http://www.design-tools.com/add-ons/

We have the first half of 2008 scheduled for our conferences.  We thought we would give you a peak into what we are thinking about for the rest of 2008.  The following are are targeted cities we are planning but have no contracts signed so please contact us for the latest details if you are planning to attend one of the following:

• Tokyo InDesign Conference in July
• Pixel

Adobe MAX moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles this year (http://max.adobe.com/).  The event runs from October 4-7.  In case anyone attended the event back before Adobe acquired Macromedia it used to be called Macromedia MAX.  Since Adobe’s acquisition Adobe has added a ton of creative content and sessions to mix in with the traditional developer heavy tracks.  If you you want to attend one of the largest creative events in North America you can sign up and join over 5000 other creative professionals and developers.

We have merged PhotoshopTechniques.com and the Mogo-Media.com forums into one of the largest Adobe Creative Suite user community on the web.   Please stop by and check out the forums and see what is happening.  Come with questions and we will get you answers.  If you have a MOGO Membership  your same username and password will work.  Log in now.

We are sponsoring a Facebook InDesign Tip’s application.  Here is one of the recent ones that we found funny.

We post on our homepage some fun sites that we run across.  I thought why not share them here too.  This way they come into the feed (if you are following us- and if you aren’t Why not?)  If you don’t love this then I am truly sad for your sense of humor.  If I am crazy just post as such in the comments.  Unfortunately you wouldn’t be the first.

Shavemyyeti.com

Tis the day for plug in updates.  I.T.I.P announced their Readabilities 2.0 “has been tested and approved for use within the K4 editorial system.”

“Readabilities 2.0″ is available for InCopyCS3 and InDesignCS3 on both MAC and Windows. Available as a single-seat version (”Readabilities”) and as a K4 version. For all additional information and sources of supply, you can visit their website http://www.itip-gmbh.eu.  They are even saying they will make a fully functional but only time-limited evaluation version available to anyone who contacts them.

Hopefully this is helpful to some of you out there.

Automatication (out of New Zealand) just announced a new InDesign PlugIn called PlaySWF. Here is the description of the new product:

“One of the issues when placing SWF(Flash) files in Adobe InDesign is there isn’t a preview available. PlaySWF is an add-on that allows you to play placed SWF files in InDesign. PlaySWF targets designers that create interactive PDFs from Adobe InDesign. Additionally you can play and place any SWF files without having to leave the comfort of InDesign.”

If you want more information you can visit their website and download it. 

Ted LoCascio is a professional graphic designer and an expert in Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, InDesign, Illustrator, and QuarkXPress. He served as senior designer at KW Media and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) for several years, and has created layouts and designs for many successful software training books, videos, and magazines. He is the author of InDesign CS2 at Your Fingertips, The InDesign Effects Book, and Combining Images with Photoshop Elements. He has contributed articles to Photoshop User magazine, InDesign magazine, Creativepro.com and has taught at PhotoshopWorld. Ted is also the video author of InDesign CS2 Essential Training, Font Management, Illustrator CS2 Creative Techniques, and Creative Suite 2 Integration: Print Project Workflow–all available at www.lynda.com. He also teaches a Digital Graphics course at St. Petersburg College, in Seminole FL.

Just over a year ago, in October, 2007, Adobe showcased a product concept at their annual Adobe MAX conference, in Chicago. The product was code-named Thermo, and I wrote about it on my Illustrator blog. At this year’s Adobe MAX conference in November 2008 in San Francisco, Adobe announced their progress on Thermo, and even distributed a special “preview” prerelease edition for folks to take home and play with. Luckily, I scored a copy and had a chance to give a run for the money. Here, I describe my first look at Thermo.

OK, so first of all, Thermo was just a codename for the product. At MAX, Adobe announced the official name for Thermo: Adobe Flash Catalyst. Much like the way Adobe has positioned Photoshop as a franchise (Adobe Photoshop Standard, Adobe Photoshop Extended, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop Express, etc.), it seems Adobe is following suit with Flash as well. Hence, Adobe Flash Catalyst sits alongside Adobe Flash Professional, etc. While the name doesn’t roll off the tongue nearly as well as Thermo does, Catalyst certainly does describe its role well—as a way to jumpstart your projects. So what exactly is Adobe Flash Catalyst?

Well, at a basic level, let’s take a look at where Web design was, back in the 1990’s. To create websites, one had to write HTML code, and most used text editors (i.e., BBEdit) to do this. Designers who wanted to create websites not only had to learn how to write HTML,  they also had to write the code themselves. Often, they might design how they want their site to look, using Photoshop or some other design application, but at the end of the day, they’d still have to find a way to reproduce that look with code (not an easy task, especially since designers weren’t great coders). Then along came “WYSIWYG” HTML editors. These were programs that allows designers to visually build web pages, while the necessary code was automatically processed by the application. For example, if a designer wanted a photo here or a table there, they’d drag out elements onto the page and position them to their liking – not much different than what they might have been used to in their design applications. Adobe Dreamweaver plays this role very well today, going beyond standard HTML, allowing designers to create pages that contain complex and even dynamically-generated content, with CSS, AJAX and JavaScript functionality – all with a few clicks of a mouse. The real benefit here is that Dreamweaver has two buttons: one called Code view and one called Design view. You can either use the Code view to hand code your own content, or you can use the Design view to draw your content. This allows a designer to create something that a developer can then take to the next level. Instead of a designer showing a developer a picture, saying “make it look like this and make it work like so”, a developer can simply take the code the designer created and massage it and add whatever logic is necessary to make it work correctly.

