Well here it comes! 2009!!! Are you ready? Yeah, me neither!

While you are formulating those New Year's Resolution why not take a look in Lightroom and finish up 2008 getting ready for 2009. Here are a few tips:

While not exactly an Adobe-based topic, I thought this was slick enough to warrant a post on. Tracking Santa's progress on Christmas Eve on your Mobile Phone using North American Aerospace Defense Command (aka NORAD) and Google Maps.

http://www.noradsanta.org/en/trackmobile.html

Just as Chris noted in his blog about the Dallas Flex User Group establishing an Adobe Group presence, so has your DFW AUG. Check us out here:

http://groups.adobe.com/groups/b2a9af8306/summary

The adobe groups presence gives us more of an opportunity to be known not just throughout the metroplex, but throughout the globe in that many times folks come to the Adobe.com site looking for more information. The DFWAUG adobe groups pages allow us to grab a wider audience and also to point them to the "portal that Gene built" here at dfwaug.net

Don't get me wrong - I think Photoshop is a heck of a tool and the "Mother of all Image Editing Tools", but I think Fireworks does a more than adequate job as well. I don't think it gets near the attention it deserves, and it is why I'm looking forward to next month's presentation with Alan Musselman on Fireworks CS4. 

So you're enjoying your new copy of Photoshop CS4 and you suddenly discover that some of the features you have come to rely on are no longer there! Did you regularly use the Extract filter? How about Picture Packages or Web Gallery?

Discovered this article regarding Adobe Zoetrope. It is currently under development, but is software which allows you to see past content on web pages, compare zones of a particular website, or compare multiple website content history.

Click on this link to see a 5-minute video demo. Very slick:
http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=183

If you are interested in getting more involved in the local Flex scene, be sure to visit http://groups.adobe.com/.  Sign in and then do a search for Dallas.  You'll see D-Flex.  Just click on it and then join the group.  Also, remember that you can always go to the regular site which is http://d-flex.org.