WTF, NVIDIA? Please don't screw with my colours and focus on building better hardware instead. Secondly, how did this update get WHQL approval and made it into Microsoft's Windows Update? It's little things like this that have made all the pros move to Mac.

Lightroom was actually doing the right thing by preserving the original look of the images. All that was needed was to either reset the development settings (killing my adjustments in the process), or update to the latest process version (this is available from the Settings menu when in the Develop module). I have noticed that some of my images require a lot less sharpening under the new process and so would look rather over-sharpened when simply converted to the latest process. In other words there is a good reason why Lightroom does not automatically put your old images through the new process – it’s different enough that the results of your original adjustments may simply not look as good as they should. My advice would be not to do large-scale en masse conversion of entire folders or catalogs, rather convert individual images and reassess the adjustments made.

Now that I am seeing the output of the latest rendering engine, I can tell you that this alone will be worth the price of the upgrade for me. Colour noise handling is vastly improved, the luminance grain is tighter and there may even be a tad more detail visible in some borderline cases. Have a look at the following side by side crops and judge for yourself (click to see in full):

All files use the default Lightroom noise reduction settings – the colour noise reduction slider was set to 25, and luminance noise was set to 0.

The improvement in the G10 images is very impressive. Also note the much reduced vertical banding in the 50D ISO3200 sample #4 above (this is the only crop that is not 100% because the banding was not as obvious at the 1:1 magnification size). Overall, I am seeing ever so slightly more detail (e.g. the stitching in sample #2, eyebrow hairs in sample #3) and vastly reduced colour noise with a more pleasing grain pattern. The Nikon D700 does not show a huge improvement – I had to go through quite a number of ISO 6400 photos to find one that shows much of a difference, mostly because the files are so good to start with. The story is similar with the Pentax K10D in that it doesn’t show much improvement – the files are fairly noisy in the first place and stay that way even under the new process.

All the above files have easily discernable differences at full-screen view on my HP LP2475w (24” 1920x1200 LCD, or around 30% magnification depending on which camera the file comes from), except for the Canon 50D @ ISO 400 and the two Pentax shots. The differences between Lightroom 2.5 and 3.0 Beta rendering for these three images are basically invisible at smaller magnifications.

Another small but important improvement that I’ve noticed is the smoother movement of the adjustment sliders. Previously, some computationally-expensive adjustments would make the sliders very notchy as the image preview was being rendered every time you changed a value. Now the sliders can move freely all the time. This is a classic case of better use of multithreading leading to more responsive software. I haven’t done any actual testing but it seems as though the new beta is also utilizing my dual core CPU better during import/export. It only makes sense as CPUs with four or eight threads of execution are becoming increasingly popular, and Lightroom 2 has some known deficiencies in such configurations.

The Lightroom 3 beta is available to all at Adobe Labs (free registration required).

Orlando Power Station set on Flickr (slideshow).

Canon G10 set on Flickr (slideshow).

Zune 4.0 Software showing collection view of artist albums by release year

Grab Zune 4.0 Software or have a look at some screenshots first.

Now if anyone out there is listening, please can you make WMP 12 go the way of Outlook Express and make the Zune desktop software the new default? KTHXBYE!

Here are a few shots of what it looks like on my G10 and K10D:

Also check out the customer gallery on Gordon's website which showcases many the different styles and colours available.

Verdict: highly recommended! (It should match my future S90 quite nicely, methinks.)

He's right, developers are important. And if you only go to Microsoft conferences, it looks like all developers are using Windows. But if you go to any other developer conference, everyone is using Macs.

Which got me thinking, WTF is up with the Windows command prompt? If there's one thing developers need, it's a solid command line interface which lets them manipulate OS primitives with the minimum of fuss. So why do I find myself installing Cygwin and puttycyg on every Windows machine that I need to get some work done with? Maybe I'm just a *nix die-hard who's too stubborn to learn something new but it works great, for the most part (what's wrong is the subject of another rant altogether).

Some will probably say that PowerShell is meant to be the answer but I disagree. It may be nice for scripted rolling out of patches and performing other sysadmin-type tasks en masse but c'mon, who wants to use that as their shell? Even if you were willing to dig deeper and learn the arcane syntax, you're still stuck in the same old DOS box "terminal" that the regular cmd.exe runs in. Even trivial operations like resizing the window or copy & paste are a misson. A Google search for "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly" returns a similar rant about PowerShell as one of the top results so clearly I'm not the only one frustrated by it. It all sounds very good on paper what with the pipes on steroids and .NET integration but it somehow fails to provide a shell replacement.

Are all Windows developers hopelessly stuck somewhere deep inside the Visual Studio GUI? (The ones that haven't migrated to the Mac yet, anyway?)

Pixel densities compared - Canon G10, Canon G11, Nikon D90, Nikon D700. They are 34 MP/cm², 23 MP/cm², 3.3 MP/cm², and 1.4 MP/cm² respectively. Ok, a compact is never going to be anywhere near as light sensitive as even an APS-C DSLR, but f the new sensor delivers even a 1-stop improvement over the old one it would be great. Can't wait to get my hands on one!

Edit: I think Canon missed a trick with this one however. They should have left a small attachment point and released an optional external viewfinder, with brightlines for 28/35/50mm framing.

Firstly, this does not sound like another Linux distro. Yes, it might run on top of a Linux kernel and borrow some UI code, but you can think of this as a web browser that runs on the bare metal. What use is such a thing? (ASUS is already doing something similar by embedding a stripped down Linux in their motherboards. It boots in a couple of seconds and lets you browse the web and check your email.)

Google makes money off people using the Internet. More than that, they especially benefit from stuff that runs on open platforms - HTML and JavaScript as opposed to Flash and Silverlight. Hence the massive investment in technologies such as GWT and Gears that enable full-blown interactive applications inside a browser using widely understood open standards. The more people publishing useful stuff on the web, the more Google stands to benefit. The more users on the web, the more Google stands to benefit.

The Chrome OS could work quite well on a stripped down netbook (even lower spec than what we call a netbook today), touch-screen tablets, or minimalist desktop computers with specs along the lines of netbooks.

Given the recent popularity of netbooks, and Microsoft starting to push Windows 7 to OEMs instead of the ancient XP, maybe Google is hoping that some of them will jump ship and give Linux a second chance. What's going to be different this time? If you don't pretend it's a full-blown computer but rather a web-only "device", it's easier to sell it to people who already have several computers in their household.

The ultra low hardware requirements mean that the machine itself should be cheaper to produce too, so once again adding to the "it's a web appliance, not a computer" selling point. Lastly, this must have been fairly easy to do from a technical standpoint. It's simply repackaging a bunch of existing code into something usable so not a hugely risky project for Google.

If some Taiwanese manufacturer jumps on board and produces anything even remotely successful based on this software, it only further entrenches the Web as an application platform. And that, I think, is exactly what Google is hoping for. It's very much the same thinking as that behind Android, just aimed at a different segment of the hardware market.

UPDATE: Further reading - coverage from around the web:

• AnandTech: Google's Chrome OS Announced
• The Register: Google polishes Chrome into netbook OS

You can also view it large on Flickr.