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Basking in heat from above
If your newspaper is anything like my newspaper, you would have noticed stirrings of change coming down, surprisingly this time, from above.
From my view, pressure is building to embrace online news delivery — resistance has crumbled, if not outright vanished. It’s not just the little guys and gals in the trenches wanting to experiment and try new ideas. Ideas that once would have marked me as a maverick to rein in suddenly get noticed and embraced. One year ago I saw skepticism and hesitation; today we can’t move fast enough to please the powers that be.
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Freeware Friday: Wizz RSS Reader 2.1.2 for Firefox
Handy free RSS reader gives Firefox what it should have in a convenient sidebar or free-floating format
RSS, even though the jury may be out on it, is mad popular right now, and if it be a work in progress, it’s a wicked useful one.
Read more on Freeware Friday: Wizz RSS Reader 2.1.2 for Firefox…
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Freeware Friday: A Better Finder Rename & Attributes
It’s not a Photoshop plug-in, but for renaming large batches of images A Better Finder Rename is a good tool for changing or tweaking file names.
Can you tell I have batch processing on my mind? First I published my article on speeding up your batch processing by running Photoshop in the background, and now I’m writing about a shareware app that helps rename large batches of files. I’m talking about A Better Finder Rename.
Read more on Freeware Friday: A Better Finder Rename & Attributes…
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Freeware Friday: Phoenix Slides
Does waiting for iPhoto drive you crazy? Phoenix Slides is a lightning-fast photo browser/slideshow program that also does lossless JPEG transformations and can display EXIF data. This may be just what you’re looking for!
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Cut Your Batch Processing Time In Half
Photoshop’s batch processing abilities make mammoth tasks into laughably easy ones, and the time saved can be significant. What if I told you that it’s possible to double that time savings by processing images twice as fast?
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Cool Tip on Map Drawing in Illustrator CS
Doing simple maps in Illustrator should be a snap with this technique
Adobe Illustrator is a very apt application for drawing simple maps-street maps, navigational maps and the like. Vectors stand in very well for streets, transit lines, and the like, and the Illustrator Symbol feature is tailor-made for duplicating highway shields, informational icons, and the like.
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Cartography Word of the Day: Quadrangle
A useful term to know when ordering from the USGS
The mathematical site Mathworld defines the term quadrangle thus:
A plane figure consisting of four points, each of which is joined to two other points by a line segment (where the line segments may intersect).
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Typography Word of the Day: Ess-Tset
“Double-S”, in German
The ess-tset, in Adobe Garamond italic and regularThis curious character looks like the Greek glyph for ‘beta’, but is most assuredly not.
It is a letter commonly found in German, something of the 27th letter of the alphabet, the ‘ess-tset’, and it’s used to express the “ss” in such words as Strasse (road). The term for it is a combination of the German words for the letter s and z (“tset”), and perhaps this is why an alternate way of referring to it is “sharp s” (scharfer ess).
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Casey Gets A Base Hit: Aperture 1.1 Released Today
Back in December I reviewed Aperture, Apple Computer’s new pro photo studio app, and found myself unimpressed. But Aperture 1.1 was released today and I actually like what I see (and what I don’t see).
Read more on Casey Gets A Base Hit: Aperture 1.1 Released Today…
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QuarkXPress 7 Beta 2 Now Available
Quark launched the second phase of its public beta program
Quark released the first beta of their layout program at last Macworld’s conferene. The beta was to expier by the end of March. You now have the possibility to download QuarkXPress 7 beta 2, which will run until May 2. Quark rightly makes a few points which should be taken into consideration when using QuarkXPress 7 beta 2 :
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Preflight While You Design
Think with the final output while you design and you will save time at preflight stage
If you have read last How-To on Designorati:Desktop Publishing you know what you are looking for when you want to prepare a file for printing on an offset press. I am now going a step backwards to show you what to do to avoid problems even before they happen.
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Irfanview is not new, but it has been continually improving as long as Irfan Skiljan has been working on it. If you haven’t seen the latest version, it’s time to take another look.
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Google Does Dating with Soulmate Search Engine
Known for their clever seasonal logo changes, those wacky folks at Google only practice through Halloween, Christmas, and St. Patrick’s Day for their real favorite holiday: April Fool’s Day.
