Adobe – Ciaran Laval

March 21, 2014

A Massive Cross Promotion Opportunity Stares Linden Lab And Adobe In The Face

Adobe are currently offering Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 for a subscription of $9.99 a month if you sign up for a one year plan :

For a limited time, you can join a special Creative Cloud plan. It includes access to Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5, plus feature updates and upgrades as they are available, 20GB of cloud storage for file sharing and collaboration, and a Behance ProSite. And it’s just US $9.99/month when you sign up for a one-year plan, but you need to join by March 31, 2014.

Now if you’re in the the Euro zone it’s 12.29 a month including VAT and in the UK it’s £8.78 including VAT … the temptation to rant here is rather immense, but I’ll let it pass. The prices are reasonable, here’s the thing, Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful tool that could be used for Second Life content creation. Adobe used to have an island in Second Life, I don’t know if they still have that island but I visited the place when they had an event many moons ago.

The transport was a freebie and they had entertainment there during the day, so Adobe did at one stage have a clue about how to use Second Life. However even if they no longer have an island, their new monthly subscription plan is ideally placed for being bundled with some sort of Second Life premium membership plan. One aimed at content creators.

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January 8, 2013January 9, 2013

When Offers Go Wrong

Tateru Nino has received word on why the weekend Amazon offer was pulled with a reply from Peter Gray of Linden Lab:

“This offer was terminated early due to repeated attempts to circumvent the one-per-customer limit, but we saw great demand for the deal and hope to be able to offer similar special promotions in the future”

Inara Pey has decided to award Linden Lab’s Amazon offer the inaugral SL Palme d’Face Award, for not seeing the blindingly obvious. However Linden Lab don’t appear to be the only people unable to see the blindingly obvious, Adobe have been at it this week too.

Yesterday it went viral that you could download the Adobe CS2 suite for free, this included old versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, which generally won’t play nicely with the latest operating systems. This rumour started due to Adobe announcing that the activation servers would be turned off and they placed the serial numbers on their site, in no time at all word spread that CS2 was now free, people were downloading away like mad and then the links stopped working and Dov Isaacs of Adobe quashed the rumours in a forum thread:

“On behalf of Adobe Systems Incorporated …

You have heard wrong! Adobe is absolutely not providing free copies of CS2!

What is true is that Adobe is terminating the activation servers for CS2 and that for existing licensed users of CS2 who need to reinstall their software, copies of CS2 that don’t require activation but do require valid serial numbers are available. (Special serial numbers are provided on the page for each product download.) See <http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1114930>.

You are only legally entitled to download and install with that serial number if you have a valid license to the product!

– Dov”

When I say this rumour about CS2 being free went viral, I’m not talking about forum threads, it was reported by the likes of CNET and Forbes.

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November 5, 2012November 5, 2012

Books And Libraries

So my ususal Monday trick of listening to Digital Human on BBC Radio 4 for blog inspiration failed this week because they were talking about Cyborgs, transhumanism and whether we are all subsconsciously becoming Cyborgs and try as I did, I couldn’t find an angle to get to Second Life from that material, a jolly good listen however.

So I decided, after urgings, to investigate e-books. This was a tale of woe, first of all I tried to get an e-book from Waterstones. However to read e-books on the PC I needed to download Adobe Digital Editions, this was a breeze and now I was cooking on gas, all I needed to do was remember my Adobe password and I could install my soon to be purchased e-book on different mediums, if I didn’t register, I’d only be able to read it on my PC. At this point things went tits up, I couldn’t remember my password. Aha, there’s a password reset request and sure enough, I was informed an email was on its way. Several hours later and I’m still waiting.

So instead I went to Amazon, installed their Kindle for PC reader, realised I’d forgotten my Amazon password… oh heck but this time a password reset request actually worked. The only annoying thing left was having to pay VAT on my e-book, in the UK we don’t pay VAT on physical books but an e-book is considered an electronic service, not a book, even though it is a book, I’ll save that rant for another day, although Remember Remember, the fifth of November is an ideal day for a rant about The Government! The real moral of this story is to remember your passwords.

Then I read a little and decided to quickly take a look at the Second Life storytelling scene and popped to the Seanchai Library.

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February 23, 2012February 23, 2012

Blender 2.62 Now With Second Life Compatibility Option For Exporting Armatures

Back in January I reported that there was talk of Blender dropping support for Collada. This was a tad concerning but as I pointed out at the time, not the end of the world. Collada is the format used to get Mesh into Second Life, so in Second Life terms it was important but you can happily use older versions of Blender to create content. Blender 2.62 hasn’t ended this discussion, but Collada support is not only still there, there’s now a mention of Second Life with the addition of a compatibility option for exporting armatures, which you can read about here.

There is also a mention of the issues with Collada and Blender there too:

“There has been much discussion about the state of the Collada integration, it’s not currently working very reliable yet, and this needs to be solved somehow. A new team now started working to improve Collada support to get it more useful for integration with external tools and game engines, improving the existing OpenCollada based I/O module.”

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