Fewer than three weeks ago we wondered aloud if Opera Software's bid to get its Opera Mini browser into Apple's iPhone App Store was pure folly, or a gamble that Opera could actually win. On late Monday, Opera (and Apple) proved doubters and naysayers wrong (like me, I'll admit) when it approved Opera Mini for iPhone.

Apple's acceptance of a browser app may not seem like a big to-do, until one looks at Apple's notoriously stringent interpretation of the rules it created to keep competing software off the iPhone. Mobile browsers that compete with the iPhone's Safari browser do exist, but they're all based on the same WebKit browser engine used to power Safari. In contrast, Opera has coded Opera Mini using a combination of programming languages, without adopting WebKit. Apple has certainly denied apps for less.

A loophole

At the CTIA conference in March, Opera's founder and former CEO Jon von Tetzchner told CNET that Opera stood a strong chance of getting Opera Mini accepted into the App Store through a loophole. Unlike many Web browsers, Opera Mini doesn't technically request and pull down Web pages through its own native code. Instead, Opera Mini is what's called a proxy browser because it sends Web page requests to Opera's servers, which then compress the Web page before sending it back to the phone. The result is not only an often-faster way to distribute Web content, but a legitimate way to bypass Apple's objection to most standalone HTML browsers.

The appearance of Opera Mini on iPhone significantly gives iPhone users another browser choice based on a completely different Web engine, and one that happens to be noticeably faster than Safari in our tests. Of course, we're holding out our final opinion for a real-world test, but Opera's ability to compress Web page data bodes well for triumph in browser speed tests on iPhone. We'd expect to see makers of other proxy browsers (like Skyfire) follow suit and submit versions of their apps for iPhone.

Opera Mini will be available for free within 24 hours depending on your country of residence. At the time of writing, Opera Mini for iPhone was not available on iTunes or on our San Francisco-based iPhone. Opera tells us that the roll-out begins in Japan and is continuing eastward. While you wait, be sure to check out our hands-on video of Opera Mini on the iPhone, shot just three weeks ago.

You've had months now of teasers and gee-whiz video demos of new features and technologies that Adobe Systems is planning to debut in Creative Suite 5, and there'll be boatloads of people telling you about them over the next 30 days before it ships (here's our summary of Photoshop's new features). But for some of us, the things that Adobe hasn't fixed, and which don't merit viral videos, remain sources of immense frustration.

At the top of my list are the complete lack of upgrade and migration tools. Unlike most applications, Adobe doesn't even provide the option to simply upgrade an existing installation. I know a lot of people need to keep multiple versions of the apps on their systems--I'm one of them--but there are a lot of people who don't, and Adobe's responsible for an amazing amount of hard disk clutter. Furthermore, transferring your settings, presets, Dreamweaver Snippets, Bridge Favorites, and so on is a major pain.

In Photoshop, for example, you have to remember to export styles, Actions, tool presets and other settings before you can manually import them into the newer version, or even into a different installation of the same version. With customization pervading every aspect of the applications, doing this individually for each type of tool is tedious at best. And some things, such as Photoshop's New Document presets and Bridge's Favorites can't be transferred at all as far as I can tell. I expect more from a product that costs almost $700; at the price of the Master Collection, with the concomitant increase in the number of settings you'll want to transfer, well, I'd be pretty annoyed. (We won't really know if the company has fixed the poorly designed updater until the suite's been out for a bit.)

I stress this because there's still time for Adobe to--at the very least--write some scripts to handle settings migration before the product ships. My last communication from them on the subject said that migration tools plans were still "in flux," and I urge everyone who's considering the upgrade to put some pressure on the company to do something about it. It's tempting to consider the upgrade a one-time operation, but what if you get a new system and need to reinstall or run multiple concurrent installations? If none of that matters to you, then just consider this a friendly reminder to export and back up all you custom settings in preparation for upgrading.

And speaking of presets, let's talk about the inability edit many types of presets in Photoshop. For example, if you've got a preset rectangular selection of 30 pixels by 30 pixels, you can't change it to 40 x 40; you have to create a new one. (On the upside, it looks like CS5 has the ability to rename presets. Yippee!) Sounds trivial on something that small, but extend it out to every tool, styles, brushes and so on, and it's just a level of interface rigidity that's like a pebble in my shoe. And for those of us who work with a lot of text, forget about test styles--that feature got left on the programming-room floor.

