The I.T. Life

I’ved used Lightroom for a few years now, and it is a super powerful tool for organizing and editing your photos. I think anybody that has a DSLR and shoots in RAW (and if you can shoot in RAW you have no reason not to) should use it (or something similar like Appeture). Well this is some more icing on the cake for Lightroom users, we can now control Lightroom via a iPad app. Now, I still don’t have an iPad, but this is even more reason to get one!

So, photoshop has a new toy/site out now called photoshop express. So basically it is 1 part a flickr/picasa/whatever rip off, because it allows you to have albums, store up to 2gb of photos and have a public gallery. It is secondly, 1 part a super super light version of photoshop. I have yet to truly play with it but here are my first observations.

- It claims to link to various other photo sites, but it neglects the #1 site, flickr… why would it even do this?
- It isn’t anything new. Flickr, Picasa, and all the other sites out there allow you to rotate, adjust color, light, and the basic other little things that need to be done to almost every photo.
- 2gb of storage… I know it is just a public beta, but Adobe can afford a lot more than this, and when many sites give unlimited storage, this is a joke

So there not mine. But I keep them in my toolbox, and use them regularly. So far everything I have ever needed to do Ajax related, has come from these libraries. So here they are, and a brief summary.

• Spry, by Adobe:
  • This is a great framework, though still very early, and a bit rough. It has a lot of excellent features. It has some of the more common items like sortable tables, tabbed interfaces, fun effects, all that jazz. It also has a very extensive XML library to it, it makes dealing with datasources a breeze, and takes most of the heavy work done. One of the best things this provides is a dreamweaver plugin that allows drag and drop use of all these tools. This will be a very very powerful library, once they get all the kinks worked out. My biggest complaint is that it is almost impossible to combine this XML capability with the rest of the library. It seems to die instantly
• Script.aculo.us:
  • This Library is very well known. It is based on Prototype, and is a very nice library. It’s more noticeable features are its easy as cake drag and drop, and its effects. It has a very large set of DOM utilities, and unit testing tools as well. It has a lot of support for incorporating with Ruby on Rails, and is already used by some of the biggest names on the net (Digg, and Apple for starters). This library has saved my ass a few times already, and its worth checking out.
• ASP.Net Ajax, by Microsoft:
  • So, if you are doing .Net work, then this is for you. Microsoft has a excellent Ajax library, that like Adobes, links in to there too (Visual Studio) and allows for drag and drop insertion of there fun toys. I haven’t used this in over a year, but from what I read, it has gotten much better, and it wasn’t that bad when I used it. What I loved about this, is how it allows you to link in back end code to the functions, so you can code a very slick Ajax app, without much js knowledge, or knowledge of how data goes back and forth between a server side and client side language.
• Lightbox 2:
  • This is a very small,1 purpose library. It is also very very cool. Basically, it allows you to load and view a full image, and overlay it on the screen. It makes slide shows, gallery’s and image previews a piece of cake.

Now, I have a few more links here that are based on the stuff above mostly. They are small additions or libraries, but expand these a lot.

Sortable Tables
Script.aculo.us Two Handle Slider