricks. Greg's upcoming video is about Behavior -- Ajax, Spry, Jquery.) Our current CS3 flavored book will be available in real time -- and we're happy to put our scribbles on it for you (or bring it from home if you already own it). If you're sticking with CS3 for a while, that's your best bet. If you'll be upgrading quickly to CS4 (or already have), come pre-order or just meet us. It's always fun to put faces and names together.

Following the book signing, at 2pm, I'll be presenting Standards-Based Solutions to Common Web Design Challenges in Moscone West 2008. This is an intermediate to advanced session and is best for people who already understand the basics of CSS. I will not be reviewing the box model, floating or positioning. We're going to get right into the down and dirty demos. Since my job entails either coding or teaching other people to code, I'll be sharing every day CSS challenges I'm presented with and techniques I commonly use to deal with them. There are many ways to make your CSS more succinct and powerful. This session is filling up fast, so you'll want to log in to the Scheduler and reserve your place soon.

On Wednesday, also at 2pm, I'll present a session called Common Mistakes Print Designers Make on the Web in Moscone West 2011. Don't let the title of this one fool you -- it's not just for print designers. This session covers the ten most common mistakes I see when people are learning to use CSS and web design. This applies, of course, to print people making the transition -- but many of these issues are universal. I promise I did many of these things myself at the beginning. We'll take a look at the common misconception or problem and then the "best practices" way to do it. This session is appropriate for beginner to intermediate levels.

If you've been to MAX before, you know it's a huge conference. Please don't be shy. Come grab me in the hall and introduce yourself. I'm really tall and hard to miss. ;) Feel free to discuss with me the challenges your business is facing. I'm always happy to help out where I can. I look forward to meeting you there!

In a few days I'll be flying down to San Francisco to attend and present at this year's Adobe MAX. Last year was my first time going to MAX and it was certainly impressive. I'm very interested to see if that "MAX fever" is maintained.

As for the work side of MAX, I'll be running the Fireworks Mock Up lab, where we will take a couple half built sample files and add the interactivity and other steps necessary to turn the files into interactive PDF documents and AIR prototypes.

I'm looking forward to seeing old friends and making some new ones (and giving out a few copies of my book). If you're attending MAX, I hope to see ya there.

At 12:01 this morning, Adobe publicly announced the upcoming release of Creative Suite 4. Some very cool new features have been added to all our favorite software applications. Fireworks CS4 is - IMO - the most significant upgrade in a long while. And other apps like Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Flash are also chock full of new goodies.

For more details, be sure to stay tuned here at CMX, and also make sure to drop by Adobe's web site for a breakdown of the Suite packages.

Well, it's coming! Adobe has disclosed the the announce date for Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 on www.adobe.com.

Details about Creative Suite 4 at will be made available at  12:01 A.M. Eastern Standard Time (USA) on September 23. You can register to hear the special launch webcasts at: www.adobe.com/go/somethingbrilliant

Today is a great day! At 12:01 am this morning, Adobe made available public betas for both Dreamweaver and Fireworks.

Not only that, but we've got brand spanking new content for both Fireworks and Dreamweaver public betas, starting today. 

Walk, run, fly, teleport on over to Adobe labs and get your own beta copies while supplies last. The public beta software will be available for download for the duration of the beta program and will run for 2 days as a demo before requiring unlocking. Unlocking the public beta for the remainder of the beta period requires an active CS3 serial number.

I've been nosing through both applications and the updates are quite impressive. Stay tuned here at CMX for a variety of sneak-peaks into both applications.

And if you are a Fireworks Junkie, you can learn even more in the coming days at the Adobe Dev Center, Peach Pit Press and Lynda.com. Yep, I've been a busy boy. ;-)

Representatives from Adobe announced today the launch of Adobe CS3. I know we've been hearing little bits about this for a while, but people, this is huge.

This live webcast gave the global audience an chance to see what Adobe has been working on for the past two years, "the largest software release in Adobe's history."

How large? 13 point products upgrades were announced today, including NEW products. A pretty ambitious effort indeed.