From the be-careful-what-you-wish-for department comes the new drag-and-drop behavior between Bridge and Photoshop. In previous versions, dragging from Bridge to Photoshop just opened up the image. Now, if you drag into an existing image it "places" the image as a new Smart Object; dragging it to the tab bar opens the image. This is a feature I wanted; now that I've got it, I keep forgetting the new behavior and having to repeatedly redrag the files. There are several interface changes that, for better or worse, at least call for stopping and turning off some new defaults, like the Scrubby Zoom. Of course, there's some behaviors that Adobe finally fixed. Now, when you do a Close All on multiple files, the Save Changes dialog lets you vote Yes or No for all the files (rather than having to click each dialog individually). And Bridge's propensity to disappear Favorites to disconnected drives has disappeared itself--it works right now.

Consider this my opinion as a prosaic Photoshop user who really has no need for most of the whizzy new features rolling out in the upgrade (and who really can't tell if there's any performance improvement until the code is final); I know that beta testers have enjoyed them, but beta testers tend to be a self-selected group more likely to be create reasons to try to integrate new tools into their workflows. For me working with the beta of CS5 felt a lot like working with CS4. When the product ships in a month, I'll be able to report on its performance and whether features like Content-Aware Fill, Puppet Warp and the new paint capabilities still merit their "gee, whiz" or just an "oh, gee."

Originally posted at Crave

Two years ago, Adobe Systems thought the only big change coming with Photoshop CS5 would be the complete overhaul needed to build a 64-bit Mac version. With the unveiling of the software Monday, though, it's clear Adobe far exceeded that low expectation.

Photoshop CS5 brings a number of high-profile features for photographers, artists, and the broader designer market that uses the software. It's just one of numerous changes among the Creative Suite 5 packages Adobe is unveiling at a Monday event, but it's one of Adobe's highest-profile programs. So without further ado, here's what's coming when the new version ships in the next 30 days:

• Automatic lens corrections, based on Adobe's close measurements of various camera bodies and lenses, can ease the removal of barrel and pincushion distortion, vignetting that darkens corners, and chromatic aberration that produces colored fringes along edges. This automates a previously manual chore. People can create their own basic profiles and, showing the wonders of crowdsourcing, share them on the Net.

• Revamped support for high-dynamic range (HDR) photography will let people combine a range of images at different exposures--and this time, produce the desired look out of the composite. Adobe believes it's surpassed the prevailing tool for the job, HDRsoft's Photomatix. Photoshop CS5's HDR Pro feature can be used for an unassuming look that fixes blown-out highlights and crushed blacks, or it can be used to generate the eerie but controversial otherworldly look some HDR aficionados enjoy. For those who want the effect but didn't take bracketed photos at different exposures, a HDR toning command applies the look to a single image.

• Content-aware fill lets a person delete a region of a photo--an unwanted object, for example--and let Photoshop fill in the resulting blank patch even if it's a complicated background. Content-aware fill can also flesh out the blank patches left around the edges when images are stitched into a panorama. It's common knowledge that photo-editing tools can be used to alter reality, but this automates the process even more.

• An advanced selection tool will let people more easily isolate subjects from their backgrounds, even with that most notorious of complicated edges, hair. Photoshop users spend lots of tedious hours at this, often buying plug-ins to help, so any improvement in automation is significant.

• Puppet warp lets people move elements of a scene around with free-form adjustments based on control points and anchor points. Adobe demonstrated it moving an elephant's trunk from the ground to its mouth, and to level a horizon line bowed by lens distortion, but a more likely use case is making models look skinny and curvaceous.

• 64-bit support on Mac OS X. It was there on Windows since Photoshop CS4 was released in September 2008, but now Mac users will get its chief benefit, the ability to handle really large images and exploit the advantages of computers with more than 4GB of memory.

• The artistic set gets new physics-based paintbrush and paint dynamics, including attributes such as ink flow, detailed brush shape, and paint mixing. This process is accelerated by a computer's graphics processing unit, or GPU, and works in conjunction with the pressure and orientation settings of a pen and tablet setup such as those from Wacom.

• The plug-in for handling raw images from higher-end cameras--inconvenient but powerful files taken from the image sensor without in-camera processing into a JPEG--is refurbished with the new, higher-quality processing algorithms for noise reduction and edge sharpening that Adobe is building into the upcoming Lightroom 3.

