Distraction is the enemy of focus. If you work at a computer all day, the possibilities for distraction are limitless. One way to stay focused is to use the technique of a firmly regimented working period followed by a short break period that I first came across at Merlin Mann's 43 Folders site. His technique suggested using 10 minutes of work followed by 2 minutes of rest, but the recently popular Pomodoro Technique suggests using 25 and 5. Whatever periods you use, the cross-platform Adobe Air based Focus Booster application is just the timer you need to keep you on task.

Focus Booster is a tiny timer that allows you to set a work and rest period, then away you go. You can focus entirely upon your work knowing that a rest period is coming soon, and you can check out your Facebook / Twitter / blog comments / whatever it is you fancy when the time comes.

Until April 30th 2010 -- six whole months! -- Adobe Lightroom 3 is available for public beta testing.

In the last week there's been a lot of news regarding Lightroom 3's advanced feature, and now here's your chance to actually give it a whirl!

Lightroom is great for every kind of photographer -- casual, avid snapper or professional. It's not a full-featured editing suite like Photoshop, but it does have most functionality that photographers (note: not 'digital artists') might require -- but if you're the kind of artist or photographer that likes to airbrush his works into submission, Lightroom isn't for you. It is a 'digital darkroom and presentation' tool -- so from downloading photos, to sorting through them and producing pretty presentations/contact sheets, Lightroom's the program to use.

For those of you that have used it before, and are wondering why it might be a good time to upgrade (or at least try the beta), here are the new or enhanced features that Adobe are touting:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio-designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

And if those bullets got your juices flowing, here's the download link again: Adobe Lightroom 3 Public Beta

The flash-based tool will render a page in recent versions of the most used browsers, and will let you view an image of the rendered page one at a time, side by side (2-up view) or my personal favorite, onion skin view, which stacks two images from two different browsers on top of each other and gives you a slider to adjust translucency back and forth so you can see just how horribly Internet Explorer renders your page elements relative to every other modern browser.

The service is currently free and I expect that I will be using it quite heavily.

At the time of writing, the supported browsers are:

• Firefox 2.0 - Windows XP - version 2.0.0.18
• Firefox 3.0 - Windows XP - version 3.0.4
• Internet Explorer 6.0 - Windows XP - version 6.0.3790.3959
• Internet Explorer 7.0 - Windows XP - version 7.0.5730
• Internet Explorer 8.0 - Windows XP - version 8.0.6001.18702
• Safari 3.0 - OS X - version 3.2.3
• Safari 4.0 - OS X - version 4.0.3
• Firefox 2.0 - OS X - version 2.0.0.18
• Firefox 3.0 - OS X - version 3.0.4

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook can already be dangerous places. Things like short links and bogus messages from friends with compromised accounts put unsuspecting and under-prepared users at risk.

Now, AVG's security researchers have discovered a new threat on Facebook. For the first time, they've found hacked Facebook apps. According to AVG, the apps are being used to launch drive-by attacks which target vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash. AVG reports finding seven hacked apps, but they admit there could well be more.

First things first: if you're not running up to date versions of either of those, download them right now. Here's the link to Flash and here's one for Reader. Using anything but the most current version could leave you open to attack.

The attack works like this. Visit the Facebook page for any of the hacked apps and click to install. Instead of the normal process, the page will try to push a poisoned PDF document to your machine. Once open, the infected PDF infects your system with a bogus antivirus application - which are often notoriously difficult to remove.

I've mentioned fake antivirus programs like these before on Download Squad. If you've been infected, you can try the tools listed on this post to clean up your system.

To keep from getting infected in the first place, make sure you:

• have a good antivirus program installed and that it is fully updated
• update browser plugins like Java, Flash, and Adobe Reader as soon as you are prompted to do so
• install any critical Windows updates that are available
• check comments on new apps before you install - others may have already been infected and left a post on the wall!

Adobe has released an Adobe AIR based client for Facebook called Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook. As Digital Inspiration notes, it's better than Facebook's official app.

Photo Uploader for Facebook offers most of Facebook's functionality, with uploading photos being only a small part of it, though it does make uploading photos much better than using Facebook's web interface. The app offers various views including a rich media version and a plain text version, as well as offering a slide show mode.

Adobe is really selling this app short by naming it Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook, given the full functionality of the app. Maybe they don't want to step on any toes, but it seems that with an app this powerful, they'd want to pitch it as an AIR version of the Facebook experience.

The prevailing wisdom is that if you keep your operating system up to date with the latest security patches, and you run antivirus software, you're probably safe from malware. Unfortunately, that's just not true.

