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I received an in-depth document that details tons of Adobe CS4 information and it’s mostly info regarding Photoshop CS4, Bridge CS4 and the launch date of the latest version of Adobe’s Creative Suite.

First of all, the launch date is going to be around or during Adobe Max which takes place November 16th-19th in San Francisco or at the end of September around the 23rd. Adobe Creative Suite product cycles are around 18 months and Adobe CS3 was released on April 16th, 2007 so Adobe Max would mean 19 months since the last release. Let’s take a look at some features that may or may not be included in Adobe CS4.

Adobe Photoshop CS4:
Codename: Adobe Stonehenge CS4 Extended. Splash screen is Stonehenge.
1. Interface is similar to CS3 but there are small and minor polishes that complete the look.
2. Support for “Extensions” under the “Window” menu
3. The extension manager is in every CS4 application
3. “kuler” which is a Intranet color pallet collaboration tool for sharing color swatches with others on your team.
4. Flash Support (more on this later)

Adobe Panel Configurator 1.0 (Alpha Version):
1. It’s a way to create Photoshop toolboxes.
2. Choose from over 860+ commands, tools and application features and create your own toolboxes that work in any CS4 application
3. Supports Actions and Scripts too
4. Drag and drop text fields into these toolboxes
5. Support for SWF and Quicktime video files in toolboxes (not sure why)
6. Export the toolbar file and open it in any CS4 application.

CS4 Suite New Features:
1. Flash SWF support across all applications
2. You can open SWF files in any app and play them
3. A tool for developing flash content without any coding experience is coming

Adobe Bridge CS4:
1. New Interface (cleaner, more like Apple’s Leopard Finder)
2. Sidebar and search tool location are just like Mac OS Leopard
3. Folder navigation just like Windows Vista Explorer
4. Labels and star ratings are easier to access.
5. Filtered searches are now much faster even across thousands of images
6. List View in Bridge
7. Auto Photo Downloader to download photos from your camera is now easier and better than Bridge CS3
8. Improved slideshows. Spacebar starts slideshow (like quickview in leopard)
9. From Slideshow, just hit “r” and Adobe Camera Raw opens automatically.
10. Review Mode: (full screen review of photos)
a. Just like a full screen version of Apple coverflow
b. Loopt tool built in
c. Open all photos and review photos and drop photos out of view that you don’t want and other stay in full screen
d. Upon leaving review mode, photos you kept are now selected in bridge. Ones you dropped are still there but not selected.
e. Ability to create photocollections from within review mode
11. Collections are just like Playlists in iTunes. Ability to group photos. Location of photo is not changed.
12. More sharing options
a. Upload directly to FTP within Bridge
b. Web gallery templates are easy and uses the same templates available in Lightroom 2
c. Ability to create flash galleries with a few clicks and upload instantly
d. Uses the Opera engine to render galleries within Bridge
e. Photoshop Web Gallery is going away and being replaced by Bridge Web Gallery
13. Bridge CS4 Menus (in order left to right)
File – Edit – View – Sttacks – Label – Tools – Window – Help

Adobe CS4 Applications are exactly the same as CS3 but the text in the icons is black instead of white.

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Believe it or not, I have 30 minutes of video and 4 hours of audio recorded that hasn’t been posted yet. I am trying very hard to keep things spaced out so a new episode pops up once a week but I might break that rule. Here’s what’s coming soon to DailyTechTalk Show.

- An awesome interview with the creators of Blip.FM
- An even better interview with the boys of Yoono
- We talk with Louie, a die-hard Nokia N95 user who puts Symbian up against iPhone
- A video interview and tour of Speck Studios
- A video tour on the making and history of Rickshaw Bags

If you love what we’re doing so far, do me a favor and review our podcast on iTunes. link

Episode 3 of DailyTechTalk Show is up. It’s just me in this podcast. I have interviews for the next few shows. This episode focuses on iPhone and Macintosh against the world and comparing features for features.

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I’m still working on some super secret stuff but the commitment to the podcast has continued. I just completed episodes 3,4, 5 and 6 of the podcast. As most of you know, I’ve only released 2 episodes so if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, there’s still a few more hours of tech talk for you. I’ve been co-working over here at Podango Productions which has really helped the creative juices flow. I really need to get down to business on my new project but I’ll have more info for you as soon as I get closer to the finish which is very soon.

