Ryan Hicks, the Sr. Experience Designer at Adobe (and brainchild of the new branding?), defends the new designs with the following words on Veerle's blog:

"Honestly, we have been living with the icon system internally on our own machines for so long now that it's a bit hard to remember what the big deal is. We're as varied and hardcore a user group as will be found anywhere, we've found the stuff just works. Done."

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Relly just created a piece of leggo art, a stretch hummer that she'll be setting loose soon. I can't wait to see if and when it's picked up and added to!

John Nack revealed the branding strategy for Adobe's next generation of products on his blog yesterday. OK, so "strategy" might be too harsh a word. More like "disaster".

Having seen the "design" for the public beta of Photoshop CS3, I was entirely hoping that they were placeholders and that it was a case of priorities; Adobe merely had not gotten round to branding the application by the time of the release. It seemed odd to me that they would release the first public beta of one of their flagship products with a splash screen and icon that looked like it was created in five minutes in Microsoft Paint. At the same time though, a nasty thought surfaced at the back of my head: "That icon sure looks like something you'd see on the Periodic Table, I hope they're not trying to be smart!"

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Here's a PHP basic authenticator class by David Wilkinson and a MYSQL recordset to JSON convertor by Adnan Siddiqi. Handy little things.

Nick Bradbury has a great blog post about how operating systems scare users from downloading and installing desktop applications with security alerts. There's a big difference between *being* secure and scaring users. It appears to me that the less secure an operating system is, the more it tends to resort to warnings as a way of limiting its liabilities (case in point: Windows and Internet Explorer).

Nick's post frames the issue as one of the reasons why people are moving to using web applications in favor of desktop applications but I want to bring this to the attention of the RIA crowd and Adobe. I know that Adobe (and Macromedia, previously) take security very seriously and I hope that they will continue to do so. However, while doing this, I hope that they remain very sensitive to not scaring users unnecessarily.