General
View every Steve Jobs keynote and video appearance
General
General
General
20% off Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 through December 31st
Deliver innovative ideas in print, web, interactive, and mobile design with Adobe Creative Suite 5.5. If you’re in the market for an upgrade, Adobe has a 20% off Creative Suite 5.5 going on now through December 31st. That’s quite a savings! For digital photographers, Adobe has also made a 30% off discount available on Photoshop Lightroom when you purchase it with Photoshop or a Creative Suite. Check the Adobe Discounts page for more information and other discounts.
If you’re running an old version of Creative Suite, this is a great upgrade. If you already have CS5, you’ll most likely want to wait until the next upgrade is available unless you’re planning on doing tablet, phone or ebook development.
General
Desktoply: Show off your desktop
General
Free Freehand group files antitrust lawsuit against Adobe
There was a time when the battle for vector creation dominance was a heated battle between Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. Illustrator was the dominant player, but not by much. Freehand users were extremely loyal, and the application offered many features that are still absent in Illustrator to this day. All of that changed in 2005 when Adobe acquired Macromedia and discontinued Freehand completely.
Freehand users were absolutely furious. To this day, Illustrator faces no real competition in the professional vector art creation world.
Out of nowhere (for me anyway), a group called Free Freehand has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Adobe Systems, Inc., alleging that Adobe has violated federal and state antitrust laws by abusing its dominant position in the professional vector graphic illustration software market.
I suspect that the group is seeking to have the code for Freehand sold to another party for active development, or donated to the open source community. At this stage of the game, I’m not sure if anyone could resurrect Freehands popularity among professional designers. Illustrator is a great program, and as part of the Adobe Creative Suite it is a staple product for every professional designer; a group that doesn’t take well to drastic change. But it will certainly be interesting to follow the lawsuit.
General
New Microsoft product leaked
Details are sketchy, but we got our hands on one copy of the new Microsoft TV Dinner, expected to ship any day now. An unboxing video isn’t available, but the only thing inside beside the dinner was an instruction sheet containing the following: Read more “New Microsoft product leaked”
General
Advanced CSS3 training in plain English
CSS3 is the technology behind most of the eye-catching visuals on the Web today, but the official documentation can be dry and hard to follow. Luckily, The Book of CSS3 distills the heady technical language of the CSS3 specification into plain English, so you can get started on your next project right away.
With real-world examples and a focus on results, The Book of CSS3 shows you how to transform ordinary text into stunning, richly detailed web pages fit for any browser. You’ll master the latest cutting-edge CSS features, like multi-column layouts, borders and box effects, and new color and opacity settings. You’ll also learn how to:
- Stylize text with fully customizable outlines, drop shadows, and other effects
- Create, position, and resize unlimited background images on the fly
- Spice up static web pages with event-driven transitions and animations
- Apply 2D and 3D transformations to text and images
- Use linear and radial gradients to create smooth color transitions
- Tailor a website’s appearance to smartphones and other devices
“The Book of CSS3 doesn’t waste time teaching the basics,” said Author, Peter Gasston. “It’s for experienced developers who want to build on their existing knowledge. It gets right to the good stuff, so you can put it to work on your own sites today. And the companion website offers up-to-date browser compatibility charts and live CSS3 samples for you to explore, so you can actually see the book’s examples in action as you read.”
NoStarch Press is offering a free copy of the Ebook version when you buy the print copy for just $34.95. The Ebook only version can be had for $27.95. You can also purchase a copy of the book from O’Reilly, but it does not come with a free copy of the Ebook.
General
Adobe Creative Suite 5.5: digital content creation and new…
Adobe has announced the next version of their Creative Suite software. CS5.5 is heavily focused on designers wishing to take their work to tablet, smartphone, and EPUB users. All versions of their individual apps will be updated (except Acrobat, which remains at version X), as will the Creative Suites that comprise the apps – including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash.
Beyond the numerous features for building interactive documents for use on iPad, iPhone, and other tablets and smartphones, there’s not much information available covering feature updates for print-based designers.
