"That will never catch on," I told my friends and teachers. "That's just a novelty, a toy. Who would really want to create art on a computer?"

Little did I know that a little over ten years later I would be sitting in a college training to become a graphic designer. I could kick myself for not learning the computer back in high school when I had the chance. Oh sure, I had played around on a computer at home when I was a kid. Our family even owned an Apple™ knock-off called Franklin. (they went out of business years ago.) I would spend hours copying code from a magazine just to get the think to print a calendar or something similar. But, alas, no Photoshop.™ So, when I sat in that first day of design school and waited for the professor to come in and teach me about the Apple Macintosh™ I was understandably a little nervous.

But, like anything else in life, I learned that if you don't dive in head first you don't learn a whole lot. I tried my best and studied hard. There was a time when I really hated Photoshop™ because I just didn't get it. It was too complicated and the instructor seemed to talk way too fast in a language of terms that were completely foreign to me at the time such as scanning, frequency, dots per inch and resolution. This was in the mid 90's so a lot of this was new to everyone. We were learning Photoshop 3.0.™ If you are familiar with the program's history you will know that it was very primitive at this stage.

Eventually I excelled and started to enjoy creating art in Photoshop.™ One of the things that I learned quickly and really seemed to help was keyboard shortcuts. My instructor couldn't say it enough. He would say that if we didn't learn our keyboard shortcuts we would not be able to meet our deadlines and if we didn't meet deadlines we would be out of a job. Boy was he right! So, that's why I am going to stress to you that you go about learning your keyboard shortcuts. I will outline some simple ones for you and tell you some ways to learn on your own.

Most people that use the computer regularly are familiar with the basics shortcuts for a computer. But, just in case I will go over a few. Generally the first letter of a word is matched with the command key (apple) or the control key (PC). Such as command or control - P is usually print on most computers. Similarly, command or control - O is usually open. As a designer you will definitely want to familiarize yourself with the copy, cut and paste shortcuts. They should be about the same for any application. They are command or control - C for copy, command or control - V for paste and command or control - X for cut.

The industry standard design programs that I use are Adobe Photoshop™, Adobe Illustrator™ and Adobe InDesign.™ When you buy these applications they usually come with a cheat sheet with several shortcuts. I urge you to use these as much as possible if you want to be an efficient designer. You will be amazed at the time it will shave off your day and allow you to finish your jobs faster (or goof off sooner as the case may be!).

Another important factor regarding keyboard shortcuts is the placement of your hand. You should keep your fingers placed near the command or control keys so that you can place your thumb on the modifier key (the first key to be placed) and then the corresponding letter. Such as command or control - P for print. After a while of working this way you will not even notice you're doing it. You can also make use of a two-button mouse. The right button generally takes the place of the modifier and when pressed will bring up a menu of commands.

If you have been meaning to learn your keyboard shortcuts and haven't because you feel it is too time-consuming or demanding I have some suggestions. Try learning just one shortcut a day. Work all day with this one shortcut only and try to only use the shortcut for executing this particular command. Or you could try two or three a day if you are brave. Then, the next day, or in a few days, whatever you feel comfortable with - try some more. Eventually you will learn several of them and they will become second nature to you.

If for some reason your software did not come with a cheat sheet of keyboard shortcuts there are several websites that list them that you could print out or you could simply just look in the menus of the program. For example, in Photoshop™ - the keyboard shortcuts are always listed to the right of the command in the menus. Take note of these and start using them. You will see a marked improvement in your speed and you will free up more time for other things. For more information you should also visit Adobe software's website at http://www.adobe.com.

I'm a graphic designer. I have a pretty broad range of projects on the go at any one time and accordingly, use a wide range of tools. I build websites, design for print, create video presentations, flash animations 3D models and some animation. I still use older, Macromedia versions of programs (thank you eBay), as I don't have the money to upgrade to the newest Adobe versions.

My computer has plenty of RAM, and a decent processor. I have the full use of both arms and all of my fingers. So why does it take me so long to finish a project?

Well, no one program can do what I need. I used to be fairly Photoshop-centric in my work, but now I like Adobe Illustrator, as it does almost everything Adobe Photoshop can do short of photo editing and having all my art as vectors is better for file sizes and for scaling up in later projects. But, for example, if I'm making a video, and posting it online, often my work flow looks like this:

Receive brief from client. It's in .doc format, so I open it in Open Office. (if it's in .docx format, I get angry and have to dig out my Microsoft Word viewer)

• Create concepts in Adobe Photoshop.
• Email them to client from Thunderbird.
• Get the go-ahead from the client.
• Animate some segments in Blender.
• Edit together footage in Adobe Premiere.
• Export using Adobe Media Encoder.
• Import into Macromedia Flash.
• Create title overlays in Illustrator, as Flash wont read all my fonts.
• Import these as vectors.
• Save as a .swf.
• Build web page in Dreamweaver.
• Write the rest of the page code by hand in Notepad2.

