The Photoshop Express public beta launched about six weeks ago and other than some early concerns about the ToS, we continue to be impressed with the service. Today, Adobe has added a number of new features to the service, including support for Flickr.
At the conference call in March, we asked Adobe about their plans for integrating Photoshop Express with other web services and they assured us Flickr support was on the way. It's available now and we think it adds a lot of value to both services. Now you can download your Flickr photos directly into Photoshop Express for cropping, color correction, digital effects, etc. Photos edited with Photoshop Express can be immediately re-exported/uploaded to Flickr all in one seamless step.
Additionally, Adobe has added a new "Save As" feature so that you can save multiple versions of a photo in addition to the original image. Adobe has also introduced a new embeddable media player for photo slideshows that can be used with Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites.
The WordPress team has released version 2.5.1 of the blogging software. The new version, which comes nearly a month after the initial release fixes a slew of performance and interface bugs, but also includes a very important security update. It is highly reccommended that all WordPress 2.5 users update their installations as soon as possible, especially if you allow open-registration (for user comments or for multi-author blogs).
In addition to the aforementioned security patch, 2.5.1 contains a number of fixes to issues that have plagued some WordPress users for the last couple of weeks.
The highlights include
Improvements to the Media Uploader
Performance tweaks for the Dashboard and the Write and Comments pages
TinyMCE has been updated
Layout fixes for IE users
Download the latest version of WordPress from their site and update your installations accordingly.
Thanks to the recent BitTorrent debacle, Comcast has been far from Comcastic for many of its customers. Throttling customers for using technologies they deem too data intensive is pretty nasty, and the company has had to acquiesce and change its practices, but what happens when they disconnect your service (and threaten to keep you shut-down for 12-months) for "excessive usage" -- yet refuse to issue that threat in writing or tell you what "excessive usage" really means?
Well, that is exactly the situation Dave Winer, tech analyst, pioneer and RSS God, has found himself in. Comcast has restored his service, but still says they will shut him down for up to 12 months if he doesn't alter his usage patterns. The kicker? They won't tell him what level he needs to adjust his usage patterns to in order to stay compliant.
Can they do this? Especially without issuing the warning in writing? And what exactly defines, "excessive" in Comcast's terms? Many of us here at Download Squad use Comcast and we DO love to download, so this issue bothers us both on principle and for practicality. Although Comcast has been more receptive via their @Comcastcares Twitter account than they were via phone, this whole situation makes us very, very uncomfortable.
We spoke to Dave earlier today (the podcast of our conversation is here) and this is what he had to say:
"I thought it was an outage and they said I had to call a special number and that I had been disconnected as a matter of policy."
Google has just announced the preview release of Google App Engine, which the company is describing as " an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google's infrastructure." Think of it like Amazon's web services, but as a fully integrated solution. With Amazon's services, developers can mix and match the various components with each other or with other solutions -- Google App Engine is a one-stop shop of sorts.
Most appealing, Google App Engine is free. During the preview, there are only spots for the first 10,000 developers who sign up, but Google's information page says that free accounts will be available after the initial preview. Of course, the free accounts do have resource limitations (500MB of storage and 5 million page views a month), but free is free!
Let's get into the details:
Applications can be served from the free appspot.com domain or from an external domain via Google Apps
Python is the only language supported right now -- Google says they look forward to supporting other languages in the future, but for right now -- Python is where it is at
Google's service API is built into App Engine -- so Google Accounts can be easily integrated into an application
During the developer preview users are able to register up to 3 applications
The SDK is available for Mac, Windows and Linux
From our perspective, this news is exciting -- if not for what it offers right now -- but for the potential in the future. Only initially supporting Python is a curious choice (though we are big fans of Django), but the ability for developers to execute scalable apps using Google's resources -- for free -- is extremely exciting.
Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google, the April 1 edition!
Google loves April 1, otherwise known as April Fool's Day, so we're dedicating this entire edition of Googleholic to Google news/hoaxes/jokes centered around April 1. This edition covers:
Google's April 1, 2008 pranks
Google pranks go International
GMail turns 4 -- AKA, the hoax that wasn't
A look back at some of our favorite "April 1 Google hoaxes"
We've written about the DataPortability Project before (we even linked to a video explaining the concept) but at SXSWi 2008 we were lucky enough to talk about the project with co-founder and chairperson, Chris Saad. The project is still in the early stages of development, but the premise is powerful and the momentum that has taken place in just the last 90 days is extremely impressive.
At SXSWi 2008 we had the pleasure of speaking with Gary Vaynerchuk, wine connoisseur and host of Wine Library TV's daily videocast. Gary, who is truly one of the most dynamic individuals we have ever met, spoke with us about the importance of loving your community, the power of online video and the essence of "radool."
We've written about Freshbooks -- the online invoicing system -- before and have been big fans of their approach and service. We were even more impressed upon meeting Saul and Sunir, two of Freshbook's team members, at SXSWi 2008.
Grant talked to Saul and Sunir about the service, the importance of community and traveling from Miami to Austin in an RV and stopping along the way to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with customers.
The Photoshop Express public beta launched about six weeks ago and other than some early concerns about the ToS, we continue to be impressed with the service. Today, Adobe has added a number of new features to the service, including support for Flickr.
The WordPress team has released 
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