Nancy’s Blog

Adobe Photoshop Express has gone online — a free product from Adobe. I haven’t dug into it to see what it does and doesn’t do. The reviews that I’ve seen aren’t crazy about it. It’s designed for rank amateurs. It interfaces with some online photo sharing apps, and at least one review said it will work with Flickr soon, although other reviews say it’s not as good as Picnik.

It also offers a variety of sharing options, including emailing, building one’s own online “Gallery” hosted by Adobe, and embedding or linking photos hosted by Adobe to social networking sites and blogs. There was an uproar about the terms of service and ownership, which Adobe says it’s rewriting.

What I find interesting is that these online editing tools may make more sophisticated photo editors and, eventually, photographers of people who don’t know that much about photography by offering them such functionality as exposure compensation and white balance. If it does make posting and sharing easier, then it’ll encourage more of that, too.

Like other Adobe apps, however, the documentation is terrible, and the app is definitely not self-explanatory to its supposed target audience of people who’ve never used Adobe. Adobe’s big Achilles heel is its documentation, with usability not far behind.

NY Times Magazine article yesterday:
“An Interface of One’s Own” by Virginia Heffernan

She describes several wordprocessing programs designed for writers, including Scriverner, Nisus Writer, and others. I plan to try at least a couple.

UPDATE: They’re all for Mac.  Sigh.

My new rule: if it’s running, don’t update it!

If you are running Atlas ti, do not, do not, DO NOT update it to 5.2. It has failed on both my machines (home desktop and home laptop) and the fix that tech support sent doesn’t work. SoI’m trying to finish two articles over the break using my Atlas ti coding and I can’t get into my data.

Similarly, if you are running Reference Manager, DO NOT update from 10 to 11. It only works partially, and exactly the update that I wanted (to no longer have to key in over again the text to search on when inserting refs into an article, e.g., the author’s name) — that’s exactly what doesn’t work, and it broke the entire function. So I CAN’T key in the name and search on it from within a document. I have to leave the document, go to RM, find the reference, select it, and go back to the document to insert it. Again, tech support has been unable to fix this.

So time that I should be spending on my research is being wasted trying to fix broken software.

I’m a moderate fan of Dragon Naturally Speaking — not a BIG fan, I don’t use it a lot, but I do use it. (I only have it on my home desktop machine — I would use it more if I installed it on my laptop.) I’m a very fast typist, so it’s slower than I am. But — I started using it when I was having repetitive stress problems, and it does help save one’s arms. And I find it particularly useful when I want to make detailed notes on something I’m reading, so I don’t have to go back and forth between reading and making notes. I should be able to have the reading open next to my keyboard, but, in practice, I find that it’s easier to sit back in my chair and read excerpts aloud and make comments.

The reviews for the new version 9 are enthusiastic, though NYTime’s Pogue says that, if you have 8, it’s not worth upgrading to 9 (thank goodness, since I just upgraded to 8 ). I was impressed when I started version 8 and it got “Foucault” right. But every dictation that I have done with it does require some error correction, slowing down the process. What I’ve found works best is to dictate a whole paragraph, then stop to review the paragraph and correct mistakes. (You don’t want to wait too long to correct mistakes, and you do want to do them within Dragon, not from the keyboard — Dragon learns as it goes along, so an uncorrected mistake will recur.)

Version 9, they say, doesn’t require that you train it — with older versions, you read a prepared text into it for a while. But no doubt it still uses — and benefits from — another kind of training: you have it scan a bunch of your documents, so it learns your vocabularly. Which is probably why version 8 knew “Foucault.”

It does make some hilarious mistakes…

An aside: Pogue has written about Dragon before, because he uses it, but I was surprised at the NPR review — how has Dragon managed to get all this publicity?