Thanks for all of the support. Sorry the DTT blogging hasn’t been as consistent as it has been for the last 5 years . I think that everyone deserves a little blog.

I’m not a guy that reposts a lot of news from all over the net but if you don’t subscribe to Gizmodo, then you missed this post today about a guy that has $50 million dollars in records. Over 80% of these records can’t be bought in any other form of media. He’s trying to sell them for only $3 million. It’s a very cool and emotional video that’s worth checking out.

Honestly, I would buy these if I had 3 million lying around. I love albums and regret that I don’t have a day to day use for them.

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

I’ve had a desire to move to Wordpress for the past 2 years. Unfortunately, the makers of Wordpress never developed a tool to import a Pmachine Pro blog over to Wordpress. I purchased and have been using Pmachine since 2003 and have posted over 900 articles using the previous system. I waited for years and never found a plugin to make the migration easy. Well, it appears that someone has heard my cry and posted a script and another person posted a how-to for deploying the script.

It was quite a long process to get a theme, get plug-ins configured and finally perform the migration. The last step of migration has been going on for the past 5 hours. It’s a good feeling to be using Wordpress but the migration isn’t complete yet. The following things must be completed:

Complete the design of this theme
Add advertisements
Updated all other DTT Media blogs to latest WP version
Move all other DTT Media blogs to new themes
Configure analytics tools
Setup blogger accounts for all blogs
Clean all spam comments from DailyTechTalk
Catchup with quite a few posts that are overdue

There’s still a lot to do but I’m very relieved that the migration is complete.

Episode 2 of DailyTechTalk Show is up. It’s just me in this podcast. I have interviews for the next few shows but this one focuses solely on Macworld Expo which is coming up in just a few months. I like to do an introduction to Macworld while people are still planining.

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While at iPhoneDevCamp last week, I took some photos of Adobe’s entrance area and the boxes of previous Adobe software really impressed me. I’ll let the photos tell the story from here.

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The Full Photo Set

Just realized that an interview I did at SummerMash SF for Stickam was posted. Check it out below.

I am going to get some hell for this one. Windows Vista and Blackberry are the best for me when it comes to staying organized and getting more work done. Windows Vista is not as reliable as Mac OS X and comparing Apple’s iPhone and Mac OS to Vista / Blackberry is a hard sell when it’s so much easier to use Apple’s offerings. From a usability and learning curve perspective, I love Mac and iPhone but there are days when I have 200 unread messages, 400 unread RSS feeds and my phone is ringing constantly where I wish that I wasn’t using a Mac. Here are some reasons.

Why Windows Vista beats Mac OS
1. Office 2007 is a fantastic suite of applications for Windows. I love writing with Word 2007. The Ribbon interface in Word and Excel is so beautiful and incredibly useful. I can write for hours in Word and I won’t get distracted. Outlook is the killer app for me and I miss using it on a daily basis. There isn’t a mail application today that is functional like Outlook and I really miss Microsoft Exchange Server. What a kick ass collaboration email system that integrates so well with Outlook. I could manage 1000 emails a day in Outlook for Windows and as a PIM (personal information manager), it was perfect. I bought a second monitor just to keep Outlook on day after day and really miss its power. Entourage 2008 for Mac is nothing to Outlook 2007 for Windows.

2. The interface of Windows Vista is incredible. The Apple dock is my most hated feature of The Mac OS. It takes so much space. I know it can be removed but it shouldn’t have to be. If i have the dock open, it takes 15% of my monitor. Pair that with the top menu bar of the Mac OS that’s always there and I now have 20% of my horizontal screen real estate taken from me the second I start up. Windows doesn’t force the top menu bar on you and the task bar of Windows is so minimal. I love organizing files on the Mac OS but the icons are just too distracting. Vista’s file navigation system navigation is sometimes slow but search in Vista is very fast. I use the Vista search to launch every application. I wish Spotlight was that accurate.

3. Compatability. I still have to keep Safari and Firefox open at all times on The Mac because there are sites that will work with one or the other. I hated Internet Explorer 6 because it lacked tabs but now, I’m all for it and wish I could run IE7 on my Macintosh.

