This was a little event a few days ago: Adobe launched its first beta version of the online PhotoShop under the name of Photoshop Express. As it was easy to predict, it’s not as simple as marketing would like you to believe and you cannot replace one by the other as most of the reviews hereafter will show you:

• Les Numériques (en français): would better use Picasa to share the images prepared with Photoshop Express, and would want to see Raw files management, curves and histograms, and masks.
• Ars Technica (in English): it is rahter a cross between iPhoto and Adobe Bridge, but they love the basic features and (including color correction).
• Baekdal.com (in English) : disappointed; This is not an image editor, by far – just a fun way to apply a few corrections/effects. Woudl rather recommend Splashup, he feels is superior.
• Photojojo (in English): This is certainly not Photoshop but it does very well what it offers (basic image edition/correction).
• LifeHacker: Not the Full PS Package, but Good Web-Based Editing
• Pixinfo.com (in Hungarian): Honest! I didn’t understand what they think about it…

To notice: Photoshop Express is free, limited to 2GB of online storage (easy to reach) and in English only for now.

The PDF file format is a little gem invented by Adobe that brought the enormous advantage of a portable file format able to display a document on nearly any kind of display and computer. Unfortunately, the Adobe PDF format and free player are not exempt from problems and this generated a wealth of applications worth knowing to support all your needs around the PDF format.

Here are the best ones solving what were problems (until now):

• PDF documents cannot be modified. Wrong! With the help of PDF Hammer (an online free tool suite), you can perform basic edits like: add, remove, re-arrange one of more pages from one or more PDF files.



• PDF forms cannot be modified. Wrong! Actually, if you use PDFescape (online), you’ll be able to fill PDF forms and make minor modifications to the document.
• PDF documents cannot be restored back to plain text. Wrong! Thanks to free PDF Text online, you can just copy-and-paste text from the PDF file you want. It can even preserve the bookmarks and font of the original file.
• PDF documents are always long to load. Wrong! Actually, it is a problem of the Adobe PDF reader. Despite being free, it became so bloated that it takes days (Ok, I’m prone to exageration) to open and load the first file. The solution is simply to use a free alternative PDF reader like PDF-XChange viewer.
• Opening PDF files on the web is slow. Right, but…, if you are the webmaster, you can use PdfMeNot to transform your PDF files into Flash media that will be easier to handle on your web site.