Adobe Makes You the Housekeeper

People often say that Adobe's Photoshop image editor is way too cluttered--that it has so many tools strewn about, buried in menus or hidden in palettes, that you can't find what you're looking for. Well, with its soon-to-be-introduced Configurator tool, Adobe's handing you a broom and a dustpan.

The Configurator lets you create custom palettes and toolbars, which you can use in addition to or in place of Adobe's stock ones. The tool, which runs on top of Adobe Air (Mac or Windows), shows you a collapsible, comprehensive list of all the tools, commands, actions and scripts, and widgets available in Photoshop; after you create a new, blank panel, you simply drag things into the panel. Several buttons across the top of the window help you arrange and distribute elements in your panel.

You can create multiple panels, export them, then open them up in Photoshop via its Extensions menu; once you get them where you want them, you can save a custom Workspace, and they'll open up in the same place every time you start up the application. You can also drag in text labels, images, and even video; Adobe showed me examples of pretty sophisticated tutorials that use customized panels.

Adobe says that using custom panels won't speed up Photoshop or reduce its system requirements, but John Nack, principal product manager for Photoshop, says that, by and large, Photoshop doesn't load things until you need them anyway.

When I tried out the Configurator, I found it hard to limit my picks to what I really need. Like Bluto at the Faber College cafeteria, I found myself taking some of this, a little bit of that, too much of that, and I ended up with a panel that was way too overcrowded with things I'd never use. The solution: Create multiple palettes, and group them by task, as much as possible. The only problem I foresee: I might become dependent on these custom palettes, and I forget where all the default locations for the tools and commands are.

Configurator will appear on the Adobe Labs site as a free download at the end of October (though I suspect it may leak out sooner than that), with the idea that people can try it out and give Adobe feedback on what they think of it. And at some point, you'll be able to download other people's panels (including the aforementioned tutorials) and upload ones of your own. If the response is strong, says Nack, Adobe will consider extending it to the entire Creative Suite.

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