Software : Facebook acquires Friend.ly

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Facebook has continued its recent spate of acquisitions by snapping up social question and answer service Friend.ly.

Friend.ly, which has existed as a third-party Facebook app for the last two years, encourages users to make new connections by answering questions relevant to them.

Both companies have now acknowledged that the sale went through last week, although there's been no official announcement on how much the acquisition cost Facebook.

Compelling way to connect

The social networking giant said in a statement it had been long-term admirers of its new partner.

"We're excited to announce that we recently acquired friend.ly, a Silicon Valley startup that created a really compelling way for people to express themselves and meet others through answering question, said the statement.

"We've admired the team's efforts for some time now, and we're looking forward to having Ed [Friend.ly CEO Ed Baker] and his colleagues make a big impact on the way millions of people connect and engage with each other on Facebook."

In a blog post, Friend.ly seems over the moon with its new masters. It says it will continue as a stand-alone application, but will be working with Facebook on upcoming projects.

Hands on: Adobe Photoshop Touch review

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Photoshop Touch was recently announced at Adobe Max - it's a touch-based version of Photoshop that will be available for Android tablets from early November.

Pricing is $10 (£6.40) in the US and the app will be exclusive to Honeycomb 3.1 tablets for the moment - it will come to iPad 2 in early 2012.

Photoshop Touch is more akin to the full-blown version of Photoshop - it will still exist alongside the much more basic Photoshop Express. So what's it like to use?

The layout has various tools around the edge of your tablet's screen. There's a toolbar with the key editing tools down the left and the Layers palette on the right.

Icons across the top of the screen open menus with options to edit images, select and crop areas, move and transform elements in images, apply adjustments (such as exposure and contrast, including the powerful Dodge and Burn tools), effects and a bit of a grab-bag or other features on the More menu that includes adding text or warping images.

Photoshop touch

The interface uses the space very well - as you pick a tool from the toolbar, options appear as a flyout, then the panel of settings appears to replace the toolbar, and icons leave more room for the images you're working on than text labels would.

Unless you're familiar with the icons of Photoshop tools already, the interface can look a little daunting, so the set of built-in tutorials is very useful.

But it's also easy to open an image - from Facebook, Adobe's new Creative Cloud or even a Google search (by keywords, colours and creative commons licences) as well as from the pictures on your tablet - and start playing around.

Photoshop touch

You can pinch and zoom as you'd expect, and objects have big, finger-sized handles so you can resize or distort them. But all the tools are designed to be easy to use with your finger.

You don't need to be precise when you're using the magic wand tool - with Scribble selection you just draw a continuous line inside the object you want to select and another outside to show the background, and the selection gets the edges with pretty good accuracy. If it misses a piece you can draw an extra rough smudge to include or exclude it. And then you can tidy up complicated edges - such as hair - by swiping your finger to show where you want to refine edges.

Creating colour gradients or blending two images or layers together is very intuitive; you drag a line to show how and where you want the blend or gradient to run, and finger-friendly buttons enable you to set the direction and angle of the fade or colour changes.

Photoshop touch

These are complex tools that are fiddly to use with a mouse; your finger is far less accurate but you can get an equally good effect rather more quickly.

And being able to tilt the tablet to see a 3D representation of how your layers are arranged is the best use of 3D so far. Desktop Photoshop users will want these tools as well.

We also tried Photoshop Touch out on Samsung's new prototype active pen tablet, which fits in the digitiser for the same pressure-sensitive Wacom pen we're used to on tablet PCs without being any thicker.

Photoshop touch

As well as making painting easier (your strokes get thicker the harder you press), that also gives you the same experience as a mouse, with tools appearing when the pen gets near - and an eyedropper appearing when you click the button on the side of the pen.

You certainly don't need to pen to use Photoshop Touch, but it's great to have the option, especially for drawing tools where you want to be precise.

Photoshop touch

With Photoshop Touch, Adobe is treating tablets as devices for creating content, not just looking at it - and going back to basics to redesign Photoshop for a whole new way of working.

Photoshop Touch doesn't have all the features of the desktop version, but it has far more than you'd expect for a $9.99 tablet app - and it makes them easier to use without being much less powerful.

There are limitations; text that you add to images doesn't stay as an editable text layer, it's converted to vectors. More generally, while you can save images to the Creative Cloud and open them in Photoshop and the layers you create here show up as layers in Photoshop, you can't take live effects and settings back and forth between Photoshop and Photoshop Touch.

Photoshop touch

You can add glow and drop shadow and warp text but you can't add your own fonts, and unlike desktop Photoshop, there's no option for third-party effects and filters, because app stores don't enable an app to load third-party code.

One possibility is having those as services in the Adobe Creative Cloud, and Adobe is promising fast updates. It's also promising support for more tablet operating systems than the current Android offering, with an iOS app listed on its website as coming soon.

Photoshop touch

Touch has changed the way we work with games, emails and websites and use simple apps with a handful of features, but it hasn't yet transformed the rich desktop apps that rely on you having a keyboard and mouse, desk and chair to use.

Taking a real version of Photoshop to tablets is a massive change in the way we interact with a full-power application. Even if you don't need powerful image editing tools, this might be the most significant tablet app so far.

It's also Adobe's answer to the "Flash is dead" crowd; like the other new touch apps, Photoshop Touch is written in AIR 3 - which is just Flash 11 outside the browser.

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Yahuui Blog

Tuesday, October 11, 2011