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.

Are you going to be at Adobe MAX 2008, in San Francisco? If so, stop by and visit MOGO Media in the Partner Community Lounge!

From what I’ve been hearing so far, MAX should be quite the show. Adobe has already hinted that they’ll actually be distributing a preview release of the product currently codenamed “Thermo”, and I’ll also be giving a few sessions on that product as well. I hear lots of rumblings about mobile stuff as well. Oh, and the parties! It promises to be a fun week in San Francisco!

Hope to see you there!

3 attendees visiting the Create Chaos iStock booth from the Creative Suite and WDDC conference in Orlando.  And to think you missed this.

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=78180

An important message to Macintosh users who are considering purchasing Acrobat 9: I am writing to let you Mac users know that the current marketing for Acrobat Pro is very confusing. On the page for Acrobat Pro, is a very enticing sidebar that says “Consider Upgrading to Acrobat 9 Pro Extended” It outlines all the cool things that Extended can do. I had seen some publicity for Extended and so I immediately clicked that button to find out more about this version. It is a very compelling product that has a presentation application, 3D capabilities, and the form creation product Live Cycle Designer. I was very excited about this product, when I was lucky to have checked the System Requirements for this product. And was amazed to find that this product is Windows only! It is one thing to shove the Mac market off to the side as Acrobat has in the past. For instance, in the past, Acrobat products have provided features for Windows that were missing on the Mac. But the current advertising borders on misleading advertising. Rather than just hide the Windows-only features under the same name as the Macintosh product, Adobe has come out with a Windows-only product that doesn’t clearly state it is Windows only! To publicize a product on a page that is cross platform and then make it very hard to find out that the product is Windows only is terrible. And I guarantee that this will lead to many people ordering something they can not use. And will be very angry about! I have written to several people I know at Adobe to complain about this. I would suggest that others use the Adobe feedback page to tell Adobe how this makes you feel. Meanwhile, I’m glad that I won’t have to shell out the extra money for this Windows-only product.

The Getting Started with Dreamweaver and CSS Web Publishing Workshop seminar tour began with a sold-out event in Los Angeles this past week. The workshop is a one-day event and is a collaborative effort from MOGO Media and Adobe Systems Incorporated.Attendees were greeted at the fabulous the Ritz Carlton in Marina Del Ray with a sumptuous breakfast, thanks to Adobe. Over 300 attendees jammed the ballroom to then see Steve Forde of GridIron Software give a great demo of their recently-announced Flow software. After Steve answered a few questions, Brian Wood took the stage and kicked off the all-day event focused on publishing websites using Dreamweaver CS3 and CSS.Brian started at the beginning and spoke about laying the groundwork for websites using familiar software applications, like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks. Brian then spent some time discussing just what exactly CSS and how it works. What was really great about this part was how easy it was to understand. Brian made constant comparisons to traditional print design terms (for example, how CSS ID tags compare to Layers in Illustrator or InDesign), making the session easy to follow, and seeming less technical.During lunch break, tens of attendees lined up to speak personally with Brian, asking questions on specific items from the class, and asking for advice on how to implement their own personal projects. In fact, Brian had little time to grab lunch for himself, as the afternoon sessions got underway quickly.  Brian then took the attentive audience into a deep dive, covering Dreamweaver CS3. Putting everything together into a site, Brian showed how to integrate design elements from Photoshop and even covered how to import content directly from InDesign CS3. At the end of the day, one lucky attendee walked away with a full copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium!With a great start in Los Angeles, the next stop on the tour is New York city, this week, on June 4th at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The event is already sold-out with over 400 attendees and it promises to be another exciting day of learning and fun.With dates coming up in Washington DC, Chicago, and Boston, there’s still time to sign up and benefit from this great event. Check out www.mogoseminars.com for dates and registration information. Hope to see you there!