Yippeee!!! If you haven’t already heard about the next version of Photoshop (CS3), then it’s time you made your way over to Adobe! (Note: You need to have a valid CS2 serial number to get the beta.)

Anyone who knows me personally is aware of my love of beta software. What’s not to love — they are practically begging you to BREAK it and tell them how you did it! They warn you not to run beta software on “production” machines, but I always am so anxious to use the software I can’t bear to put it on an old machine I only sometimes use. So, of course I’ve paid the price a couple of times with lost files and even lost productivity because of crashes and such. But who cares! I love the opportunity to play with this “baby” software…

OK, back to the beta at hand. This is the first time Adobe has ever made a beta available to the general public. Why are they doing this? One of the primary reasons is that this is the first version to run natively on Intel Macs (read more). While that is a monumental feat in itself, there are a couple of other HUGE things you need to know about. Here are some of my favorites:

• Smart Filters!!! Ever wished you could go back and remove a filter from a layer, or even just adjust its characteristics? Now you can! Simply convert the layer to accept smart filters, and each filter will appear in the layers palette with the option to be disabled or even just altered. This is a huge step forward in filters.
• New Interface The palettes can be more easily rearranged on your desktop, plus be collapsed or expanded with a single click.
• Black and White Any experienced Photoshop user knows that converting color images to B/W doesn’t just mean choosing “grayscale” as the color mode. In fact, to achieve rich B/W images in previous versions of PS, one had to play with several color adjustments. Now, there is a special tool just for converting an image to B/W.
• Zoomify Ever wanted to create your own zoomable maps? Now that capability is built into Photoshop, using a tool called Zoomify. Waaayy cool!
• Better Vanishing Point CS2 gave us the ability to easily wrap an image around a 3D product using the Vanishing Point tool. However, that tool had some limitations that made it unusable for many people. CS3 gives us a revamped vanishing point with multiple, adjustable angle perspective planes!

Oops! Time has got the best of me (see how excited I get about this stuff?!). I’ll write more later, plus add links to video demonstrations made by other beta testers. In the meantime, download that beta and enjoy!

Those of us who’ve been in this industry for some time likely remember the dot-com-crash from a few years back. I suppose everyone remembers it, but those of us who were directly impacted definitely have *stronger* memories (or should I call those nightmares?).

During the glory days, I was first an employee of the largest web development firm in the company, and then a freelancer living high off the fact that everyone seemed willing to pay top dollar for a basic web site. I remember my first job as a freelancer - it was for a software company just outside of Boston. The amount of money they paid me for a simple marketing site would buy that same company a CMS and lots of fancy back-end stuff today. Ahh… the good old days…

But wait - did I mention the web is back? I’m once again freelancing (after two stints at full-time positions) and am finding (especially recently) that web firms are busier than they have been in five years. I’ve been consulting for a few advertising agencies in the Baltimore area, and each has told me they have seen steady growth in their web services over the past few years. In fact, this year has seen huge growth for a few — causing them to need people like me (which is certainly not a bad thing).

So I’m left wondering - is the web (or rather web development) here to stay now? I think so. The types of projects I’m seeing are not the crazy high-budget fancy-graphics sites of the late 90s. Instead, these are well-thought-out, productivity-boosting, customer-satisfying sites that are being integrated into the daily lives of the people using them. And if that’s true, then the future looks a bit brighter than it has in recent years for folks like me.

P.S. This is why I haven’t posted in a while - I have actually been BUSY!!!