People keep moaning that us Brits are being ripped off with the iPhone but I don’t think they have been doing their sums.

A lot of companies use the classic Clinton Era exchange rate of 1.6 dollars to the pound when pricing goods for the UK market.  Probably because you can’t keep changing the RRP month by month as the US market fluctuates like a mad thing.   So I worked out what Apple used and it seems close to a quite generous 1.74 dollars to the pound. See…

399USD * (1/1.74) = 229.43 + (VAT) = 269.58GBP

Actual Price: 269GBP

For fun, lets have a look what Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium Full would cost if Adobe used the same sums as Apple.

1599USD * (1/1.74) = 919.425 + (VAT) = 1080.32GBP

Actual Price: 1404.12GBP

So knock at Adobes door, not Apples.  (Yes I’m still obsessed with Adobes pricing)

This probably isn’t important… at all, it’s just that it’s confused the hell out of me.

Adobe have given Photoshop a new logo. Why would you change the logo in between releases? And will the dock icon no longer suite the rest of creative suite? And why should photoshop have a logo and none of the others? And why does it remind me so much of the Open University?

I’m now using lightroom after all

I originally poo-pooed lightroom because it didn’t offer any obvious way to share your library over a network, and I want to be able to edit photo’s upstairs on my iMac and be able to show people photo’s occasionally on my iBook downstairs.  It doesn’t let you open a library over a network either.

I’ve been using bridge for a while because it doesn’t use a central library.  But after a few weeks it becomes very very slow, beach balls all over the place. It doesn’t seem to have a very efficient cache, it ironically seems to make it slower rather than faster.

So I thought, well what now, and grudgingly gave lightroom another go. Turns out lightroom is freaking great and I was totally dumb not to realize how it can work perfectly over a network.

All you do is store the photo’s in a traditional folder layout on the HD, and alway import them without moving them to the catalogue.   Set a preference to always write changes to the files metadata and you’re away.  It’s even got a folder list, clever enough to have the parent of the most high level folder of a photo existing in your library.

So what you do is create a different catalogue on each comp and import the photo’s over the network without copying them.  Then each time you want to update lightroom on the other comp all you have to do is right click the folder in the folders panel and select “synchronise” it doesn’t take long at all and it works just great.

Also, for some reason it doesn’t seem to be affected by Adobe’s policy of ripping off people in europe.  RRP in the US is 299USD, in the UK it’s 205GBP including VAT.  Not only that, amazon.co.uk are selling it with 50 quid off!  Bargain!

I dunno if this makes even more angry that people are forced to import creative suite from america though.

OMG, I have a blog!

Can anyone explain this screenshot?

Woah, what a post… after all this time!

Susan tell’s me Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has been released.  Yeah, the photoshop bit in the name is really necessary.  Here’s my review summary…

Pros…

• It does stuff with photo’s.

Cons…

• It has no network support.
• You can’t store the library on a network location.
• It doesn’t even let you keep the library DB on the local drive and store the photo’s on a network location (it crashes)
• It doesn’t share photo’s over the network
• No network here jimini cricket
• It’s NASty with my NAS drive
• Hey mate, what’s a network do?
• A Network is as a network does
• A computer network is two or more computers connected together using a telecommunication system for the purpose of communicating and sharing resources.

Overall I give Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0:  No Network Support out of 10

If you ever need an example of how us people of the united kingdom are ripped off (or “rip off britain” as I believe its known) check this one out. Have a look at the price of this at amazon.com, and now at this from amazon.co.uk. Amazon haven’t made a mistake either, they’re the proper prices. To make it even more comical, if you were to purchase it from amazon.com, pay international shipping and even if it was prodded and probed by customs and you had to pay the tax… you would still be paying half the money that you would if you bought it from the UK. And that is just one reason why I despise adobe. Hmm, why have even been checking creative suite out when the universal version isn’t out yet?

It is going to be so embarrassing to watch our footie side play in the knockout stages, we barely survived against some unknown Caribbean island who I doubt even knew they were in the world cup.

I’m quite digging Adobe’s new Lightroom app. It’s their newey for competing with iPhoto/Aparture/Picasa. There’s a free public beta, no strings. With it being the first beta there are some major bugs, and there aren’t any tools for such things as cropping, which I hope will be introduced later on. Anyway I absolutely love the interface, it reminds me of Ableton Live, which also has an interface i love. You can switch between different screen layouts using hotkeys, so that you can get a nice view of the photo whilst you’re doing things and just see the tools that you need at the time, whilst being minimalist in design, mostly black so that your photo’s are always the most prominent thing on your monitor. It’s also fast, even on my iBook, much much faster than iPhoto at switching between photo’s. Also better than iPhoto, it lets you choose what you do with importing photo’s, copy them to it’s own folder or keep them where they are. Please apple, will you do the same? There’s mucho colour tools and a lot of them I don’t even understand, so a bit of experimenting may be needed there. But all in all it’s looking good. I don’t know what price point it will be when released, i’m hoping it won’t have a pro price tag.