Adobe has created variety of collections geared to different types of users and price points:

• Design Suite Standard
• Design Suite Premium
• Web Suite Standard
• Web Suite Premium
• Production Premium
• Master Collection

The common theme throughout the CS3 suites is one of integration - better integration between Fireworks, Photoshop and Illustrator, better integration between Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator, between Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator and between Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator.

Lording over it all is Adobe Bridge, which is now connected to many of the major Adobe apps, including Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. 

For more information on the new suites, keep checking back here at Community MX where we will be giving you sneak peeks into some of our favorite features over the coming days.

You can also - of course - visit Adobe's web site for more details on the new software, pricing and packages as well as tutorials.

According to Adobe's blog site, they will be announcing details about the launch of the new Creative Suite (CS3) on March 27. So Adobe is officially announcing they will say something in an annoucement about the new release. Seems a little Monty Python-ish, but I know I'm excited anyway.

This release is said to be "largest software release in Adobe's 25 year history."

Adobe will present details via a live web cast from New York City at 3:30 pm.  More details about the webcast will follow later this week, so stay tuned and make sure to mark this one in your calendar! 

In case you missed it -- the announcement has been made and the blogosphere is abuzz - Adobe MAX 2007 will be in Chicago from September 30 to Oct 3 2007. Mark your calendars and corner the boss - it's time to make plans!

Ben Forta has worldwide MAX dates/events in today's blog post. 

Sometimes I get a bit behind on my Community MX reading and have to catch up in one fell swoop. This morning, I was having a look at the past few articles and found a most awesome resource that Sheri German put together. Though we're in the midst of a site redesign (yes, we know it's sometimes tough to find the exact article you want as CMX approaches 1950 articles!) it's not done yet. In the interim, Sheri has compiled the CSS section of the site into a great learning guide that you'll want to keep nearby. It's free, for those that aren't members, and groups articles by subject and gives you an idea of their levels and what to tackle first.

I had to share this one! Design Your Own Custom CMX CSS Course -- a learning resource guide.

Also, in case you missed it, over the holidays Adobe launched a CSS-related beta of their own - CSS Advisor. CSS Advisor is a resource where information on CSS bugs will be compiled by the community with links to their originators and other resources where possible. A kind of all-in-one-place starting point to pinpoint what your bugs might be and find solutions.

Design Resources

Finally, more related to design than CSS, Adobe has another beta you may have missed called Kuler. Kuler is a color blending tool and I must say, it's the best I've seen so far. Create a free account and then, starting with the base color you want, create palettes of analgous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades and custom shades. It's very easy to use too since you can either move sliders or use a color wheel with these nice little "arms" you can move around. And, well -- just go play with it, save and share your own custom palettes!

Released today at Adobe Labs is the public beta release of Photoshop CS3. If you have a valid serial number for a  CS2 product or bundle, you can download and use this product until the full commercial release in the spring of 2007.

If you don't have a serial number, you can still download and install CS3 but it will expire after 2 days.

For more details check out the press release at adobe.com 

I finally downloaded and installed the much anticipated Windows Beta of Adobe Lightroom. I've only been playing with it for a while, but the first word that comes to mind is "slick." Overall the interface has a very polished look to it and I am enjoying some of the features such as one-touch zoom and drag and drop keywords. I loved the fact that I didn't have to download any updates in order for the software to recognize my Fuji S9000 RAW files.

I plan to write a more detailed overview of this beta quite soon, but for now I encourage all you digital shooters to take a few minutes and give the beta a test run. Yes, there are flaws, but it's not ready for shipping yet either, and Adobe wants your feedback.

If you frequent the (former) Macromedia News Groups, you're going to start seeing a new designation in the volunteers' signatures.

Effective February 27, the Team Macromedia (TMM) designation has been replaced with Adobe Community Expert (ACE). This was not some arbitrary decision on Adobe's part either; TMM members were polled and the popular opinion leaned to this new identifier. We even got a cool new logo. I like the name (although I'm a bit too modest to be completely comfy with the abbreviation)

I think the new name is a good sign of what Adobe thinks of its customers and the developer/designer community. One thing Macromedia always did well was engage its users. It looks to me that Adobe is going to maintain this sense of community and corporate outreach. I think it puts a friendlier face on a very large company.

As Martha would say, "It's a good thing."