Consider yesterday's news that Trend Micro has discovered a new zero-day exploit in Adobe Reader. Who doesn't have Adobe Reader on their machine? If you have it, how careful are you about keeping it up to date? To be fair, the likelihood that you are going to try to open an infected PDF file is probably fairly small, but on the other hand, Adobe Reader is only one of probably hundreds of applications on your machine. As Mozilla recently discovered, thousands of Firefox users have potentially vulnerable older versions of Flash running on their machines.

So what's a responsible computer user to do? It's a difficult problem. Some software vendors are very responsible about pushing out updates to their software when needed. Others leave it in the user's hands. There are tools that will scan your machine and let you know when updates are available, but I'm not a big fan of these; I think users should know just what is changing on their system.

The best you can do is to be vigilant and consider your software at the same level you do the operating system when ensuring your machine is up to date. Obviously web-facing software or software that interacts with downloaded files are the biggest concern, and anything that is ubiquitous or incredibly popular, like Microsoft Office or your favorite browser.

What do you do to make sure your machine is as secure as you can make it?

[via InSecurity Complex]

Photoshop has come to the iPhone in the form of Adobe's new Photoshop.com app. As someone with a lot of experience using Photoshop on the desktop, and a little bit of practice with Photoshop.com, I was surprised to find that the iPhone version is incredibly light. There are no layers, no brushes, and no levels ... just a lot of filters. You can touch up the exposure and saturation on your photos, add borders and vignettes, and apply a tint or a number of preset color effects. When you're done, you can save your work on your phone or upload directly to a photoshop.com account.

Honestly, I think Adobe got this one right. It would be cool to do some serious photo editing on the iPhone, but even the 3GS doesn't have the specs for the more resource-heavy features we've come to expect from Adobe's Creative Suite apps. iPhone users mostly just want to make their photos look a little better, and it's not like they're shooting with some kind of 12 megapixel DSLR. The Photoshop app delivers: just throw a little soft focus on there, fix up the colors, and you're good to go. The app also seems to be a promotional effort to get people to sign up for photoshop.com accounts, but it's not much harder to save your images and then upload them to Flickr or another photo sharing site you like.

Flash is coming to the iPhone! Well, sort of. Adobe is showing off a new feature of Flash CS5 Professional that will convert Flash/Actionscript into iPhone apps. The public beta of CS5 with Flash Platform is due out later this year, but for now, you can test out some iPhone games that were created with the new system. For comparison, check out the puzzle game Chroma Circuit on the web and then on the iPhone.

This is good news for Flash developers who want to get their games into the App Store without having to write iPhone-native apps themselves, especially because it allows them to reuse the same code on the web or on Flash-friendly mobile platforms. This might mean that we'll see some of our favorite Flash time-wasters on the iPhone, too. There's also the possibility that the App Store will be flooded with the same awful Flash games that plague the web now. Developing a lame Flash game for the web doesn't have the same $99 pricetag that signing up for the iPhone developer program does, though, so that might keep the quality of iPhone game offerings from taking a huge dive.

After Adobe's recent acquisition of analytics giant Omniture for $1.8 billion, there was a lot of speculation that Adobe was beginning a foray into the advertising. Now we've got some more clues, since Adobe's partnering with Gigya, a company that distributes widgets and advertising. Now, Adobe's got its fingers in every part of the process, from content creation to ads to analytics.

Adobe's new Distribution Manager lets developers share their Flash widgets on 70 sites, tracks traffic for the widgets, and serves ads. Destinations include Facebook, MySpace and iGoogle, amongst others. It also supports mobile devices, including Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. The iPhone is also (sort of) supported, but without Flash, the widgets have to be part of approved app store apps. Developers can follow their traffic and ads with - what else? - an Adobe Air app.

[via Techcrunch]

Adobe announced it's buying Omniture, the web analytics firm it's been using to track usage stats on its products for years. Omniture is one of the largest analytics companies out there, serving a roster of customers including America Online (this blog's parent company), British Telecom, Disney, eBay, and Ford. Adobe's using thick corporate-speak in its press announcements about this acquisition so far, but the upshot is that they can target content to users with the help of Omniture's behavior-tracking capabilities. That means Adobe is now well-positioned to get into the advertising business.

While Adobe sees Omniture as a business opportunity, some privacy-conscious web users see it as a spyware peddler. You may remember Omniture as the company behind the slightly shady 2o7.net domain, which looked to many users like an IP address, but was actually a domain that Omniture used to track stats. Omniture eventually (sort of) explained 2o7.net, but hasn't stopped using it. They also still offer an option to opt out of the domain's tracking cookies. I haven't heard much of an uproar about 2o7.net in the past few months, but Omniture's privacy policies still say that "the 2o7.net domain is the primary domain our corporate customers use to measure visitor behavior on their website(s)."

