From: Duncan McNeill

> These shortcuts - and I guess that I am not the only one to find them
> of great use- didn't just 'happen', they were carefully coded- and to
> glibly state that they are undocumented certainly fails to convince me.
> Could it be that there are certain combinations vouchsafed to alpha,
> beta, or even omega testers that will make power presentations 'worth
> the money' for attendees?

Duncan. . .

You are wrong. There is absolutely no truth to this theory. The Photoshop
engineers and the alpha testers work very hard to get everything possible
into the program-sometimes that happens up to the last possible moment. Such
was the case with the imaging numbering feature.

The problem is that the Q&E teams, responsible for documenting features and
writing the manual are trying to write about a moving target. As features
change, they have to go back and re-write the documentation. As you might
expect, this goes on up till the last moment, BUT, the manual has to be
printed. . .which means a led time of about 4 weeks or so. So, anything
changed or added after the manual and documentation gets shipped to the
printer just doesn't get written up.

Some stuff gets added literally at the last moment. Last year at this time,
Martin Evening and I were in California shooting our Photoshop Masters DVD.
At the filming was Marc Pawliger (getting away for a weekend at a nice B&B).
Marc was kind enough to to do a tech review of our programming. During that
session, Martin & I complained about the lack of functionality for starting
a numbering at a specific number. He took that back and a solution was
written into Photoshop that came AFTER the cut off date for the manual.

So, should they NOT have written in the functionality? They did it at our
request, but it didn't get documented. I would rather have it in even if it
doesn't get documented.

Photoshop 3 had an incredible number of undocumented features. . .and I mean
a LOT! Various engineers would literally write in functionality and not tell
anybody. That caused a lot of problems. Starting with v4, every effort is
made to document -as best as possible, everything in Photoshop. Some things
slip through the cracks. Could they do a better job? Yep, and they really do
try. But we're all human ya know.

On the other hand, users are not particularly well known for actually
READING the friggin' manual or the READ ME when installing or checking the
web site for updates or new info.

This is the reality of the situation. . .

Regards,
Jeff Schewe

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