I guess Adobe got a lot of feedback about concerns similar to mine below. Potential users were not happy about the prospect of their content being used without consent of royalties. Although the new EULA is not up yet, they are working on some new language. I may forget, but I will try to watch for the new agreement when it comes out.

More on this from ArsTechnica…

Adobe has released a free web based version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Express. From a photography perspective, it offers the basic tools that some may need such as cropping and red-eye removal. Yet this is obviously not intended to replace an experienced designers or photographers arsenal of tools. Yet I think the idea is pretty cool for those that do not want to install the free tools that exist such as GIMP. And from a development standpoint, I really think that the creators of the site inside of Adobe did a very nice job. It looks great, functions well, and seems to be pretty easy to use. Yes, it is a bit slow. But this is web based, so what do you expect? And this is an early version, I am sure it will improve as time goes on.

Overall this is not a surprising move on Adobes part. I read somewhere a while back that Adobe would like to move all its applications into a web based subscription style service. While I do not like this idea one bit, the concept seems to be liked by most software houses. The idea of a continual flow of revenue along with piracy issues would obviously make this desired from their standpoint.

Yet, part of my issue with the service that would make me never use it should I need (say I was offsite and needed a quick image crop), is the TOS. Not to mention concerned about any future online offering from Adobe. Scroll down to#8…

8. Use of Your Content.

1. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.
2. “Publicly accessible” areas of the Services are those areas of the Adobe network of properties that are intended by Adobe to be available to the general public. However, publicly accessible areas of the Services do not include Services intended for private communication or areas off the Adobe network of properties such as portions of World Wide Web sites that are accessible via hypertext or other links but are not hosted or served by Adobe.

For someone uploading a new photo of a crazy party of the weekend (perhaps the intended audience?) this may not be a large issue. Yet anyone worried about copyright and protecting their property, this is a show stopper. When I think about any online service, this is the first thing I think about. Not only privacy from unauthorized access, but “authorized” access to your data from within the controlling body. Call me paranoid, but my content will stay on my computer than you very much. This declaration in the TOS is expected in this situation to be honest. Yet I would be very curious how they would word the terms if they ever do move a more professional application to web based use, such as the full Photoshop or Illustrator.

Now this section also clearly states public areas of the site. I guess it comes down to whether or not new uploads will default to public galleries and sections. I think I am going to setup an account to see what I think after exploring it in depth some more. I guess the TOS just makes me uneasy with my already paranoid view of publicly accessible private information.

So Internet Explorer 8 is coming later this year, and is currently out in Beta. So what does this mean? Well, for one it means that I have to figure in one more browser into compatibility tests. The reason that this irks me, is IE is already the hardest browser to deal with IMO. The install base for IE6 is still the same size as IE7. And they render various things differently, such as some CSS elements. Right off hand, I can remember one situation that plagued me recently in which a DIV container overflowed in IE6. I forgot to check this one area with IE6 and didn’t realize it till the site was live. Stupid on my part, but annoying none the less.

So now, developers will have to deal with IE6 and 7, which didn’t play nice with standards. And a new IE that will default to a more standards friendly approach. The division of browsers should play out to be IE7 in 1st, then IE6/Firefox, and then IE8 for at least a little while. Eventually IE8 will catch up, but as IE6 has shown… people will not install the newest IE in any haste.

I have to laugh to myself when I read things like this…

Microsoft’s improved support for Web standards in its Internet Explorer 8 browser is laudable — but it could cause big headaches for enterprise IT developers. That’s the opinion of analysts at tech research firm Gartner, which cautions in a new report that IE 8′s default standards mode “will result in pages that don’t display correctly for some enterprise applications.”

That’s because many Web- or intranet-facing applications used in business were built to work with previous versions of Explorer, in which Microsoft often favored its own protocols over universal Web standards.

With Explorer 8, slated for full release later this year, Microsoft has promised default compatibility with W3C guidelines.

So developers who didn’t code for standards now have headaches… heh. A lot of things come to mind on that subject. Yet one of the main things that I think about, is the adoption of the non-standards IE from these developers caused part of the problem that web developers face today. If the enterprise industry would have stood up and demanded standards from the beginning, MS would have been forced to do so. Enterprise is a huge chunk of their business, so they would have had to listen.

Of course I know it is more complex that this, as certain features that these clients used required MS elements because they tied in with MS products. Not to mention that MS isnt the only one in history to create standards issues (think Netscape).

Overall, this is the reason why developers should design and code for compliance. I know that I have left out a “cool little” feature more than once because it either didn’t work for the top few browsers equally, or didn’t work at all in say IE. I would love to be able to say “Use Firefox on this site or it wont work”, but thats not reality nor fair. Just because I do not use or like IE does not mean that others can’t use it.

The CSS rendering differences between IE and Firefox can be frustrating and irritating. The majority of issues I have come across between the two arise when using nested DIV’s, and the positioning of these DIV’s.

One recent example, was setting up a menu bar. Perhaps in bad form, I used the following:

<div id=”Parent”>
<div id=”Child”>
Content
</div>
</div>

#Parent {
width:800px;
margin-left:auto;
margin-right:auto;
}

#Child {
width:790px;
margin-left:5px;
}

Now, the Child DIV was a smaller width due to some background images and lining up content to this background. I was attempting to use a left margin to set the position of Child within Parent, and the width automatically setting the right margin due to the value defined. All would work in Firefox when I was building the page. Yet after I would check IE to verify all was kosher… I would see the problems. IE was making the left margin appear differently than Firefox. To make matters worse, the right margin was also coming out differently.

So if I would change the margin-left value to be higher (as IE was showing the DIV further to the left than Firefox), Firefox would then show whitespace between the margin I wanted and the DIV container Child.

Changing DOC TYPE to strict did not help. So instead, I used this.

#Child {
margin-left:7px;
margin-right:8px;
}

The width was being defaulted to 100% inherit value, and the margins being declared on both sides. That worked. So… do not define the width value if you are having similar issues.

I am currently developing a RSS Feed in PHP. The project started because I am tired of having my feed reader at work, and then another on my laptop, and another at home. Leading to each computer not remember which story was read, each having different feeds, and so on.

With that in mind, I set out to create a feed reader that would do everything I needed it to do, and I was thinking of seeing how others on the web liked it.

Yet as I go over to Google Reader, it looks like I would be in a hopeless battle. The Google Reader is a nice piece of work. Does most things that I could want, as I am sure others would agree. So… Guess I will still work on mine just to see where it goes and what I can accomplish. Yet it may never see the light of day outside my own password protected domain it currently resides in.