Adobe is ditching the free version of Photoshop, the Album Starter Edition, and promoting its web-based version of Photoshop at Photoshop.com instead. The move is sure to annoy devotees of desktop apps, who now have to shell out the money for Photoshop Elements, which is now the cheapest (supported) desktop version of Photoshop. On the other hand, the web app can be used from any machine, and offers 2GB of free storage.

Storage is upgradeable for a fee, and there's an AIR app to handle syncing between Photoshop.com and your desktop. Adobe's also pushing a "plus membership" to Photoshop.com, with a few extra features, including templates. Photoshop.com is extremely easy to use for basic stuff like tinting a photo, adjusting levels, or removing red eye, but if you're a slightly more advanced user, the upgrade to Elements might be worth your money.

[via CNET]

Tilt-shift photography, if you haven't heard of it, is a technique that results in only one small area of a photo being in focus. This tight area of focus often results in the photo appearing to be made up of miniatures, rather than real people and objects. The effect typically requires a special (and often expensive) tilt-shift optical lens. If you don't have the money for the real thing, or just want to play with the effect, check out Tiltshift Generator.

The Tiltshift Generator website hosts a Flash application that will allow you to open any image that is local on your file system, then apply effects that will approximate the tilt-shift effect. The default settings out of the gate are quite good, but if you're not happy with the results there are a number of tweaks you can make to get just the effect you're looking for. You can also apply the effect to portraits, to really focus in on the subject matter. While not a traditional use of a tilt-shift camera, the effect when using Tiltshift Generator on this type of photo is quite nice.

In addition to being a website, Tiltshift Generator is available as an Adobe AIR free cross-platform application, so you can take your tilt-shifting offline.

One of the challenges of web design is making sure your site renders properly in the most popular browsers your visitors use. Sometimes, this means installing an extra browser or two (or ten) on your system, to preview your page in each one. It might even mean running multiple operating systems. Well, Adobe BrowserLab aims to fix all that by generating previews of a page as it would look in several different browsers, across multiple operating systems.

You can view the previews side-by-side to get a direct comparison between Firefox 2 and 3 for Mac or Windows XP, IE 6 and 7 for Windows XP, and Safari 3 for Mac. There's also an Onion Skin mode that allows you to overlay one version on another, with adjustable transparency. Sure, there are some perfectly viable browsers that aren't included, but the most popular players are all there. It will be interesting to see if Adobe expands BrowserLab to reflect the increasing adoption of mobile browsers.

The free preview of BrowserLab is available now, but it's limited and there aren't always slots available. You'll find a "check status" link on the download site to let know whether you can get in.

Being "the guy" in charge of open source and standards at a company more known for its closed source products is a job I don't envy. Adobe's Dave McAllister, however, is a man that loves that kind of challenge and that's exactly the role he plays.

Dave's involvement in Open Source pre-dates the creation of the term itself. As a key member of the Silicon Graphics team in the early 1990s, he was involved in key OSS projects like OpenGL. McAllister also co-founded Cassatt and helped develop pioneering cloud computing solutions based on 37 open source projects.

When he was hired on by Adobe in 2006, McAllister went right to work, sitting down for a meeting with his new CTO and asking "When can I Open Source the Flash player?"

That hasn't been fully possible yet, due in no small part to the presence of technologies within Flash that Adobe must license from other vendors - like the h.264 codec. Flash player's foundations - things like the SWF, FLV, RTMP, AMF, and FlashCast specifications - are all published.

The Flex SDK, Blaze DS, and ActionScript virtual machine are also fully open source, and Adobe grants full patent use on all these things, which allows developers to go wild and produce cool things like the Pushbutton Game Engine. "If we can't open source the code," Dave told me, "we will open how it was built."

Do you ever have to design or have input into software user interfaces? If not, you might want to skip this post, but if so, Balsamiq Mockups might be of interest to you. The concept of the program is quite simple: create a bare-bones version of the user interface in question. So bare bones, in fact, that it almost looks like it was sketched.

The hand-drawn style might seem a little funny at first, but it serves a couple of very real purposes. Firstly, it makes it extremely clear that what you create with it is nothing but a mockup; nobody you show it to is actually going to expect that it be able to do anything. Second, it strips away all of the more subjective elements of design like color and shading, so you can focus on the usability of the layout of your user interface.

Balsamiq Mockups is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux, but unfortunately that flexibility comes with a price, in more ways than one. The first price is that it's a Flash application, so to run it on your machine as a desktop app requires Adobe Air. The second price is, well, the price: $79 US to be exact. Well, that's not entirely true. Yes, it is $79US for the full desktop version, but if you're not worried about being able to save your mockups or export them as PNG files, you can install a feature-limited desktop version for free.

[via John Watson]