Tagged: update

InDesign CC 2017 update + tips

InDesign CC 2017Adobe released an update to InDesign on Friday, and though it’s not a major update, it contain some changes worth noting.

The long-and-short of it for me is: mehhh. The first thing I did was turn on the Use Legacy “New Dialog” in the General tab of the preferences so I can avoid the highly annoying New Document dialog box that cuts off the Margins & Bleed entry areas to make room for giant useless icons for standard documents that used to live in a tidy little drop-down menu.

The new “Spectrum UI” is a huge leap backwards. You used to be able to adjust the brightness of the entire interface with a slider in the prefs; tweaking it just to your liking. Now you have four options: Dark (too dark for me, and too much contrast), Medium Dark (can’t decide if it wants to be dark or light and fails at both), Medium Light (which has no contrast at all and makes the entire interface look like a giant gray box), and Light (which is bright but useable).

I like the “flatter” interface, but it’s nothing to write home about.

Since David Blatner did a whole lot of work writing it up, I’ll point you to his review at InDesignSecrets.

Since you’re heading over to InDesignSecrets, take a look at these tips while you’re there:
Adding Alt Text to Images With Object Export Options
Naming Items in the Layers Panel

It’s nice to see Adobe updating InDesign regularly, but I’m starting to feel a bit neglected with the lack of new features, bug fixes and overall speed increases.

Get your OS X 10.11.4 Combo & Delta updaters here

El Capitan Update

If you’re ready to update to the latest El Capitan release, but hate amount of time it takes to download via the Mac App Store—and the fact that you don’t have an installer left behind to use on other Macs—then what you want are one of these two installers from Apple.

Combo Update: Updates any version of El Capitan, including the recent betas. I find this the most useful DMG to keep around.
Delta Update: Will only update El Capitan version 10.11.3 or the recent 10.11.4 betas. This will be the quickest download (though not by much).

The Graphic Mac’s new look

As I looked through the analytics for The Graphic Mac over the last year it became increasingly obvious that more and more users were viewing it on iPhones and iPads. Unfortunately, the old theme of the site didn’t work as well as I had hoped on mobile devices. It was also quite cluttered in general. So I started looking for something a little cleaner to use. Today, you see the results.

The Graphic Mac update

The categories are listed in menus (when applicable) at the top in a desktop browser, but when you view it on a mobile device (or simply by resizing your browser window to be really thin), it places the navigation in a small drop-down style menu. The content is a lot more readable on mobile now.

Do you want comments?

The next step is deciding whether to allow comments on blog posts. I’ve had them turned off for a few years now, but I’m considering turning them back on (as I have for this post.) If I do turn them on, I won’t be using native WordPress commenting. Instead, I’ll be using either the Facebook Commenting System (like you see on many sites such as BuzzFeed), Disqus (which is used by the guys over at The Loop), or LiveFyre (which TechCrunch uses).

I’m leaning toward Disqus. It allows you to log-in using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or a Disqus account. It also allows you to up vote or down vote comments, as well as share those comments via Twitter or Facebook.

[zilla_alert style=”green”] Ultimately, it’s up to you. I’ve turned on comments for this post, so let me know what you think below, or send me a note via the contact page (found under the About link at the top of the page). [/zilla_alert]

As you can see, the new site drops the sidebar, and reduces the lower half of the homepage to small summary-style boxes for the posts. It is my hope that the new design puts the focus squarely on the content. It’s not perfect, and I hope to fix small issues along the way, but I wanted to go live with it as soon as possible.

I hope you like the new site. And I also want to thank everyone for visiting the site for the last 10 years (starting with the original CreativeGuy blog). While the site was never designed to make me money, I do thank anyone who has ever clicked an ad (of which there is currently only one found down in the footer). It is my intention to keep the site as ad-free as possible.

Extensis Universal Type Server updated for Adobe CS6

Extensis recently announced the immediate availability of updates for the Universal Type Server Client font management software. The updates provide plug-in based font auto-activation to teams that use Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) applications.

The updates are available as a FREE download for Universal Type Client for Mac OS X, and include plug-ins for Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and InCopy.

[ilink url=”http://typeserver.com “]Click here for more information about Universal Type Server[/ilink]

Firefox 9 update brings Swipe gestures for Lion users

Firefox 9 update brings Swipe gestures for Lion users

Mozilla has FINALLY added Mac OS X Lion gesture support in Firefox. Although, Firefox 9 only adds two gestures (forward and back), they are certainly the most popular.

Firefox 9

Still not making the feature list (below), though, are numerous other Lion (and even Leopard) features that Chrome & Safari browsers have, such as PDF viewing support and native full screen. With the plethora of extensions now available for Chrome, there’s little reason to use the more bloated Firefox browser right now.
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