What I’m Reading

Today Twitter announced the launch of its first official plugin for WordPress.

The plugin, available on WordPress.org and GitHub, bundles together a couple of features largely already provided by third-party plugins, including: the ability to embed tweets, the ability to embed videos uploaded to Twitter, as well as tweet and follow buttons.

It’s interesting to see the above features only arrive on WordPress now, seeing as the content management system (CMS) already natively renders Twitter links as embedded Tweets. It’s noteworthy, however, that an official plugin may yield better results for certain publishers — Twitter can update this plugin as it wishes whenever its platform changes.

Here’s a full list of features, in case you’re curious:

• Embedded Tweet – customize backgrounds and color schemes to match your site’s theme
• Embedded Twitter video – showcase video uploaded to Twitter
• Tweet button – simple sharing of your site’s content on Twitter
• Twitter Cards – highlight your site’s content when shared on Twitter
• Twitter Analytics – track impressions and top distributors of your site’s content on Twitter
• Follow button – grow your Twitter audience
• Twitter ads conversion tracking – easily track actions on your WordPress site triggered by a Twitter ad or build a custom targeting audience

In the past 25 years, nothing has affected our perception of images more than Adobe Photoshop. By allowing users to adjust, fix, tweak and wholly invent images, the software has worked its way into our portfolios, our family lives and our media consumption.

It’s staggering to think that it was released 25 years ago, on February 19th of 1990, when people still dressed like this:

The software came out at a time when a large part of the struggle was getting an image into a computer in the first place. Our older readers will recall that taking photos once involved driving to the edge of a parking lot and dropping a roll of film off at a little booth, which is actually reflected in the very first Photoshop icon:

You’ll also notice, above, that color didn’t even make it into the icon until Photoshop 2 (which was technically the third icon).

And how about the evolution of the toolbar? Most of you are familiar with the one at far right, below, but how far back to the left does your memory reach?

Then there’s what the software could (or couldn’t) actually do back then. In this video from 2010, Photoshop co-creator John Knoll recreates, complete with old-school computer and monitor, the very first Photoshop demo he gave in 1990:

Contrast that with what Photoshop can do now. While the video below shows just a few of the latest features, the software has become so absurdly powerful that a large part of the improvements have to do with helping you actually find and manage those features:

Of course, the power of the software still lies with the user who wields it; if you’ve got no sense of lighting, composition and scale, all the Photoshop in the world won’t help you. Case in point, this ham-handedly retouched photo of the more recent 90210 cast:

Ouch.

Apple has today delivered a new beta of OS X to developers that comes with a major new feature: diverse emoji. A tipster sent in these screenshots of the new emoji palette found in OS X 10.10.3. You can now click and hold on any emoji to change the skin tone. There’s also a bunch of new country flags.

Cal Redback is a talented photographer, artist and retoucher based in Paris, France. Cal captures and mixes portraits with flora, moon, mirrors, blood and more.

via photo manipulations.

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What’s happening in Siberia’s thawing permafrost and Greenland’s melting glaciers sounds borderline supernatural. Ancient viruses, bacteria, plants, and even animals have been cryogenically frozen there for millennia—and now, they are waking up.

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