An Adobe CS5.5 pricing chart is available to help you decide what versions of the Suites or individual apps you wish to purchase.
This is where it gets interesting. Adobe has also announced a new month-by-month subscription plan for all their major Creative Suites and individual applications. For instance, you can rent Dreamweaver for as little as $19 per month, or the entire Creative Suite Web Premium for $89 per month. Serious Creative Suite users will most likely still want to purchase their preferred Suites, but for those who just need to complete a quick website and only own Design Standard can rent Dreamweaver for the price of a week’s worth of coffee at Starbucks.
With any Adobe Creative Suite update comes discussion of frequency and cost of updates. Adobe is making changes in this area. From now on, the Creative Suite will be on a 24-month development cycle for major upgrades (CS3, CS4, CS5, CS6, etc.). Every 12 months they will also release a mid-cycle update (such as the CS5.5 just announced) which will offer only minor feature enhancements, bug fixes, and code tweaking. Previously, Adobe released Creative Suite upgrades around every 18 months.
Unless you’re doing a lot of work destined for a tablet, smartphone or ebook reader, you’re probably going to skip this release and wait for Creative Suite 6. But if you do that type of work, CS5.5 appears to be a dandy update.
General
Extensis brings Adobe Font Collection to web designers
Extensis announced that they are working with Adobe to deliver the Adobe Font Collection typefaces to the Web with its WebINK web font service.
Over 180 Adobe fonts are now available on WebINK, including some of their most recognized type families. Myriad Pro, Adobe Garamond Pro, and Chaparral Pro are just a few of the families available as Adobe Web Fonts.
“Extensis WebINK makes web site development and design easy, and integration with Suitcase Fusion 3 is a great feature for designers,” said Caleb Belohlavek, principal product manager for Type Development at Adobe. “We’re excited to collaborate with Extensis to provide customers with high-quality Adobe type for the web.”
Until recently, web browser and font license limitations have constrained Web developers to using only a handful of typefaces in their web designs. Extensis’ recent debut of WebINK breaks down these barriers, instantly delivering custom fonts straight to web browsers using WebINK’s global network. With WebINK, web designers simply indicate their chosen fonts using the @font-face rule in CSS. Developers can now choose from a huge array of fonts and quickly reference them within the site’s HTML code.
WebINK has a free 30-day trial, so you have a great opportunity to test your own website using custom web fonts. And don’t forget, WebINK is integrated into Extensis Suitcase Fusion, making it even easier to use.
General
Firefox 4 leads Mac browsers in battery life
Microsoft has released a fairly extensive study of browser use on laptop computers and the effects on battery life. Not surprisingly, IE 9 comes out in the lead overall. As far as Mac browsers go, Firefox 4 takes the crown, followed by Chrome and Safari. Opera brings up the rear in the study.
I’m not sure about the usefulness of the information, as your use of the browser is only one aspect in terms of how long your MacBook’s battery lasts. And how many people use enough Watts of power just surfing the web? But the information provided is interesting nonetheless.
General
Quark to ship XPress 9.0 next month
Quark recently announced that Quark XPress 9.0 will ship sometime in late April. The upgrade will feature a few nice features for designers creating flyers, brochures, posters and books like an improved links palette, import of images into a grid, and an integrated story editor. But the biggest new thing with XPress 9 is the interactive tools. XPress users can create and publish richly designed, interactive content for the web, eBooks, smartphones, the iPad, and more.
If you upgrade to ($299) or purchase a full version of ($799) Quark XPress 8 now, you’ll get the upgrade to version 9 for free.
General
Web developers and designers: How fast does your page…
In a day and age where a good majority of web surfers have high-speed Internet, web developers and designers still must concern themselves with page loading speed. Javascript, JQuery, Java, Flash, and large images can slow the load time of any given page. The best way to test the speed of your web pages is to use an off-site app to test it.
Loads.in is a great site to do just that. You simply type in the URL of your web page and wait a few seconds for the test to run. Once completed, a display of average load times is provided. From there, you can select cities in various countries from a list and retest your page. Additionally, you can choose to use IE, Safari, Chrome, or Firefox to run the test.