MacWorld had a great tip today on how to put 10.5’s help windows in the background. This is a great start, and removes much of the annoyance. But the Help Viewer application is still invisible in the dock and when command-tabbing. This is however quite easy to fix.

Disclaimer: If this guide messes up your computer, I am definitely not to blaim. Proceed at your own peril.

1. Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices and locate Help Viewer.app
2. Right click (or control-click) and select View contents of package
3. Go into the folder Contents and locate the file Info.plist
4. Change the preferences of the file, so you have write access
5. What you do in this step varies according to whether or not you have Apples Developer tools installed.

   If you have Developer Tools installed:

   Open Info.plist in Property List Editor and remove the checkbox next to “Application is agent (UIELement)”

   If you don’t have developer tools:

   Open Info.plist in a text editor, and replace

   <key>LSUIElement</key>
   <true/>
   

   with

   <key>LSUIElement</key>
   <false/>
   

That’s it. Bob should, pretty much, be your uncle. It’s not quite perfect; command+q doesn’t work and you get a new help-window every time you click the icon in the dock, but it’s still way better than it was.

This recipe will make two heaving sandwiches.

First, grab yourself a nice, big boneless chicken breast. Slice it up into strips, and throw it into a plastic baggie along with a chopped garlic clove, some olive oil, a good dash of balsamic vinegar, and some salt and pepper. Put it in the fridge for a couple of hours.

You also need four thick and heavy strips of bacon, and a handful of cherry tomatoes. Cut the tomatoes in half, and fry the chicken, bacon and tomatoes in a hot frying pan until everything is done. Now spread butter on both sides of four big slices of bread, and fry the slices in the same pan until they are nicely brown and crispy.

Get your avocado. You need one that’s really mature and soft, not dry and hard. Cleave it in twain, remove the pit, and carve out the flesh with a spoon. Cover two of the slices of bread with avocado, and the other two with mayonnaise (and get yourself a good and tasty one. I prefer Hellman’s, which is the only non-crap mayo you can get in Norway). Put the chicken, bacon and tomatoes between two slices.

Warning: Remember to wash your face afterwards. Do not eat on first date.

I love Photoshop. I’ve used it for many years, and with each upgrade I have marveled at its new features. From the context-sensitive options bar in Photoshop 6 to the incredible auto align/blend-commands in CS3, I’ve had something to enjoy with every new release. But but there is one part of the interface that hasn’t changed much since it was introduced in version 3, and it’s really starting to show its age. The layers palette must go.

Let’s loose the layers

Of course, it hasn’t been completely ignored all these years. We have gotten adjustment layers, vector layers, text layers, layer groups, layer sets, layer effects, more advanced masking, and in CS3, smart objects. But with all this functionality, the layers palette still lacks a whole lot of flexibility and elegance.

Smart objects brought along something I had wanted for a really long time: Non-destructible filters and transformations. Using this feature, though, is incredible clunky. When you convert a layer or a group of layers to a smart object they will appear as a single layer, and to edit it, you must open it as a separate document, edit it, and save it. This unnecessarily breaks up the workflow, and feels like a “work-around” type solution.

I want flexibility. I want to create a single layer, and have it appear in different parts of my document, and have them all update dynamically. I want to be able to use the alpha-channel of any layer as a mask for another layer. I find it incredible that before CS3, there was no way to create an adjustment layer that didn’t apply to every single layer below it. And I might add, Illustrator had non-destructible Photoshop filters before Photoshop did.

Enter nodes

A while ago, I played around with Shake, and it felt like a revelation. Suddenly Photoshop felt horribly old-fashioned and awkward. Because in Shake, everything is done with nodes.

For the less-enlightened, Shake is a high-end compositing and motion graphics application, which has been used in pretty much all the CG-shots in most movies for the last few years. It is incredibly powerful, and still manages to be very usable.

Nodes 101

If you import a photo into Shake, that photo will become a node. If you adjust the photo in any way, that adjustment will become a node. The photo-node is connected to the adjustment-node via what Shake calls a “noodle”, and the resulting output is, logically, the photo with the adjustments added. What is significant is that any action performed in Shake leaves the original files completely untouched—the parameters of each node can be adjusted on the fly, and you don’t have to open and save a separate document to perform something as trivial as a non-destructive transform.

To merge nodes together, you use a “layer”-node (this is where the terms get a bit confusing), which accepts several inputs and displays them nicely atop each other, optionally with various blending modes enabled.

But that’s not all. You can drag several noodles out of a node, which means that a single node can exist in multiple locations in the same document, with different adjustments applied. In addition, every node has an input for a mask, which means that any node can be the mask of any other node.

Add node grouping and the ability to view the output from one node while adjusting the preferences of another, and you’ve got an incredible flexible system, that can handle just about any image-related task you throw at it.

Options

So, if you want to use nodes, what are your options? Of course, you can just use Shake. But as mentioned, Shake is geared towards advanced video compositing, and using it to edit images would be far from streamlined, as it lacks much of what Photoshop has, not to mention what a huge overkill it would be.

NakedLight is a promising node-based image editor for Mac OS X that’s currently in public beta. But by simplifying the node-based interface, they have missed one of the main points of using nodes—multiple inputs and outputs. So while this is a promising application with a great new interface, it wouldn’t stand up to the needs of a professional.

So, I’m back to the main point: I want nodes in Photoshop. When I was beta-testing Photoshop CS3, I lamented the clunkiness of Smart Objects on the forums, and proposed dropping layers in favor of nodes. I got a very positive reply from the head of product development, saying that he actually agreed with me. Perhaps they had been asking too much of the good old layers palette, and this was something they were interested in doing (in addition to the layers) in CS4 or CS5.

So I’m still crossing my fingers.

I’ve never really been a blogger. Sure, I’ve read some blogs, and I even have thoughts sometimes that I think other people should hear, but I’ve never actually done anything about it. Until now, that is.

So, before we get started, here’s a little FAQ:

Who are you?

Basically, I’m just this guy. I’m 24 years old, soon to be married (update: as of july 19th I am actually married) and I live in Trondheim, Norway. From my location you might be able to deduce that I’m not a native English-speaker, so please forgive any errors. Feel free to drop me a line if you feel like correcting me, though.

What do you do?

Currently I study computer science, and play around with HTML, CSS, Javascript and programming. I also work at my university’s helpdesk.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Huh, not quite shure. I actually kind of enjoy teaching, so I might some day (perhaps already this autumn) end up as a teacher in something computer-related, most likely at Jeløy Folkehøyskole.

Why are you doing this?

Because I felt like it, and I had the afternoon off.

What beers do you like?

I really enjoy almost anything that’s Belgian (give me a trappist Dubbel and I’m yours), as well as Proper British Ales, from pale to imperial stout. But I’ll drink pretty much anything that’s not a cheap bland lager.