The horrors of Photoshop text rotation

Whilst having a good laugh at the Internet Explorer 8/Nickelback promotion this morning (submitted to Reddit with the amusing headline Lose-lose. Download Internet Explorer 8 get a Nickelback mp3.), I noticed the Mark of Photoshop:

IE8/Nickelback promotion text with dodgy rendering

You see it everywhere:

Photoshop text rotation from Richer Sounds promotional email

The reason is that, when you rotate text in Photoshop, it gets it wrong. Every time. Even in CS4:

Example of Photoshop rotating text incorrectly

There are ways to work around this bug, but it is a bug, and a pretty egregious one. I mean, how hard can it be? Well, not very, since just about every other program I’ve ever used can render text at an angle and do it properly without obvious rounding errors—and without costing the price of a decent upper-arm prosthesis. It’s high time Adobe fixed it.

For a piece of software that costs so much, Photoshop can be pretty disappointing. I guess Adobe can afford to coast when they’ve got such a captive market, but it’s a program that increasingly feels like new features are just being phoned in from the beach.

2009-07-01 10:31 UTC. Comments: 2.

Dedication’s what you need, if you wanna be a Record Breaker

Last weekend, I, James, and about 850 others headed to Devonshire Square where we channelled the spirit of the late great Roy Castle and took part in a world record attempt.

We were trying to beat the record for the most Ukuleles played at one time by exceeding the previous record of 401 people, set in Stockholm in 2007. I already had a ukulele, and James’s friend B—, who was also taking part, lent him her old one (a pink flying V!). More…

2009-06-27 21:43 UTC. Comments: 0.

Liberating culture

The National Gallery houses the national collection of Western European painting from the 13th to the 19th centuries. It is on show 361 days a year, free of charge.

You can look at the collection online via a fancy zooming panning scrolling widget. It’s very clever, but the experience of peering at a painting through a tiny porthole (even on the ‘full screen’ version) isn’t the best one.

I don’t believe that our shared cultural heritage should be locked up behind browser widgets, so I took a look at reverse-engineering the system. That may sound controversial, but it’s actually completely in line with the Gallery’s stated aim of making its pictures available: More…

2009-06-27 18:48 UTC. Comments: 0.