Without doubt, Photoshop is the most popular pixel manipulation tool for anyone who makes (or aspires to make) money from images. Today, Adobe opens its street stall and lays out the latest version for download and purchase – but with a difference.

Tecnobitsdodges and burns its way to the front.

Alongside a range of under-the-bonnet changes that no one will ever really notice – and a bunch of user interface changes that we will all complain about – Adobe has actually packed some powerful, noticeable changes into its latest version, CS6.

Video editing is given more of a welcome in CS6 and retouching has been enhanced in several ways (by making the software itself more ‘content aware’).

Looking at the success of 3rd party tools, Adobe has also included a more powerful correction system for lenses etc in CS6 – which will be welcomed by Nikon and Canon lovers everywhere.

More importantly, the Mercury Graphics Engine that lies at the heart of CS6 will now have a much more open approach to GPGPU – using AMD Radeon cards as well as the existing support for CUDA-enabled GeForce products.

Last, but by no means least, Adobe has decided to give people a different way of buying.

With CS6, you can buy the product for use ‘one month at a time’ for just £17.58 – which is an incredibly useful feature, especially if you’re running projects that – from time to time – need more personnel.

We tried the purchase system just before hitting ‘Go’ on this article, but while the sales pages were all full of love and ‘£’ for the UK customer, as soon as you actually tried to make a purchase – you were directed to a US site in dollars that did not want UK customers. Maybe someone in the Adobe web team needs to apply the ‘heal’ tool to the store.

Looking at CS6 compared to CS5.5 might not seem such a leap, but if you're using an older version – the arguments for upgrading are compelling. Especially if you use a Radeon graphic card.

Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.

Have you experienced the annoyance of booking into a hotel room only to find that it has one network socket in the corner of the room? Many people have probably already chosen their next hotel based on wireless internet connection support in all rooms. If you are one of these people then a portable wireless router device could be a good investment.

The Tenda W300M is a portable wireless router which can act as an access point allowing you to connect several wireless devices to the internet, or as a wireless repeater extending  the range of the weak hotel wireless signal.

There are also three other functions which are combinations and variations of the previous two. This allows you to make use of this device in many different environments, whether at school, university, work, or conference halls.

Specifications

Tecnobitsis in love with the Japanese idea of maximum efficiency with minimum effort. It’s something that permeates not only the universe as a whole, but the world if technology in particular. One of the first things that any computer science student learns is that, in life, remove repeating groups. Why doesn’t this apply to the iPad?

Way back on 11th May, we ran a story about Apple’s new iPad software update. Earlier, we were contacted by a reader to ask if their experience with the update was (a) normal or (b) totally bizarre.

Having seen our story, she had updated one of her iPads. The second iPad was being used by her kid, so she left it.

This morning, when she attached the second iPad to her PC, Apple not only told her that she needed a software update to 5.1.1 (which she had figured out already, when the same PC said the same thing the day before) – but it also insisted that she download a copy.

When you speak with Apple, they insist that the intelligence has been built into the iPad in such a way as to make it, well, friendly to all users. Maybe, but the download team works in another building.

Both of the iPads are ‘synched’ in the sense that they both install software with the same user name and password – so why the double download?

The use of the same user name and password, means that Apple automatically duplicated all of the software/purchases on both tablets – so the Jobs legacy knows that more than one tablet will need updating…  so why not keep the download instead of pressuring the interwibble for a second batch of around 770MB of data.

Surely this has to be viewed as a kind of ‘really dumb and totally unnecessary kind of spam’ ?

It’s possible that we’ll now be contacted by an Apple guru to say that if only she’s sacrificed a rabbit with a granite blade, thrown potassium iodide over her left shoulder and chanted the phrase Steve Krishna seventeen times in a row, then a copy would have been saved – but it would be nice to be asked.

It's Deja Vu all over again

Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.

This week, the Citrix Synergy conference is going on in San Francisco, with lots of news related to Citrix’s CloudStack strategy coming out, and more. Through today, Friday, you can still access live keynotes and sessions from the conference, available by webcast here. Here is a roundup of some of the major news out of Citrix Synergy.

