It’s official. With Photoshop CS5, Adobe has single-handedly made my degree (and many more out there) worth absolutely nothing. Ok, so maybe not NOTHING but at least worth the cost of Photoshop CS5. You no longer need to have any skill to remove objects from an image, know what the tools actually do and how to alter them, or even the actual reason you are doing anything in the program. You only need to select an area, use a single check-box…”Content Aware”, and hit delete. It’s like magic.
Apart from the image manipulator, you no longer need a good photographer either who has the ability to see the issues that may arrise in the shot before they even take it. Oh well, I guess the new wave of Art Majors studying fields that use Photoshop will have an easier time with their projects. Maybe that’s just it, I’m bitter I didn’t have this option available to me. Enjoy your easier image manipulations kids, now maybe you’ll have to think more conceptually.
While I am quite the fanboy of Apple and I fully support freelance program development, there are few things I wish Apple would admit would make their products better. In the past they have done this with things like Cover Flow and iTunes so I know that they would at least consider it.
1. Integrate a method of “Letterbox View” in Mail.app
I’m sick of having to add a plugin to Mail in order to have a simple “letterbox” view of my mail. Ever sense the popularity of widescreen monitors, the real-estate for programs like Mail has increased so much potential for the availability of more information without scrolling. Even worse is the fact that Outlook has this as a setting you can simply just enable.
2. Add an auto-rate system for iTunes
I love my music, and this in turn means that I love using my iPod Touch and iTunes. Something I do is base my playlists to sync with my iPod off of the ratings, play counts, and last played meta data. Something that has made my music listening more explorative and interesting is using an auto-rating program which rates based off of previous rates, play counts, and play frequency to rate songs for my play lists. This can’t be that hard, and I think could be pretty intuitive to include with the addition of Genius now. But alas, I still have to use AutoRate.
3. The ability to unarchive .rar files
This one I just do not get. I can work with .zip files, but I’d have to go to command-line to mess with a .rar? This doesn’t make sense at all. For this I can only offer one thing, UnrarX.
So there are a few things I think would be simple to add into OS X that Apple shouldn’t have a problem including. For the mean time, enjoy those downloads and I hope they help you out with using your Mac a little more efficiently.