September is going to be crazy.

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You might be starting to notice that Update isn't a regular conference. It kicks off with the Royal Banquet at a palace (for which there are still a few tickets you can buy to attend), continues in the premier concert hall in Brighton, and ends with the A Night at the Museum after-party at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. It is a tightly-scripted experience, with 18-minute inspirational talks punctuated by Geek Ninja Battles, tech beats, and live/interactive music and visualization acts. And, unlike other conferences, we're approaching sponsorship differently too.

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Come by next Thursday and have a drink or two on me as we chill and talk about how you can help make Update 2011 even more awesome. We need volunteers, people to help get the word out, and… well, I'm sure you have ideas I haven't even thought of yet.

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Update 2011 is not your mama's conference: it's not just about mobile technologies and user experience, it is an experience… starting with the pre-conference dinner on the 4th of September.

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In the initial version of the upcoming Update conference web site, I'm optimizing for desktop, iPad, and iPhone-tier phones. This means that I have to create five different versions of nearly every image. One for the desktop size, one for 320px wide screens, one for 480px wide screens, and two for the Retina (@2X) resolutions. Of course, saving all those images by hand would suck. And it's not enough just to resize the images and export them for web since, when resized, I need to unsharp mask them to make sure they're not blurry.

I initially thought I could record an action to do this, but the Photoshop file I have for the graphics has dozens of layers. I thought I could use the Layer comps to files… script that ships with Photoshop but – while it let me export layer comps to files – it wouldn't let me add custom actions in the middle of the process (in this case to unsharp mask the image once it was resized).

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