Phew. As fast as my PC is, I can't realistically keep all of those programs running. However, to speed things up, I'll often have five or so open at any one time. Once I start moving content between them I start losing time.

I have several options. I could use Adobe Bridge. I could. It's cumbersome and at the end of the day, eve if I liked the interface, it's just one more program to run and will only link about a quarter of the programs I want.

I don't use Windows Flip 3D. It's beautiful, it's original (unless you've ever used a Mac in the last 10 years), it's.... ..utterly useless. It's eye-candy and the sort of thing that ageing men everywhere use when someone walks past their PC, just so they can look as if they're doing something complicated.

But, I digress. What I want to do is finish my project. I need to edit content, add stuff in and export it. I'm fairly sure that given enough motivation, someone, somewhere, could teach my PC to understand that a vector in one program can be a vector in another. I can drop stuff from Illustrator into Flash, (after a fair amount of groaning on my computer's part). Premiere can open up Photoshop files, though why it would want to is utterly beyond my comprehension. This is a start. And it's the reason I was happy to hear Adobe bought out Macromedia, though it will still take a while before the Macromedia programs are anything but Adobe in name only. Premiere has been an Adobe project of several generations, but still remains very different, besides it's ability to crash at the slightest provocation.

So, what am I getting at?

I think the very concept of the Windows OS needs re-examining. Windows functions by running, applications, processes and everything else in, (would you believe it!?) Windows.

Once upon a time, this model worked very well, everyone had 256k of RAM and they were happier for it. But not any more. Let me give you an example:

I'm running Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Blender and Open Office .org at the moment.

All of them have options to insert text into a document. This means on my PC, I have five instances of text features, running at once. They're not all compatible, Flash wont read all my fonts, Blender wont read the other half and that only leaves me with with Arial Black and Papyrus (which just screams, “I'm six years old, here's my Egyptian homework project!”).

I think, I could save RAM and improve compatibility if my OS handled fonts. Then, I could just call up that feature, like the character map and chose my font. It only runs once on the system, so I save memory. These days Photoshop and Illustrator are about 50% identical, already it would make more sense for there to be a basic framework with individual features which can be called upon as needed. Both have colour pickers, (think what integration could do for managing colour profiles), Photoshop has vectors, Illustrator has layer styles... ..can you see where I'm going with this?

So, really I think it's up to the OS to incorporate everything, or at least provide a framework to make this possible. That way, more features could be integrated as individual modules. Think of the amounts of memory we could save. No longer would I have to load huge font list in five individual programs as they start up. Nor would I have to wait for all those Photoshop brushes to load when all I want to do is correct red eye in one photo.

It could work from a marketing perspective too; iTunes found success by selling individual songs from albums, I think programs could do the same with features. It might provide useful feedback on exactly what users want in applications. I think Adobe would be hard pressed to find anyone willing to buy some of the tackier Photoshop filters. And if users could spend less at a time, I'm sure more people would invest in these programs. People could buy the basic module, the equivalent of Photoshop Elements and then customise their package. Illustrator already doubles up with Photoshop on so many features, and Adobe already allows people to build packages of whole programs as custom Creative Suites, they're getting there already.

I realize it's not an easy answer, but you have to do these things one step at a time. If we ever want to make changes this immense, and in my opinion, this useful, we have to plan them and then implement them one step at a time.

Surely some of this is almost reaching the point of being a necessity? I thought that code was meant to get leaner and cleaner with each new release. And whilst this seems to be the case with smaller open source applications, like Lightbox and full open source programs like Blender, other programs, like Microsoft Word are power-hungry beasts, with god-knows what built in as standard. It's a Word processor for gods sake!!! You know, I got the feeling that perhaps Word Art was a step too far in 1998, I can't even use Word these days! On my new Vista laptop I had a 90 day trial of Microsoft Word, and along side it, a whole program just to activate it. To activate it. Am I insane here!? Why does my new laptop have a program on it to activate a 90 day free trial of an unusable word processor!?

But I digress, I want my OS to take on more of the workload. It's a lot to ask for, I know.

Having said this, I'm not the first person to think about this. Douglas Adams, suggested being able to "cut and paste" functions in Macs, nineteen years ago in an article in MacUser magazine.

Just stop and think, for a second. Think of Minority Report, The Matrix, Twenty Four, well, actually any film where the writers had no clue about how technology really works. And it's no slur on them, (god forbid we criticise the Writers Guild of America, I'm only just getting over my TV withdrawal) it's just the way we want computers to work. They are simple, integrated and fast. Agent Smith never had to pause to buffer, Jack Bauer never found his computer couldn't open PNGs, Tom Cruise never had to wait whilst his image manipulation software loaded, so why should we?