great preview of InDesign 3 with screenshots
Posted on September 30, 2003
Filed Under Design | Comments Off
Photoshop CS is getting all the attention, but here’s a site that previews the new features in InDesign CS. I’ve already decided that this (along with DW MX 2004) was the upgrade I was going to do. The preview just makes me look forward to it.
I’m looking forward to:
* Dockable palettes! (although that’s not as important now that I have an extra 21″ of screen real estate)
* Bleeds in document setup! I screwed up recently by forgetting to set the bleed before making the PDF.
* Separation preview is nice…saves the step of making an intermediate PDF in Acrobat 6 Pro which also has this feature. If anyone running InDesign CS selects “Registration” instead of “Black” and doesn’t catch it before the service bureau or printer then they’re just lazy.
* Flattener preview. I’m using transparency more and more in my InDesign files and it’s not so scary. But you have to know what you’re doing and this will take out some of the guesswork. One of the nasty rumors about InDesign 2 is that transparency doesn’t print right. It does.
* Other little fixes:This isn’t mentioned in the article but I read it elsewhere yesterday. Like in Illustrator 10, if you double click on a text box you automatically get the type editing cursor. Woo hoo!
* I still have to find out, maybe someone knows and can answer in the comments, whether it’s now possible to copy text from a website or email message and have it apply unformatted. This is something that Quark has always done and the only feature I miss, although there is a workaround. I have BBEdit Lite open and I paste text there first, then recopy it. That way, I can have a paragraph of formatted text in InDesign and paste copy in the middle and it will take on the formatting of the text that surrounds it. Yes, it’s easy enough to use the eyedropper to format text but saving the extra step(s) will be nice and it’s been often requested on the InDesign list.
44″ of monitor goodness
Posted on September 30, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh | 1 Comment
When I got my G5 last week, I moved my old G4/450 and Apple Studio Display 21″ CRT off to the corner of my desk. It’s still my hope to sell them, but I decided that shipping will be impossible. Heck, I can’t even get the thing off my desk easily. So until someone local comes along who wants to take it off my hands, I plugged in the monitor. The G5 came with a VGA-DVI adapter so now I have the 80 lb. beast sitting next to my 23″ Cinema Display. Way more monitor than I need but if it’s going to sit on my desk it might as well be useful.
Adobe CS pricing
Posted on September 29, 2003
Filed Under Macintosh | 6 Comments
As expected, Adobe announced upgrades for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive today. Calling the package “CS” (a la Macromedia “MX”) the products can ship separately or in one box. The Standard version is Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and versioning software for workgroups called VersionCue. The Premium version includes GoLive and Acrobat. Adobe has been packing their products together for a while, but this is the first time upgrading licensing applied. Looking at the pricing structure, I’m not sure why they bothered.
When Macromedia first introduced Studio MX, they offered an upgrade path to the full studio if you owned two previous versions of their products for a cost that was only marginally higher than the upgrade of those two products alone. Since I owned Dreamweaver and Fireworks 4, it made sense to spend $399 to upgrade to Studio MX instead of $300 to upgrade just those two products and I got Freehand and Flash. Adobe is offering an “upgrade” to CS Standard for $549 (versus $999 for the entire package, $1,229 including Acrobat 6 Pro and GoLive) and Photoshop is the only qualifying product. I’m disappointed. I own Illustrator 10, InDesign 3 and Photoshop 7. The individual upgrade prices for each of the products I own is $169. That’s about $510 if I upgraded those products. Therefore, the “CS” package is only of value for those that folks that want or need the new Version Cue versioning control across workgroups (which you are in a sense getting for $39 with the full price upgrades). At home freelance studios need not apply.
Even $169 for the individual upgrade is a disappointment. Adobe has never charged that much for upgrades, and they typically offered an “early bird” upgrade price of $99-129. However, the new features in InDesign may make the upgrade worth it and I’ll start from there. I can’t find as much compelling me to upgrade Photoshop. Maybe I’ll change my mind when the demo versions come out. And for as much as I use Illustrator now, (logos here and there) version 10 will continue to work just fine for me.
It’s also interesting to note that the Photoshop upgrade page only offers an upgrade for the Windows version. The software is available for Macintosh in full version only. That better be a typo. And of final note, Adobe is only requiring activation on the Windows version of Photoshop.
wiggle room
Posted on September 27, 2003
Filed Under Misc. | Comments Off
It’s 12:38 am and I’m sitting here printing out 100 copies of the brochure I did earlier in the week. I have to bring them to my client on Monday morning and I want to get them out of the way so it’s not a “to do” hanging over my head all weekend. Of course, I don’t feel like working so I started flipping through my referrer logs. Always fun.
In particular, I love finding new blogs that link to something I said. Hello people, that’s what trackbacks are for…I shouldn’t find out about this for the first time from my logs! 
Where was I? Oh yeah, in this particular case a blog entitled “Trade Show Marketing Report” linked to this entry about MacWorld/Creative Pro last July.
While I’m still in favor of audits, I’m thinking that maybe the issue will go away, at least in certain segments. Part of that reasoning is due to show reviews on blogs like this one , again on MacWorld CreativePro.
If you (or more likely your company’s executives) contribute to the promotion inflated attendance numbers, you’d better hope blogging never catches up to your event. You simply won’t have the wiggle room to fudge.
Now bloggers are known to have an inflated sense of their worth in the world. But he makes a really good point. I wasn’t looking to influence anything when I said what I did, I was just calling an event as I saw it. The fact is that some companies are held closer to the truth because some Joe Schmo with no one to answer to will tell it like it is. I don’t have any power alone, but since I was one of many who reported about how quiet the Javitz Center was on show day, IDG had no choice but to keep their numbers honest. They couldn’t get away with anything more than maybe a slight exaggeration. Interesting.
Major CSS coolness
Posted on September 26, 2003
Filed Under Design | Comments Off
This one got bookmarked fast. You will too if you are a designer who works on CSS-only sites (or wants to). Tell ‘em what kind of layout you want, and get the skeleton CSS code back. The code seems clean, we’ll see on my next site how it holds up. Part of the problem with a lot of the example sites out there is that you have pick out their code in order to customize it, or it doesn’t have the necessary hacks to work on a variety of browsers.
