Well, my friends, the countdown to CS4 has truly begun in earnest. I only needed to look at the SMS’s from friends and acquaintences to know that we surprised everyone with our “announcement announcement”. In fact, a really good friend put it more, um, succinctly… “WTF?! I finally feel at home with CS3 and… Oh well… Here we go again!” To which I responded, “join the club”.

You know, it’s funny that “we” somehow get forgotten in all the hoopla surrounding a new product announcement. By “we” I mean all of the evangelists, sales engineers, training partners, community experts, book authors and all the others out there that serve as your source of tips, tricks, and techniques that you rely on when learning our products. Just like you, we get frustrated by the perceived “quick” arrival of the next “greatest software release in the history of the company”. But even more frustrating is the fact that we have a far shorter time to react and learn than you.

You see, while all of you were happily impressing friends and colleagues as you discovered the Auto Align command in Photoshop or the added productivity of Dreamweaver’s CSS starter layouts, those of us “in the know” were already “knowing” – and beginning to learn – even though CS3 was only in its infancy. And that is an even bigger challenge – being out on the road, demoing one version (with which you yourself are not even comfortable) while knowing that issues are already being addressed and new workflows invented. But such is our life…

In fact, unlike us – the Adobe faithful (read: slaves… er, um… faithful) – you even have the luxury of skipping a version – although as an Adobe stockholder I am obligated to inform you that doing so can cause headaches, dryness of the mouth, loss of hearing, nasal congestion and a temporary inability to complete any creative (suite) task. Should any of these symptoms last for longer than four hours, well, you know what to do… Buy the upgrade!!!

But my actual purpose in posting this was to draw your attention to those individuals in the community that you admire and learn from. There are a lot of them who have been spending countless hours working with and bug testing these new tools. And all of the great content you’ll be experiencing shortly on blogs, Adobe TV, tradeshows and elsewhere, was created and perfected using unstable and at times frustratingly irritating builds of the great software that you will soon be enjoying in their (hopefully) bug-free form.

So if you get the chance to meet one of these individuals that have created tutorials, written blogposts or authored a book for you to learn from, please take a sec and thank them. I know they’ll appreciate it – cause not only do I do these things myself (I’m writing this on my iPhone on the way to Dallas right now to film some upcoming Adobe TV shows), but I enjoy learning from my fellow Adobe enthusiasts as well.

Want to know more about Creative Suite 4? Then be sure to register for the live premiere – or visit Adobe TV following the announcement on Sept. 23rd.

Let us know what tips or tricks you’re interested in hearing about, and we’ll be happy to blog these tips.

On a personal note, I have to admit that I’ve had the pleasure of being able to spend these (unprecidented) 6 weeks with my kids and with Stephanie – so if you’ve missed my posts, thanks for your patience. Cheers!!!

As I’ve been following the political “season” here in the US, an interesting question crossed my mind. I’ve been watching Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin run around the country for the last few days. Of course, I’ve (actually) been watching Obama and McCain do it for much longer. But my question is, why don’t they have to give up their “regular” job in order to run for President/Vice President?

I mean, think about it… could this happen in your job? Could you go tell your boss that you’re going to go look (and campaign) for another job? Or more importantly, could you tell him/her that what you were doing was in the best interest of their company, but if you didn’t get the new job, then you’d be back to doing your “same ‘ol, same ‘ol” the next day? Oh… and you’d also like to loan the keys to the motorpool and use the limos/planes/boats/etc to ferry yourself and your entourage around during the interview process.

As the governor of Alaska, shouldn’t Sarah Palin have turned over the keys to the kingdom to someone else as she runs around the country? You can’t tell me that she (in addition to being a mother of five kids, including a baby with Downs Syndrome), can process all the information she needs to in order to make decisions for her state, while bouncing from campaign stop to campaign stop… Unless, of course, there’s not much to being governor of Alaska – which would open up a whole different set of questions.

Don’t read anything biased in there either – the same goes for Obama and McCain. Are either truly exercising to the fullest the mandate that brought them to the Senate – to serve the people of their state.

If you’re giving 5-10 speeches a day in 4 or 5 cities in states whose capitals you can’t even name, you can’t be paying much attention to what is going on on the Senate floor…

Shouldn’t we be demanding that our “potential” elected officials play by the same rules that we have to? If you want another job, fine – look for it on your own time. But if I’m paying your salary (and as an Arizona resident, Mr. McCain, I AM paying your salary), then you need to resign from your office. Go campaign. But if you lose, I don’t see how it is fair that you come waltzing back into the Senate (or Governor’s office, Ms Palin) as if nothing ever happened.

Just doing a bit of thinking out loud… Thoughts? Cheers!

You know you are a real geek when the highlight of your weekend is upgrading your WordPress software to the latest release… But in my defense, I’ve procrastinated this just because I was flippin’ scared to do it. And on top of that, I figured, so what if it is out-of-date as long as it works, right?

Well, the thing that pushed me over the edge and forced the upgrade was my (relatively) new iPhone 3G. You see, not only have I (grudingly) fallen in love with my iPhone – I’ve also been on a tear in the App Store. Thankfully there are a lot of great apps there for “free” – so I’ve not (yet) begun to equal my enormous investments in the musical side of the iTunes store. But I digress…

Probably my biggest complaint about blogging is the writing itself. I don’t mean the ideas – I have plenty of those. But it always seemed in the past that I would have a great idea for a post, but no way to actually write it because my laptop was not at hand, or I wasn’t near a hotspot, didn’t want to go through the trouble of logging on, etc. I have repeatedly commented to those around me that I would blog more IF I could just do it from my phone. I tried to set it up with my old Nokia e61i, but never got it to work.

WordPress on the iPhone

That’s why I was delighted to find a WordPress app on the App Store. Of course, after I downloaded it, I realized that I was in trouble. The version of WP that I was running was not supported. Argh… So I bit the bullet, and nervously read through the instructions for upgrading.

Is it just me, or do you get nervous when the first three paragraphs of instructions are all about backing up and how a failure to do so could leave you without a working blog, unable to login, and generally cause the fall of democracy… OK, it was exactly that dire, but I was nervous none the less.

But my kudos to the WP team for making the upgrade incredibly simple. After a couple of changes to a config file, copying my theme into its proper place and uploading it all back to the server, life was good. (The funniest part of the upgrade though was a message that told me “Your database needs upgrading. This could take some time, so please be patient.” After clicking on the button, it literally took 1 second to finish. Glad that I had that much patience!)

Editing a post on the iPhone

So, now I can successfully write/edit from my iPhone – FTW! And hopefully that will mean more frequent updates here… but I guess time will tell… :-)  Cheers!