Wasted Continuum

Adobe has officially released Photoshop Lightroom 2. Lightroom is a powerful application that streamlines your digital photography workflow. From importing your images to printing, publishing or presenting your final work. I personally use Lightroom to import, organize and process all my photos. I don’t know what I would do without it now. I used to spend hours working on my photos. Now, with Lightroom, I can spend more time doing what I love more, shooting photos. Lightroom 2 has added many features. These are what Adobe is listing as the top:

• Local adjustment brush
• Enhanced organizational tools
• Volume management
• Extensible architecture
• Multiple monitor support
• Flexible print package functionality
• Streamlined Photoshop CS3 integration
• Enhanced output sharpening
• 64-bit support for Windows® and Mac OS

I’ve decided to give Flock a try. Lately, I’ve been feeling like Plurk has been killing Firefox. When I have it on too long, all my other pages start to freeze up. Eventually, I’ll have to restart Firefox. It’s annoying. I’m going to try using Flock to have my social media site open and keep my other browsing on Firefox. We’ll see how that goes. My initial impression is that Flock integrates very well with the popular social media sites like twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc. It even sports a photo uploader that looks very much like Flickr Uploadr. I’ll test that out later.

June 17th is the launch date for Firefox 3. Mozilla is trying to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours. As a web developer, I use Firefox along with a slew of add-ons to debug my sites. I also have a lot of add-ons that make my browser so much more efficient. I’ll be downloading it tomorrow. If you want to join in, the Firefox peoples have set up a Download Day 2008 site. Download Day starts at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, June 17th.

Follow Firefox on twitter

My trial version of MarsEdit 2 is about to expire. MarsEdit is a blog publishing application from the people at Red Sweater Software. I’ve been using it to write for Wasted Continuum. After using it almost several times daily, I have decided to purchase it. It has already saved me from losing my work at least twice during this 30 day trial period. MarsEdit has definitely improved my workflow. With it’s tight integration to my Flickr account and simple template creation for my often used tags, it’s almost a no-brainer. MarsEdit is definitely one of those applications where you don’t know what you needed until you use it. There are so many little shortcuts and features that makes writing for a blog simple again. MarsEdit works seamlessly with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, Vox, and more. If you have been looking for a way to organize and streamline your blogging workflow, you should must give MarsEdit a chance. MarsEdit 2 is available for OS X 10.4 or 10.5 for $29.95. You can try a 30 day demo here.

Red Sweater Software
MarsEdit

Adobe has just released a beta of Lightroom 2.0. I’m a big fan of Lightroom. It completely streamlines my photography workflow when it comes to importing, organizing, processing and distributing. It’s an amazing piece of software. I have on many occassions sifted through a 50 plus shot photoshoot and was able to tag and reject the bad ones in around 20 minutes. It makes everything convenient. As a photographer, Lightroom is just a massive timesaver. It’s difficult to think of reasons why one should not use it.

The new features that Lightroom 2.0 is touting are localized corrections, improved organization tools, multiple monitor support, more printing functionality and 64-bit support. When Adobe was working on version 1.0 of Lightroom, they released the beta to the public too. It was a tremendous success and I’m really glad that they are doing it again for this release. I will definitely check out the 2.0 beta soon.

Download Lightroom 2.0 beta

WordPress v2.5 was released the other day. I have not had time to upgrade Wasted Continuum yet. I will probably upgrade this weekend at the latest. It’s looks like a lot of features have been added. Definitely a major update. I’m excited to play with the new features.

Download WordPress 2.5