In Numbers: Totally Photoshopped
25
Number of years since
Adobe
shipped its first iteration of culture-shifting software Photoshop. The image editing program, blamed for everything from impossible standards of beauty to destroying old- school darkroom skills, had its birthday this week.
3 million
Number of copies of Photoshop sold by Adobe in the good old boxed software days of the 1990s.
3.5 million
Number of subscribers Adobe now has to its Creative Cloud suite of apps, which includes Photoshop. It expects to have almost 6 million subscribers to the cloud-based services, first launched in 2013, by the end of this year.
Image of the week: Kings of cricket The Cricket World Cup is currently being played in Australia and New Zealand – indeed, rumour has it Ireland won a match. It's all good news for the Kashmiri bat makers of South Asia, who have seen the sale of their willow cricket bats pick up nicely since the tournament got underway. The Kashmir region is the second biggest exporter of willow cricket bats after the UK. Here a worker is pictured taking a raw cricket bat from the top of a stack kept outside for drying at a factory in Bijbehara, south of Srinagar. Well, it's either that or the world's most elaborate game of outdoor Jenga. Photograph: Reuters/Danish Ismail
The Lexicon: "Hot take" The phrase "hot take" is apparently doing the rounds in the harshly lit, oxygen-deprived basements of news media, or so we read on social media – we have yet to hear it in the wild. To the Urban Dictionary, which offers the following definition: "An opinion based on simplistic moralising rather than actual thought." Another definition, this one from NYMag.com, is that hot takes are artificially controversial comment pieces on boring topics sexed-up for the sake of clicks. You could call them half-baked analyses that were taken out of the oven too soon.
On the other hand, you could think about it for a while, research it a bit more, and come up with a more considered opinion when everybody has cooled down.
Getting to know: Murdoch MacLennan The chief executive of the Telegraph Media Group since 2004, MacLennan is the 39th most powerful person in the British media, according the annual rankings by rival paper the Guardian. But he hasn't had the best of press this week.
Respected commentator Peter Oborne resigned from the Daily Telegraph, claiming, among other things, that it had sidelined the HSBC tax story and committed "a fraud on its readers" because the bank is a key advertiser/commercial partner for the newspaper. Oborne told Channel 4 News that he has "no confidence" in MacLennan or the owners, the Barclay brothers.
MacLennan has a habit of saying goodbye to editors almost as quickly as he says hello to them, but 11 years into his job, he seems to have personal sticking power.
The list: Airbnb etiquette Etiquette experts at Debrett's have joined forces with home-sharing company Airbnb to produce what they describe as "a code of behaviour" for staying in somebody else's house, or inviting somebody into yours. Here are five of its suggestions:
1 Respect privacy Do not enter the hosts’ “forbidden zones”, no matter how fascinating they might seem. This is, indeed, timeless advice from Debrett’s.
2 Be ‘a considerate smoker’ This rule only applies to smokers.
3 Create ‘a welcoming space’ Hosts should furnish their guest rooms with “welcoming touches”, such as, for example, “some bedside reading”. Sadly, no guidance is given on appropriate titles, but everybody seems to be reading that The Girl on a Train book at the moment, so just go with that.
4 Be ‘unobtrusive’ It’s best to apologise for breathing/existing as frequently as possible. This is what you’ve paid for, after all.
5 ‘Make a good entrance’ This one is about not having muddy shoes, but obviously there are bonus marks available to any Airbnb guest who shimmies into the hallway doing jazz hands.