Today, the Internet is at a stage that many refer to as “Web 2.0″ — a state where standards like CSS and AJAX are used to take full advantage of the capabilities of the web, especially considering how we use the web these days, driven by search engine optimization (the Google effect) and mobile computing (the Internet is everywhere effect). Many people look towards the future and ask, what’s next? What’s beyond Web 2.0? Many believe (Adobe included) that the internet will extend beyond the browser experience and become ubiquitous. Instead of using a web browser like Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer, you’ll just launch applications that know how to access content from the web directly. Adobe refers to these as “Rich Internet Applications” or RIAs, and we’re already starting to see these appear in the form of widgets, and mini applications. For example, you may be familiar with Adobe Kuler – an online community around the use of color. Content from Kuler is accessible either through a web browser, as a widget, or even directly from within Adobe applications like Photoshop and Illustrator. Kuler is also available as a standalone desktop application, running on Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime).

RIAs can be developed using a variety of technologies. A popular offering from Adobe is something called Adobe Flex. Flex is a development framework that allows developers to build rich internet applications. You’ve undoubtedly used applications built on the Flex platform as many companies use it to drive their website content. For example, Adobe’s Kuler application was built with Flex. Flex applications run in the Flash Player (or in Adobe AIR directly), and in fact, you publish Flex content as SWF content, so essentially, you can run a Flex application directly in the Flash Player (so it runs pretty much everywhere these days, sans the iPhone of course).

People who write code usually use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which is something like a text editor on steroids, with tools and libraries to help them do their work. An example of such an IDE is Eclipse, a popular open-source (and free!) environment for writing code. Adobe also offers an IDE specifically for developing Flex code, called Adobe Flex Builder. Currently in its 3rd version, Flex Builder allows developers to build Flex applications more easily.

If you’re a designer though, and you want to define the user interface and the overall design of a rich internet application, how would you do that? You don’t know how to write Flex code (and it isn’t something you want to learn either). Rather, you probably take your favorite design application, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, or maybe even Fireworks, and you create the look and feel for your project. If you think about it, your design is nothing more than a big JPEG image that LOOKS like your application, but it doesn’t actually work. Going back to our analogy from before, it’s like HTML 10-15 years ago. You can draw a pretty picture, and then tell a developer to write all the code for it to make it work. In other words, in the world of Flex today, there’s no WYSIWYG Flex editor — there’s no application like Dreamweaver where you can visually create something and the where the code is written for you. Until now.Adobe Flash Catalyst is a visual Flex authoring application. It’s Dreamweaver, but for Flex instead of HTML. And considering how different Flex is from HTML, you come out with some interesting capabilities.

Let’s take a closer look at what this means. You launch Adobe Flash Catalyst and create a new project, and by default, you’re in the Design view. You use a rectangle tool to draw a shape on the screen, and you style with a color of choice. You can then switch to code view and see that what you just drew on the screen was converted to Flex code (MXML). Now, say you want this rectangle to actually be a button. Switch back to Design view and click on the shape. A Head Up Display (HUD) appears, offering you the ability to convert that shape into a functional button, where you can then quickly define over and down states for the button. Again, as you do all of this, its all being written as Flex code behind the scenes. Kinda like how Dreamweaver just writes all the HTML and AJAX code for you, right?

But it gets better. Because as a designer, you still want to be able to design in your familiar design applications, like Illustrator for example. OK, so you have this button now in Flash Catalyst. You decide you want to make it look pretty (in Flex, you can skin a button or a component to look however you’d like), so with the button selected, you choose an option called “Edit in Adobe Illustrator CS4″. The button opens in Illustrator and you use your favorite design tools to work your design magic, then you save and go back to Flash Catalyst and blammo, your button is updated in place. If you’re familiar with the InDesign “Edit Original” workflow, or the Photoshop “Smart Object” workflow, it’s just like that.

Sounds pretty good, right? Well, it all comes down to what you can actually build with Flash Catalyst. Since the underlying code is Flex (MXML), Catalyst is geared primarily to building functional applications, not websites or SWF elements that you’d place into a web browser (read: Flash ad banners, site navigation, etc.). Content created in Catalyst also requires the Adobe Flash Player 10, so full adoption of that is still a ways off as well. So if you’re thinking Catalyst is a REPLACEMENT for Adobe Flash Professional, think again. More specifically, if you’re a designer who needs to build Flash content, but you also have no interest in learning the Flash application or ActionScript, Catalyst isn’t that tool. In fact, you may find that Adobe InDesign, with its new SWF export capabilities, might be a better fit for that. Rather, Catalyst is positioned to help designers who are going to be designing the next step in development — Rich Internet Applications. Depending on what kind of designer you are, this is either totally irrelevant, or incredibly interesting. So don’t think about website development, think about application development.

While Adobe Flash Catalyst is here, in the form of a preview release, a full blown application that Adobe is ready to sell is still a ways off. But it offers an interesting look into what the future may hold for both designers and developers. Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear what others think of Catalyst as well.