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Great New Deal for Photographers from Adobe

Announced at Photoshop World in Las Vegas today, Adobe will soon be offering customers who are licensed for Photoshop (Standard or Extended) CS3 or later an upgrade to the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop AND Lightroom 5 for less than £10 per month.

Based on past refresh cycles, Adobe tend to release new software every 18-24 months so that’s effectively (less than) £240 per version of both bits of software. A quick google shows that Photoshop CS6 is currently available for £499, and Lightroom at £97 so that’s a considerable overall saving, not forgetting the cashflow advantage of small regular payments for hobbyists and small businesses rather than a lump sum payment up front.

I understand that the offer will be place within a couple of weeks and will be available until the end of 2013. Anyone subscribing before then will, as I understand it, pay the offer price until such time that they wish to unsubscribe.

By |September 4th, 2013|Apple Software News|0 Comments
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September 10 Announcement Confirmed

As predicted, the usual 7 days before Apple make their announcement, invitations have begun arriving with selected journalists and bloggers for an event at 10am (6pm in the UK) on September 10th at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.

No further information as to what the event will be, but the event invite reads “This should brighten everyone’s day” which would tie in nicely with the predicted iPhone 5C and 5S. We’ll keep our ears to the ground and let you know if we hear any further information on the announcement, whether it will be streamed, and its possible content.

By |September 3rd, 2013|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Help! I’ve Spilled A Drink On My Laptop!

I wanted to take a moment today to offer some tips on what to do in what is probably the most common hardware related issue we see on a day to day basis: liquid damage.

I’m sure that most people reading this post will sit regularly, notebook on their lap, or iOS device in their hands, with a cup of tea, wine, beer or water. And almost all of you will have, at some point, had that moment of panic when you’ve almost spilt your drink onto whatever device it is you’re holding…….right?

Having worked at an Apple repair facility in the past, I know that repairs to machines subjected to liquid spills are usually expensive to repair. This is due to how modern devices are built to keep them small and light; the downside of this is that if one component fails, for whatever reason, it requires many more to be replaced. As liquid damage is not covered by any warranty, you could almost be looking at the price of a new unit to repair any damage you cause by spilling liquids. So I wanted to offer some advice on what to do should you have an accident, and how you can possibly prevent any serious damage being done.

The first thing to do is disconnect from the mains and turn the machine off, and then get as much of the liquid out of the machine as possible. Stand it upright to allow liquid to drain out, but DO NOT rub or shake the device. Once the majority of fluid is out, dab the unit with kitchen towel or a microfibre cloth to get rid of as much as possible. If you have a removable battery, […]

By |September 2nd, 2013|Help and Advice|0 Comments
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Weekly News Round Up 30/8/13

iPhone Announcements Imminent
After months of speculation, it looks like an announcement for the forthcoming 7th generation iPhone is imminent. No dates have been confirmed yet, but many industry insiders are predicting September 10th as the day announcements will be made, with availability probably 7-14 days later. It is widely expected that the new phone will look similar to the previous generation iPhone 5, with the addition of a fingerprint sensor, improved processor, better camera and dual LED flashes. There is also a huge amount of speculation that Apple will be expanding the colour range of the new model, to include gold/champagne along with the black and white models we’re used to. Further rumours include the possibility of a lower-cost model (which may be limited to certain countries) sporting a plastic shell and there is the slightest chance that iPad models will be announced at the same event.

Of course it goes without saying that iOS 7 is expected to release along with the new phones, promising many usability updates and a much commented on new look.

If the expected date of 10th September is true, we expect to see press coverage from invited journalists from around the 3rd of the month, so we’ll keep our eyes peeled for updates.

 
SimCity for Mac Finally Launches
Delayed by six months, the Mac release of SimCity is finally available. This is the first release of a new SimCity game for the Mac since 2003, and the gameplay has changed significantly. For the first time, users are required to have Internet connectivity to play the game, as it involves regional play where cities being controlled by multiple players are able to share resources and citizens, doing business together to enable their own cities to […]

By |August 30th, 2013|Apple Hardware News, Apple Software News, Broadband Information|0 Comments
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SSD Upgrades

With the advent of many of Macs moving to SSD (Solid State Drive), we thought it would be interesting to try an experiment to see what difference we saw by using a SSD-based system. To explain briefly, SSD storage is faster and more reliable (due primarily to a lack of moving parts) than the hard drives we’ve been using for the past few decades, but at this point, somewhat more expensive.

The system we looked at was a 2008 model MacBook, no longer a quick machine but it should be suitably powerful for a typical home user. Running Aperture 3, we were beginning to find that with an internal 7200rpm 500GB spinning hard drive (so, not the entry level hard drive that came wih this machine) and 4GB of RAM, that moving between photos in our library (which admittedly was getting large at 80Gb) was moving from sluggish to infuriatingly slow. Most other applications were running OK, typical things like Office and Safari were more than acceptable. But anything that required manipulation or searching of large amounts of data was slowing performance.

First off, we replaced the internal 500GB drive with a similarly sized SSD. We decided to try one of the slower SSD’s (price mainly), and the difference was phenomenal. Searching in Outlook was much snappier, browsing through our Aperture library almost instantaneous.

The next thing we tried was top replicate the existing machine on the lowest specification MacBook Air. So, now we had an SSD that was just about full to the brim, and just 2GB of RAM. And yet it performed better than the older MacBook. Obviously the Air had a better processor, faster memory etc etc, but the wow factor was this […]

By |August 26th, 2013|Upgrade Hardware|0 Comments
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