AMPed

So.

I gave it a few days for the servers to stop getting pounded over at Adobe Media Player.

Today I went back into Adobe Media Player to watch Star Trek: TOS, All Our Yesterdays.

And a nice lady told me (literally told me) "This content is currently unavailable.

Same thing for all CBS shows.

Go to play an episode of MTV Cribs:"PLAYBACK FAILED. This media file format is invalid or not supported by Adobe Media Player."

Universal Media Group (Music Videos)? Plays. Yay. But I could watch those in YouTube. In fact, most of the rest of the shows are just internet videos that can be found elsewhere online. It looks pretty, but I am so far not very impressed. Mostly because I was looking forward to watching all those Star Trek episodes....

And the interface? Pretty but unfunctional. Want to watch an episode? Click on it. If it doesn't play, go to the downloads screen and force the episode to resume. Wait for it to finish, and when it does, it disappears, like Kaiser Soze. It could just be the Canada thing, or it could be my flaky internet, but the whole experience has been less than outstanding.

I turned on Hotspot Shield to see if that would help. No luck. The things I could get to play (Universal Music Videos, Bikini Destinations) were choppy, and didn't have any sort of caching, and play back was horrible (not everyone has great internet connections), there is nothing to distinguish a 20 second preview clip from an actual show, so you have to click on something to wait for it to start to play before you can tell if it is a show or a preview.....

Tried watching Diggnation's Live in Amsterdam fiasco, but the video had to download fully before I could watch it (yay), but after waiting for ten minutes, I went and checked the downloads page, and it had stopped downloading.

Grr.

Colour me unimpressed by the whole experience. iTunes, for all it's flaws, is easy to use, intuitive, and pretty seamless. All AMP offered me was a choppy Feist video and 20 seconds of girls in bikinis.

Thanks, but no thanks. At least for now.

64 bits of pain?

Any Photoshop users out there will remember this like it was last year, which it was.

Back in the days of CS2, it was actually faster to run Photoshop on an old PowerPC machine than it was to run on an intel machine, because Adobe was late to the whole Intel party. Because the program was built in Carbon, they didn't have the option of clicking on that fancy button to build an app that would run natively in Cocoa on both PPC and Intel chips.

But, for CS3, they scraped and coded and pushed and prodded and beat it into shape so that Photoshop actually ran quite well on Intel Macs.

Well, yesterday, it came out via John Nack's blog that Carbon has bit them in the bottom once again, and by extension, all Photoshop users.

At last year's WWDC, says Nack, Apple announced that it was dropping it's efforts to create a 64-bit version of Carbon, which meant that Adobe had to drop plans for a 64 bit version of Photoshop for Mac, at least for CS4.

How important is 64 bit? In my life, not very. Not until I start seeing what it can do. Yes, they say it has the musclepower to open big files faster, and it will allow Photoshop to be bigger, stronger, faster. But how much bigger? How much better? How much faster? I guess we see when the next version of the software comes out what sort of gulf there is between the Windows and Mac version. Nack's blog seems to imply that it will be 8-12% faster.

I suspect in my life what it'll mean is not that I find a Windows box to use photoshop on, but at worst, I'll just skip a cycle of Photoshop. Heck, I skipped CS2, not that this'd be any different.

And, since Adobe is well aware of the problems and issues, I suspect that the Mac version will be optimized for what it can be. Will it be covered in 64 bit shiny goodness? Nope. But it will still rock.

I hope.

In the meantime, get ready for a couple years of name calling, flag waving, and yelling back and forth from users. Apple vs. Adobe. Mac vs PC. WoW players vs. Star Wars Galaxy fanboys....

Update:

Read all about the history of Apple and Adobe (and carbon and cocoa, and 32 bit and 64 bit) over at Ars. Gruber has his thoughts on the matter, too.