Saturday, 1 April 2006, Google launched the beta version of its latest and most ambitious search engine yet: Google Romance Soulmate Search.
Read more on Google Does Dating with Soulmate Search Engine…
Alwan CMYK Optimizer® to Plug Into PitStop Automate Creating Collaborative Solution for Automated PDF and Color Preflighting & Optimization
PRESS RELEASE
Birmingham, UK (IPEX – Hall 6, Stand A20) – April 4-11, 2006 – As part of its ongoing efforts to develop cost-effective tools for production automation and PDF quality management, Enfocus announces its technology partnership with France-based Alwan Color Expertise.
Read more on Alwan Color Expertise Joins Enfocus Technology Partner Program…
Joomla! Content Management System: Making Open Source Proprietary
When complicated Open Source Software has no documentation and is supported by an elitist clic community unwilling to help new users, is it still Open Source? Or, is it a different kind of proprietary?
Little brass discs with a lot of legal weight
In computing, the benchmark is a test run to determine the baseline performance of a component or system. It is a stable point of reference to which all other performance or sets of attributes can be referenced to.
It looks like a 3, but it isn’t…A “lost” letter, it recently made news
As the English language came forward from its Old and Middle English origins, evolution occurred. Some letters that were in common usage only three or four hundred years ago are all but unknown today.
CreativePro.com is reporting the Universal version of Adobe Photoshop will not be seen until CS3 is released in Spring 2007.
Bad news for creative pro users of the new Intel-based Macintosh computers: Adobe Systems has confirmed a compatible version of Photoshop—and other Creative Suite applications—will not be available until at least Spring 2007, when they expect CS3 to be released. The current suite will run on the MacTel machines thanks to the Rosetta translator technology, but performance takes a hit.
A showcase for designers, new and old, to help them have more presence in the creative world
Recently I came across a site called Fakecircus. While the name deceived me at first, I had the pleasure of speaking to one of the people who is behind the project and once I really understood what it is about, I found that the project was an excellent idea.
In four simple words, this t-shirt, a first from Playground of the Stars, makes a statement all graphic designers can jibe with.
Thanks BoingBoing for pointing this out.
No need to fear these Jaws: they bring PDF production under the XPress hood.
One of the most praiseworthy additions to QuarkXPress 6.5 has been the needed provision of PDF generation from within the application itself. To this end, Quark incorporated Global Graphics’ Jaws PDF creation technology and have made it integral to the XPress application; no separate program is required.
Want a happy relationship with your printer? Follow the guidelines in the first of a series of articles about preflighting with InDesign.
I remember the face of the guy working in the service bureau I used most when I told him I was going to use InDesign. Sweat pouring off his face that had assumed the typical white coloration of someone who just saw the scariest thing in his life. Turning over to me on his swivel chair he said in panic: “Why don’t you just stick with Quark? You don’t know how many prepress problems you are going to run into with InDesign!”
This free little duckie will help you waddle the FTP pond painlessly and graphically
Are you using Mac OS X? Are you on dialup? Do you have poor connectivity? Do you find the CLI version of FTP irritating and confusing to use?
There is nothing gimpy about this week’s robust Freeware Friday offering, GNU Image Manipulation Program, other than its nickname: The Gimp. See for yourself why this free image editor and paint program has so many fans!
This week featuring two freeware downloads: Ghotscript and the ReplaceInPlace Xtension fror QuarkXPress
I am seeing scripts… err… ghosts!
Back to the time when I was still looking learning how to make PDFs and didn’t know much about the PostScript language, I came across a free utility called Ghostscript. At the time I wasn’t really impressed with it. I found it was clumsy and some fonts didn’t embed properly or in some cases they didn’t embed at all, especially if they were True Type fonts. However I was also using QuarkXPress 4, which, when making EPS files, just didn’t embed True Type fonts; I suppose that the same problem occurred when making PostScript files and the probabilityiesof success were already slim by the time I converted them to PDF with Ghostscript. Add my lack of expertise to all that, and you can see how frustrating my Ghostscript experience was.
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