Apple vs. The Other Smarthones

1. Windows Mobile is the most unreliable OS I’ve ever used and I would never go back but that integration with Microsoft Exchange was priceless. Also, the fact that I could organize my day, have instant access to email and contacts which was worked very well on Windows Mobile. The new HTC Pro with WinMo6 looks so cool. I miss the Today screen on Windows Mobile. It would show me missed calls, appointments and other things that are going on as soon as the I powered the phone on.

2. Blackberry didn’t easily show me everything that I have going on and I’d have to open up Calendar or Email (similar to the iPhone) but it was reliable as hell and I could keep a Blackberry going for days. My Blackberry would run for 3 days without needing a charge and that included constant Twittering, email and 2 hours of phone calls. I would restart it once a month and that was just because I was bored. It was a rock solid phone and the only issues I had was when our Blackberry Server would go down or RIM had some global outage.

3. Nokia and Symbian is a match made in heaven. Their interface is confusing and there’s just too much confusion when I use one but if someone really knows Nokia, they can really wow me. The N95 came out a long time ago but I’m amazed when it delivers turn by turn GPS directions. I love that the N95 has A2DP bluetooth stereo and you can listen to your Nokia in the car via wireless. The Nokia has a decent media player but SD card expansion means unlimited storage possibility. There’s a huge Symbian application development market too. Let’s also not forget that this phone can last for days on a single charge which the iPhone can’t do.

The iPhone needs to be more reliable, needs to help me be more organized and has to get a battery life that I can respect. Pretty doesn’t do it for me anymore. I need function and iPhone developers can’t do that for me. The Mac has a chance but I’m considering a complete switch back to Windows and Blackberry in the next 6 months. Seriously.

Amazon is doing some very awesome stuff on the web but the hype around their products is slim to none. I’m glad that Amazon has seen a little more buzz over the past few weeks but compared to someone like Apple, Amazon doesn’t even exist. I understand that Apple is doing so much with iPhone and Macintosh but Amazon is doing a few big things and I feel they need a little more credit.

1. Amazon.com is the best place online to buy nearly everything. I use Amazon for everything except PC parts and for that, I use Newegg. You can even sell your stuff on Amazon for very cheap and it’s better than using eBay in some cases.

2. One-click which we use very often on the iTunes Store is registered and owned by Amazon. They invented one-click and we benefit from it today.

3. S3 & EC2 Services. Amazon’s cloud computing and storage services are used by nearly every web 2.0 startup today. It’s funny because, once every 6 months S3 has some downtime and every startup crumbles to the ground for those few minutes. This past downtime affected a lot of websites that I use.

4. Kindle is changing everything in the eBook space. For a 1st generation product with severe supply constraints, they’ve maned to sell 240,000 of the units. I’m pretty sure that I read the 1st generation iPod only sold 125,000 units back in 2002. The Kindle has an amazing eBook store, is easy to use and you can even read newspapers and blogs via the kindle using EVDO networking that’s included for free in the device.

5. AmazonMP3 Store which is cheap and DRM-Free music from major record labels. I don’t buy all of my music from there but my music buying habits are 50/50 between Amazon and Apple right now. If Amazon has the album, I’ll get it from there because it’s cheaper, DRM-Free and higher quality.

6. Unbox which is a video on demand service is doing very well. I don’t use it since I use my Mac for media and don’t own a TiVo but the service is good, from what I hear and very popular.

Amazon is directly competing with Apple on many fronts and I wish there was more coverage of Amazon in the tech world.

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Thanks to Daniel for being on our first show. I had a few podcasts before but it was time for a fresh start. Enjoy!

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I’ll be in the iTunes Podcast directory soon.

I just wanted to post an update as I have been for the past few months. Another month means another jump in visitors.

Here are stats from the last three months:

Unique Visitors:
May: 97,235
June: 103,039
July: 109,472

Hits / Pageviews
May: 200,921
June: 234,810
July: 294,879

Operating Systems:
Windows: 64.8%
Macintosh: 28.50%
Linux: 6.42%

Browsers (by popularity)
1. Internet Explorer
2. Mozilla
3. Safari
4. Opera

Just to put things in perspective. January is our biggest month because of Macworld so I wanted to post stats from that, too.
Unique Visitors: 133,223
Page Views: 299,436

I’m getting very close to hitting my Macworld 2008 numbers. That’s a good sign for DailyTechTalk. Such fantastic numbers and yet I can’t get any advertisers. Sad times. Advertising is super cheap (as little as $25 dollars per month) and yet I can’t attract anyone. Anyone interested, feel free to drop me a line.

