Shockwave as a player has a new product manager which can only be a good thing. Earlier this week she announced the preview of a new Shockwave player, and she's keeping herself busy:

Macromedia, in the person of Emmy Huang is inviting the director community to create Shockwave content about the US Presidential election.

While I think its a good idea to stimulate the creation of content related to current high attention events, the US Presidential election may be a poor choice: Every effort will be compared to (and look miserable in comparison with) the hugely popular JibJab rendition of This Land is my Land...

Thomas Higgins points us Director fanboys to an article by the Flash Player Product Manager about changes in XP SP2. Having had SP2 (the RC's) installed on my TabletPC for some time, most of what Waleed Anbar says isn't new. In his article, he mentions the Local Machine Zone Lockdown. Basically what this means is that you get an extra two (!) warnings if you use ActiveX content in local files, such as publish preview pages from Flash and Director, and pages from browser based CD-Roms.

There is a public beta available of a new Shockwave installer

After the experience of installing Shockwave with my mother I concluded: "the lesson to learn is that - at least for my mother - the problem in installing the Shockwave plugin was in the combination of a long download and the number of dialogs". Anything that made her wait or choose made her doubt if she was doing a good thing.

The new Shockwave installer is about half the size of the previous versions, and has two less dialogs. Macromedia is listening!

I just got off the phone with my mother. She's been getting computer lessons from my sister Wopke. My mother used to do some computer work for my father's practice, but this "Windows" thing is totally new for her. Webbrowsing, emailing and MSN, she's learning it all (one step at a time). Anyway. she called me.

Apparently, my mother wanted to show my aunt Riet the panoramic photography I do. Riet is a "real", analog photographer, or at least I have always regarded her to be one.

"I'm on your site. Can I see the photos any bigger?"
- "Sure, you just click on the small thumbnail image I and the browser will show an image you can look around in."
"Yes, we did that, but all we got was this big bar that filled up really slowly. It also said something with Shockwave."

How's Tabitha doing these days? Just fine actually. I'm using my Tablet quite a lot, and doing presentations from a tablet (tethered to a projector) impresses the hell out of people ;-). I like walking around a bit while presenting, and the TC1100 lets me do just that. After about one and a half hour she gets a bit heavy, but other than that the formfactor is just perfect. I just gotta train my left arm a little.

I've even been using Tabitha to get some stitching done while traveling. This kind of works, though picking controlpoints is a bit tricky in a moving train. When using photoshop though, I could use some additional buttons. The TC1100 has 3 reprogrammable buttons and a rocker switch, but unfortunately it only has system-wide settings; I need different buttons/keys when I am using Photoshop than when I am eg using my SPi-V engine. I have been trying to set up Girder to make the buttons behave differently for different applications, but I'm not there just yet.

Brilliantly useless, utterly cool: GPS drawing. Some of the graphs are avaliable in a nice Shockwave based viewer too.

I wish I had that much time...

Well, that took only half a day of fiddling...

Since the Windows XP Service Pack 2 includes a significant update to the Tablet PC part, one of the first things I installed when my tablet finally arrived was installing the SP2 public preview (RC2 at the time). I noticed a few bugs, and was happy to see most of them gone in the RTM version I am running now.

One of the odd things I noticed was that SP2 broke the transparency of my PNG files. I am using a HTC component to properly display PNG transparancies on a couple of websites. The neat thing about this approach is that it requires only a single reference to a CSS file, and there is no additional scripting that could confuse other borwsers. However, after installing SP2, transparency was gone.

The second installment of my very own panoramic photography exhibition starts this sunday.

My friend, de facto agent and colleague Ianus and his wife Anneke are kind enough to let me back in after the first part of my exhibition back in april. Doing an exhibition of your work is definately a rush. I'm pretty excited with some of the new stuff that I will be showing.

Now if only I would sell, say... 90 prints, I can buy myself that Spheron camera I was talking about ;-)

DPReview has some news about Fuji's upcoming S3 camera.

I'm using an S2 for my panoramic photography, and am very happy with the camera. If the Canon 300D and/or Nikon 70D would have come out sooner, I would have probably bought one of those, but in the end I think it is a good thing I went for the S2. It's a great camera.

Now the S3 is something I'm really looking forward to. Many people are whining it is only such a small update from the S2. No 'professional body', no full frame sensor and no actual higher resolution. The only major new feature is increased dynamic range. And that's exactly the feature I was hoping for ;-)

Yesterday I got all excited about this post on Director3d.de. Not because of the apple script hack to send a command to a Director Projector in OS X, but because of this sentence:

"Beware: 'the commandLine' doesn't get set for a few seconds after launch."