Alan Coleman's

Photoshop Elements, a fantastic product and a piece of marketing genius. A stripped down version of the fully fledged software install, with all the functionality you’re likely to need unless you work in Hoxton or drink Latte Coffee or wear a Nike Windcheater. Ideal for developers like myself who just need to cut and crop and maybe do bit of contrast correction. It had the Adobe professional interface from Illustrator and Photoshop so if you learnt on one then it’s all easy, same menus, same shortcuts, same everything. All for about £50 – it’s all good, as everyone says now.

So Photoshop Elements, it’s all good. At least it was.

So there I was in one job using my trusty old Elements to great effect, then I got made redundant and moved on to my current position and they used Illustrator for Photo manipulation. Bad as it is impossible. No, “Elements” I said nodding happily, “That’s all I need”.

Elements turns up and it’s version 5 which I start to get exited about. After loading it up however, nothing could have prepared me for the horror that awaited me in my new bling monitor. I actually felt my heart drop with disappointment as I looked at my beloved Elements in utter amazement.

It’s been domesticated. By that I mean it now looks like the kind of thing that you got free with a cheap digital camera in 2003. Gone is the familiar interface, shortcuts and working environment, and in its place are huge buttons and tacky picture album templates. It is, f**king awful. Nothing works now, a prime example is the resize tool that you can no longer constrain with the shift key! The most basic piece of Adobe functionality!

Also, it’s made the Microsoft mistake of trying to be too helpful. It leaves an icon in the tray that leaps into action whenever a new device appears, helpfully looking for photos. “No, stop! Go away, I don’t want you to help me find those pictures tucked away deep in the bottom of my Flash thingy”

So now I’ve got to go back to the IT manager and ask for CS like a greedy student who’s never satisfied. I’ll never use most of the functionality and the company will have to float on the stock market to afford it.

If it’s not broken, please, don’t fix it.

On Tuesday I wrote an article on BoomaBlog about how Apple Mac computers get on my nerves. It was a little harsh perhaps, but despite my obvious inverted snobbery it did get me thinking about the pros and cons of Mac or PC from a development point of view.

I once heard the Apple Mac touted as computers for people, an alternative to the human orientated wintel PC. At the time I was a Mac user and thought this seemed like a perfectly reasonable comment to make, after all the Mac has a half decent OS and the hardware is as stylish as it is well built. Also, SCSI and 16 bit sound came as standard. The PC on the other hand doesn’t look all that and has an operating system who’s musical equivalent would probably be James Blunt.

All was well and good with me and Mac until I left a creative industry to start college, which was a PC stronghold. The change over wasn’t that difficult as most things where in the same place, if anything the machines at college seemed to be that bit more stable than the Macs I’d used before.

The true turning point came on an autumn day in London. Whilst working for Fatty on a paving job at the Millbank Tower (that’s another story) I found a dented PC in a skip, covered in brick dust. Whilst it wasn’t going to break any records for speed, I used it for the whole of the first year and even used it to build an ASP site. Things got better when I realised that the cracked software available worked flawlessly, I was hooked.

The throwaway PC theme continues with our home network. The two laptops that myself and Mandy use were also dragged out of a bin. They can be customised, salvaged for parts or modified with open source operating systems very easily, and that’s where the fun starts.

It’s because the PC has become so cheap that users don’t get attached to them. As a patronising analogy, consider having a vintage Triumph Spitfire in the garage, great for impressing your mates, but an old XR2 would be faster, cheaper and more reliable. So despite the let down of its most popular OS, it is the common old PC that is actually the peoples computer. An everyday tool that can be anonymously recycled, never too precious to leave outside with a label on saying, ‘Please take me, I work’.