I had to take some time out to mention that my friend, Scott Beale who is “primary tentacle” of LaughingSquid and has influenced my direction in the move to San Francisco, a career choice and keeps me in the loop on everything happening in the bay area. He was the first local San Franciscan that I befriended back in 2006 and continues to help me at least twice a week with misc. things.

Thanks Scott for:
A) LaughingSquid.com
B) Your awesome Flickr Stream
C) Guiding me in projects and finding events
D) You’re freaking awesome parties & drinkups.

The video rocks. It’s about time someone put Scott in the spotlight.

I’m working on 4+1 things right now.

A) Helping a friend get a company off the ground
B) Redesigning DTT Media’s host of websites
C) My own daily work
D) A brand new project that I can’t say anything about.
E) Macworld Planning which is taking a lot of time as well

I’ve been blogging at least 6 entries a day for the past two months. I’m ramping down a little bit over the next 2 weeks so I can get a lot of upcoming things done and in order. I’ll still be posting just not as much.

Just wanted to post this group photo from iPhoneDevCamp 2. Everyone that’s interested in iPhone developement should attend this event!

You can comment and view the photo full size here. Photo credit Adam Tow

Lately, I’ve been raving about Hahlo for iPhone. I absolutely love this app but the one thing that keeps this application from being highlighted by every blog out there is the fact that it is a web app. Web apps only run on the iPhone’s web browser and don’t run as a native application. There are three native applications for the iPhone from 3rd parties that are available on the app store that are currently the most popular.

Those are Twittelator, Twitterific and Twinkle. These apps are great but I’ve uninstalled all of them because they all fall short of the power of Hahlo. Hahlo is so amazing that I have packaged the website into a self contained application that I run on my Mac full time. It’s a beautiful and full featured client that has so many innovations that nothing else compares.

Here are my favorite features of Hahlo:

1. It’s always running. When I open Safari, Hahlo is exactly where I left it and hitting “refresh” shows me all of the latest tweets.
2. It supports deletion of tweets. No one else does this.
3. I can search Twitter (formally summize) right from Hahlo.
4. I can see all of my followers and people I’m following as a list or grid of their avatars and search that list.
5. I can see replies and direct messages to me and respond to them.
6. Click on a user’s name and you can see their tweets / profile.
7. The interface is dynamic and loading of various pags is inline with no complete reload of the page.
8. Hahlo tells me when Twitter is at fault. If Twitter is down, Hahlo tells me.
9. It works on your computer’s browser! Open up your browser and try it out. It works seamlessly.

Simple features like search, grid view of all of my friends, a section for direct messages and a beautiful interface make this application an awesome app that I can’t stop using. None of the web apps have a special section that shows you replies and I can follow and un-follow people directly from hahlo.

Last week, I posted an article about Cuil and how I’m not switching from Google any time soon. As I wrote that piece, I had secretly started using Windows Live Search as my default home page and search tool within Firefox. Live.com has gotten lighter, faster and sometimes faster than Google. I love the home page and Microsoft is really pushing this search as better than Google’s offering.

As I said last week, “it’s all about results” and Live doesn’t deliver. performing nearly 30 searches a day, on average and I’m extremely disappointing. The results are not what I was expecting and searching for a page takes twice as long as it does with Google. Someone looking over my shoulder at iPhoneDevCamp said to me, “wow those results suck” and I agree.

There’s not another current search engine that I’m interested in trying. Giving Yahoo! Search might be worth a try but it seems that for the past 10 years, Google has been the leader and no one currently in the search space can compete with that. Furthermore, if a company does launch that gives Google a run for their money, you can bet your ass that Google will buy them out before that newcomer gets a foothold on the market.

So it looks like Twitter is fully integrating Summize into the Twitter domain. It was search.twitter.com as of yesterday but this morning, I’m greeted with a networksolutions page when I try to go to both http://summize.com and http://search.twitter.com

It’s common for IT folk to make DNS mistakes that causes downtime for up to 72 hours. Twitter might have been affected by this too.

You can view the image: CLICK HERE.