Citrix announced the launch of Citrix CloudPlatform, the first commercially supported cloud orchestration system based on Apache CloudStack. With the new commercial release, Citrix says "customers can quickly and easily evolve virtualized datacenter resources to automated, elastic, self-service IT delivery models."

Last month, Citrix submitted its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, and, with support from over 50 key ecosystem partners, the Apache Software Foundation accepted CloudStack into its a major battle with OpenStack on the open source cloud computing scene. 

In conjunction with the conference, Citrix has also launched Project Avalon, discussed here.  Project Avalon enables windows desktops and windows applications to be delivered as cloud services, which can help give Citrix’s cloud platform an inroad into appealing to many enterprises. Citrix’s post on Project Avalon notes that it has “taken major engineering efforts to transform the XenDesktop product, which was designed to run on enterprise virtualization architecture, to work seamlessly on Apache CloudStack and Amazon Web Services.” Project Avalon is a big, Windows-focused bet on virtualization and the cloud.

At the conference, Citrix is also swe covered here. Citrix is positioning Podio as a new part of its GoTo line of products, which includes GoToMeeting, and if you consider Podio alongside both GoToMeeting and CloudStack, it becomes clear that Citrix has its eye on end-to-end cloud platform tools, including approachable front-end applications. While Podio isn’t open source, its freemium model and user-configurable cloud collaboration environments have an open and flexible ethos to them. There is a good discussion of this week’s Podio demos here.

With all of Citrix’s CloudStack moves, it’s becoming clear that CloudStack will do direct battle with OpenStack, but we’ve noted that there is room for both of these open source cloud platforms.  We’ve covered Citrix’s decision to cut its support for the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform and move full steam ahead with the next phase of its CloudStack strategy. Both OpenStack and CloudStack have many big backers, so it’s natural that these two platforms are being characterized as engaged in a high-profile fight.

The ReadWriteCloud Channel extrapolated on the notion that multiple cloud platforms can succeed in an excellent point in a post titled "It’s Not Highlander: There Can Be More Than One Open Source Cloud":

"Assuming even one-third of the companies that pledged to support CloudStack become serious contributors, CloudStack should have a bright future. It takes little away from OpenStack for CloudStack to succeed…After all the dust settles, it would be best for everyone from the open source cloud communities to figure out how they can work together. The "there can be only one" approach isn’t going to help anybody, and may benefit Amazon, VMware and other proprietary vendors who can market their wares without any drama."

We’ll round up more news from Citrix Synergy, but through the end of today, you can still catch the free webcasts of events from the conference.

Are you thinking of launching an open source project? Doing so successfully and rallying community support can be more complicated than you think, but a little up-front footwork and howework can help things go smoothly. Beyond that, some planning can also keep you out of legal trouble. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish. In this post, you’ll find our updated collection of good, free resources to pay attention to if you’re doing an open source project.

The Open Source Definition is where every project leader should start when it comes to how open source projects should be distributed, and what actually qualifies as open source. It’s also good to review Open Standards requirements.

As we noted in a this post, the Software Freedom Law Center has a set of very good online resources on how open source licenses and copyrights work, and much more. Legal issues are smart to anticipate up front. The authors are attorneys who were part of creating popular open source licenses. It’s also an excellent idea to keep up with urrent and archived editions of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review

For an easy to digest, plain language discussion of license types for open source projects, and which license will work best for your project, try available here, and the Free Software Foundation has a good primer. It’s also an excellent idea to visit SourceForge, and review the many projects housed there, which types of licenses they have, how their communities work, and more. Should your project be housed there?

If you’re stitching together open source code or deploying applications, Hewlett-Packard’s free application Fossology is designed to analyze the source code for any project and report accurately on which licenses are being used.

For developers who want learning resources, Developer.com offers useful in our post here.

Finally, don’t forget that Tecnobitsitself is an excellent forum for getting questions answered. Type a question in at any time in our Member Questions area (see the Questions button on the home page) and you’ll get answers from experts. You can also read some of OStatic’s many interviews with open source project leaders, some of them found here, here, and here, and find a whole series of interviews on open source cloud-based projects here.