Boy, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think how much more productive I could be if every single one of my creative apps ran online.

Wait.

Scratch that. No, I’ve actually never thought that.

Online applications can be fantastic. I’m using one right now. Having Flickr for photos and Vimeo for videos, and so on, can vastly expand the potential of what you can do with media. And I certainly see casual users of those applications preferring online services in some cases. (On the other hand, I also know even a lot of casual photographers who would rather sit in Aperture or Lightroom and tweak their photos than struggle with a Web app — for them, the Web is about uploading and sharing, not editing.)

It’s just really hard to see why pros would need to do everything online. And here’s the fundamental problem: why are we talking about taking applications online rather than taking online to applications? Witness Adobe’s Bruce Chizen making vague predictions about the far-off future — ten years, to be exact. By that point, we might as well start talking about how we’ll all be flooded by global warming and under attack by the Mutant Bug People who have dominated the Earth. But in ten years, says Adobe, their products will be fully online. Why? Uh … haven’t figure that one out yet, evidently.

I’m always amazed when I meet After Effects users who don’t know about or utilize expressions. I’m no scripting guru, but the few expression tricks I know get used constantly. A couple of simple expressions are extremely useful for visualists, allowing you to quickly pump out incremental clips by just changing slider values.

The creatively titled “After Effects Expressions” (Come on people, Google Juice isn’t the only rationale you need to consider when naming your blog) starts with the basics, but quickly gets into conditional expressions and slider-driven animation, which is visualist gold as far as I’m concerned.

In After Effects, an expression is a Javascript based script in that can either modify a parameter or drive the parameter entirely, like position, opacity, or perhaps a Gaussian blur level. We can add an expression to any parameter that has a stopwatch icon next to the parameter. The exclusion to this rule are Masks parameters like Mask Shape, Mask Feather, etc.

This stuff is coming from Graymachine’s Harry J Frank, who is also involved in AE Freemart, so you can expect plenty more goodness to come.

Adobe’s Bob Donlon has a great step-by-step tutorial on putting together 3D Pan & Scans in After Effects.

This is a great weapon to have in your visual arsenal. Generally clients seem to be getting better at providing reasonable amounts of raw materials and resources for visual gigs, but occasionally you’ll get someone who emails you a couple of JPGs and a PDF logo and expects a half-hour visuals dvd in return. This technique can be a great help, and photoshop’s healing brush can make short work of those background edits.

I love mice. They’re still a great way to do many things, and while some may think they’re anachronistic, they still do the job for a lot of interface tasks quite nicely. But they’re also painfully awkward for many tasks in 2D and 3D graphics. The folks at 3Dconnexion have been rethinking input devices in ways that tailor them to the software we use, and they have some interesting-looking solutions.