Veerle's blog

After a week of full-time work and digging around in Apple’s new beast “Panther”, I came across some useful features… Most keyboard shortcuts are already consistent from program to program on the Mac, but there are exceptions; the Hide All Windows command in Photoshop, for example, should be Command-H like most other Mac programs, not Option-Command-H. Fortunately, using the new Keyboard control panel, you can easily change any keystroke in any program. You can also make up a new keyboard shortcut for menu commands that doesn’t have them. I’ve already found this simple feature useful over and over again.

This is no Star Trek! An intense storm of radiation is heading toward Earth today after a giant solar flare (one of the largest ever detected!) hurled high-energy particles from the sun’s surface Tuesday at more than 4 million miles an hour. High-frequency radio communications—mostly military and aircraft—could be blacked out worldwide,... If things starting acting a little weird today, you know what’s causing it… but if you by any chance start behaving strangely forget blaming it on the solar flare :-P

Nearly every holidaymaker who has visited Ibiza must have seen some local lizard lounging on rocks in the sun and scuttling away when disturbed… But no one had realised that this little lizard is unique in the wonderful world of nature! Investigators at Spain’s top university, Salamanca, have discovered that the Balearic lizard is the only reptile in the entire world which helps to pollinate and disperse the seeds of certain plants. Without the lizard these plants would not survive.

I took this picture this Summer. He didn’t seem to be scared of the camera, even at a distance of 15 cm! It was also a large one. Most of the lizards I’ve seen at Ibiza are about 10 or 12 cm long (tail included), but this one was at least 20 cm and also a very nice one as you can see.

Panther is really what Apple promised! ... Since this morning I’m running Panther on my dual 1Gig G4 and boy do I like it! :-D Everything feels much faster and looks much crisper. This is SUPER :-) I measure my processor load through a Konfabultor widget (CPU Portal) and I see that it has dropped with half.

I recently looked into the matter of upgrading to the CS collection and it seems that Adobe is screwing their loyal customers. Upgrading to every CS program separately cost you almost as much then upgrading from 1 product to the entire Standard or Premium Suite. For example if you own Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10 and InDesign 2 you pay 553 Euro to upgrade all of them.

So people who just have Photoshop in any version can update to all these programs for only 579 Euro. Adobe doesn’t make a difference if you are a loyal customer who bought every update of all these programs in the past, no special prices, no bonuses, nada! :-( This makes me really mad if you think about the fact that they always complain about illegal downloads etc. They’re asking for it don’t you think?

We get no favors and are treated the same way or worse then people who skip versions all the time. We are in fact the victim of Adobe’s brilliant idea of bundling their products and making sure that people buy the whole suite. It goes as far as when looking on their store that you will have hard time finding the separate upgrades. Can you tell I’m a bit frustrated! ;-)