Rocketfuelled
Reuben Whitehouse

[enter] 21.07.08

In recent times I’ve moved to using Photoshop for web design comps. It just feels much tighter and faster to work with (once you get to grips with it) than Illustrator – my previous tool-de-choix. Adding effects to shapes / layers feels more exact and controllable. It’s less fluid, almost a bit more constrained at times but I think these features actually help in the design process at times.

Very good, but not without one or two frustrations, is this piece of software we call ‘Photoshop’ / ‘Photostrop’ / ‘Bloatoshop’ / etc. Apart from the obvious fact that it’s a fat beast and therefore slow to move at times, I’ve had just one particular nark that I haven’t been able to find the answer to until just moments ago: When modifying type without the palettes in view (I often tab-hide them away to get some more breathing space on this little 15.4” monitor), I constantly found myself with no way to apply the changes and get out of the text box with ease. It’s a little trap that I continually fell into. Granted, you could click up in the ‘Window’ menu and select ‘Tools’ and then select another tool within that pallette, but that’s just clumsy and slow. Why can’t there just be a frikkin key to press to apply the text changes you’ve just made and quickly move onto something else? Illustrator lets you [esc]-out of it but if you do that in ‘Stroppyshop’, it just cancels all of your hard work.

Enter: [enter] – that tiny little key next to the cursors on the keyboard of my MacBook Pro, which up until now I’ve rarely found any use for. I’m not even sure what it does that’s different to the enter/return key, if anything at all (except in this circumstance of course)? I’ll have to do some in-depth, exhaustive research.

So just now, whilst making some type changes to a layout, I accidentally hit little Mr [enter] key instead of the left cursor and, Gadzooks!, it frikking applied my text changes and let me outta the text box. Miraculous! Splendiferous! No more paintstaking mouse-searching after amending text. No more having to copy all, then hit escape, then show the palettes, then get back into the text box, then paste in all the copied changes again, then wait 2 secs for Photoshop to gather as many system resources as it can muster before pasting the clipboard contents over the previous text, then hitting another (any) tool on the Tools palette to get the heck outta that text box quick before ‘Ps’ crashes. Thank Gawd.