There's more, of course, many of them lacking the glamour of the above. Bryan O'Neil Hughes, Photoshop product manager, said there were more than 36 changes made to address the "just do it" list of productivity improvements Adobe asked users to supply.

Providing significant new features an important consideration given the unceasing grumbling Adobe faces about its upgrade prices. Adobe hasn't announced pricing, but in the past upgrades have cost hundreds of dollars. The software should be available within 30 days, Adobe said.

It remains to be seen whether Photoshop customers will eagerly embrace the new features. Another constant refrain is grumbling about Photoshop bloat from those who see a faster, svelte version as the most desirable upgrade. The trouble, as Adobe has pointed out, is that nobody can agree on what limbs should be lopped from the Photoshop feature tree.

However, to tidy things up somewhat, Photoshop CS5 gets a series of buttons toward the upper right that tailor the user interface to various common tasks.

Adobe does continue to keep some features out of the regular Photoshop, offering a more expensive premium "Extended" version. With CS5, the flagship feature is Repousse, a module that lets 2D shapes be extruded and otherwise formed into 3D shapes.

Photoshop is 20 years old, and it's now got many stablemates that will be updated Monday. Once upon a time, there was a giant software industry devoted to selling boxes full of a CD-ROM and a manual. While much of the innovation has shifted to Web services, Adobe continues to pursue the old agenda.

It can, of course, because its products usually handle the kinds of CPU-hammering chores that adapt poorly so far to running over an Internet connection. It's built that into a big business--Ticonderoga Securities analyst Jay Vleeschhouwer estimates it generates about $235 million to $240 million a year right now for Adobe.

What else is in the Creative Suite? There's Premiere Pro for video editing, After Effects for video effects, Illustrator for vector graphics, InDesign for page layout design, DreamWeaver for Web site creation, Flash Pro for writing Flash applications, the new Flash Catalyst for converting graphical mockups into Flash apps, Acrobat for handling PDF files, and others. It's a sprawling collection that spans multiple DVDs. Adobe packages it in any number of specific subsets for various specialties.

Many of these packages get new features, too. Illustrator has new abilities to incorporate perspective into 3D designs. Premiere Pro gets the new GPU- and multicore-accelerated playback engine called Mercury for higher-performance video, including better multilayer compositing. After Effects gets the roto brush for isolating backgrounds or elements across a series of frames, and both video tools are 64-bit to take advantage of lots of memory. And alas for Adobe, Flash Pro's fancy new feature, the ability to bring Flash software for the iPhone, appears to be in jeopardy with new Apple license terms.

One big difference at Adobe is the acquisition of Omniture, whose technology lets Web sites track usage in detail. Adobe thinks of it as part of a feedback loop to steer designers more intelligently, but it has another important element: it's a subscription service, not a shrink-wrapped box. Integration with Web-oriented tools such as Flash Pro and Dreamweaver appears to just be under way, though.

The full suite is so broad that Adobe has a tough time coming up with a theme to encompass all the changes. But that's not too important, as long as it can keep persuading its wide customer base to keep on paying for those boxes.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

A vulnerability in Java technology could be exploited by attackers and used to compromise computers running Windows if they visit a Web page hosting malicious code, two researchers warned on Friday.

Google engineer Tavis Ormandy released details on the Full Disclosure e-mail list and Ruben Santamarta, an engineer for Wintercore, wrote about it on his company's blog site.

The problem is with the Java Web Start framework, which allows developers an easy way to create Java applications. Disabling the Java plug-in will not protect against an attack, according to Ormandy.

"The toolkit provides only minimal validation of the URL parameter, allowing us to pass arbitrary parameters to the javaws [Java Web Start] utility, which provides enough functionality via command line arguments to allow this error to be exploited," Ormandy wrote. "The simplicity with which this error can be discovered has convinced me that releasing this document is in the best interest of everyone except the vendor."

The vulnerability affects all current versions of Windows and the major browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome, according to Kaspersky Lab's Threat Post blog.

Ormandy said he informed Sun about the problem but was told it was not considered high enough priority to issue a patch outside of the regular quarterly patch cycle.

Representatives at Oracle, which recently acquired Sun Microsystems, did not respond to a phone call and e-mails seeking comment late on Friday.

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex