Communications Technology Watch is happy to announce that William Harrel has begun reviewing printers for the popular online magazine and buyers’ guide Computer Shopper. Harrel has a long history of writing about information technology, going back to the industry’s glory days, when monthly paper magazines–Computer Magazine, PC World, Windows Magazine, MacWorld, MacUser, and, yes, Computer Shopper–were popular and powerful. A favorable review in one of these publications could make an unknown product famous, and turn small, upstart companies into powerhouse corporations. Those days are over, and once two-inch-thick magazines are now a quarter or less of there size, those that survived, that is. The ones that did make it adapted to the medium of our era, the Internet. Computer Shopper made the transition successfully and is now a trusted Internet destination and source for well-researched and unbiased new product information and reviews–as it has always been.

William Harrel – www.williamharrel.com

Ctrl has released a CS4 version of CtrlChanges, an InDesign plug-in that tracks and displays changes in InDesign documents. While this is very useful in environments with multiple designers working the same documents, the plug-in is pretty expensive, about $660 U.S.

The plug-in works on both PCs and Macs and has the following features:

CtrlChanges Light:
• Show changes in layout mode in InCopy and InDesign
• Turn viewing on/off
• Turn Track Changes on/off for document
• Accept all changes in document
• Mouse over tip showing editor, time and deleted text*

* CS4 only. Available from version 1.1 – release March 2009
CtrlChanges Standard:
• Show changes in layout mode in InCopy and InDesign
• Turn viewing on/off
• Turn Track Changes on/off for document
• Accept all changes in document
• Mouse over tip showing editor, time and deleted text*
• Able to print changes
• Include changes in PDF-file, including notes for deleted text

* CS4 only. Available from version 1.1 – release March 2009

CtrlChanges Pro (Trial available):

• Show changes in layout mode in InCopy and InDesign
• Turn viewing on/off
• Turn Track Changes on/off for document
• Accept all changes in document
• Mouse over tip showing editor, time and deleted text*
• Able to print changes
• Include changes in PDF-file, including notes for deleted text
• Use the CtrlChanges Pro panel to see all the changes in the document
and navigate through them easily
• Filter changes on author and time (v1.1)
• Users are separated using different color markings in document
• Step through the changes and accept them as you go

* CS4 only. Available from version 1.1 – release March 2009

See and download the plug-in here: http://www.ctrl-ps.com/products/ctrlchanges

I found out about the new release here: http://macblender.com/ctrlchanges-plug-in-tracks-indesign-document-changes/

To say that the book market has gone soft is a woeful understatement. Like so many other industries, the Internet has all but killed the hardcopy publishing industry. It is harder than ever to sell and get your book published.

The problems with self publishing, or “vanity press,” (paying somebody to print and bind the book for you) are many, including:

1. Cost – In order to pay a reasonable price per book, you have to order a good quantity of books, about 5,000, which can cost thousands of dollars.
2. Distribution – when you self-publish a book, you usually have to sell it yourself, which takes time and money. Even if you find a good channel for the book, such as, say, the Internet, you have to package and ship each order, which is not fun.
3. Frankly, without a full-time effort, you probably won’t succeed.

Blurb to the rescue. Blurb (www.blurb.com) allows you to layout your book and order small quantities, even as few as one copy. You can even sell the book from the Blurb bookstore.

However, this approach has a few caveats. First, the website requires you to use their book layout software, which, if you use Adobe Indesign or some other layout software, can be a drag. Second, the printed books themselves can be pretty expensive, as much as $48 for a 300-page, small 7″x7″ softcover book. There are some volume discounts, but they are not nearly enough to allow you to price your book at a competitive rate.

This is a cool idea, but it is still vanity press. Unless your topic and book is an absolutely must have, this really is not a viable avenue for publishing a book you want to sell.

A good idea but expensive. I found this story at the following link:

http://cultofmac.com/blurb-the-latest-word-in-desktop-publishing/7301

William Harrel – www.williamharrel.com

A little over a month ago I upgraded to Adobe’s new suite of products, Creative
Suite 4 Master Collection. I wanted to wait until I got to use it awhile before providing my two cents.

The reason I went with Master Collection is that it is the only way to get all the apps I needed, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop, without purchasing at least one of the products separately for an exorbitant price.

Anyway, priced at $2499 (much less and quite reasonable for upgrades), considering all you get in the box, it is a good deal. Here is what is included in Master Collection:

• InDesign CS4
• Photoshop CS4 Extended
• Illustrator CS4
• Acrobat 9 Pro
• Flash CS4 Professional
• Dreamweaver CS4
• Fireworks CS4
• Contribute CS4
• After Effects CS4
• Adobe Premiere Pro CS4
• Soundbooth CS4
• Adobe OnLocation CS4
• Encore CS4
• Adobe Bridge CS4
• Adobe Device Central CS4
• Dynamic Link
• Version Cue CS4

Plus a bunch of other utilities and somewhat useful stuff.

Installation

Installing the collection requires a commitment in itself, a several-hour process. One of the things that always irks me about installing new Adobe software is that you are never allowed to keep the setting and preference changes you made in previous versions. Instead of actually upgrading your existing version, a whole new set of apps is installed.

Ok. I understand that this is done for document compatiblity reasons, in case for some reason or another existing documents are not compatible with the new apps. But how difficult would it be to have the installation program look at your current apps and carry your preferences over to the new software?

Interface Changes

Overall, the new interface is prettier and friendlier (I skipped CS3, so CS4 seems pretty different.). However, I hate it when things get moved around or changed for no apparent reason. For example, in Photoshop, I am used to right-clicking to get to Image Size. This is very handy when resizing a lot of images for a Website. Now the only way to get to Image Size is from the Image menu. There are a lot of little nuances like this that are not only annoying but also slow you down. For those of us who keep our heads buried in our work, performing routine tasks over and over without thinking about them, these changes cause us to retrain ourselves. A real drag.

(Microsoft is, of course, the worst when it comes making interfaces so different that it causes you to relearn the software. Office 2007 for Windows and 2008 for Mac are almost unworkable.)

Worthwhile Features

At least a bunch of new features takes some of the sting out of the installation and interface change woes. Listing them all here would make this post long and dull, so I will go over a few that I find particually helpful. (You can get a description of all the new features in each application on Adobe’s Website, at www.adobe.com, and there is a good review of Master Collection on surfbits.com at http://www.surfbits.com/?p=1877.)

Dreamweaver

Perhaps Dreamweavers most usable new feature is InContext, which allows you define regions on a page that can be edited from within a Web browser. A description of InContext is posted at http://commtechwatch.com/?p=187. So I won’t recreate it here. However, I do find it interesting that the phrase “Free Preview” has been added to the InContext description on Adobe’s Website (wasn’t there a month ago), which suggests that this “feature” will soon become a service you have to pay for.

Another pretty useful feature in Dreamweaver is Live View, which allows you to see what your page looks like without switching to a browser.

InDesign

InDesign has a lot of new stuff. Here is a review from Communications Technology Watch, http://commtechwatch.com/?p=121

Photoshop

Photoshop has several highend enhancements, such as 3D painting and scaling and Content Aware Scaling. However, if you are like me and use photoshop primarily for correcting and scaling images for print media and Websites, you won’t get much use out of these. I’m more disappointed in the ways the interface has been changed, causing me to adapt the way I work, than I am impressed with the new stuff. But I am sure some folks will get great use from them.

Conclusion

After all is said and done, the upgrade was worth it. I’ll get over the small disappointments. I left out a lot of great new features that will, undoubtedly, allow me to wow my clients and prospective clients–once I learn how to use them.

Bill Harrel – www.williamharrel.com

Anybody who has been into print media design for awhile will remember that Adobe InDesign used to be Aldus PageMaker (I know, technically they are not same, but InDesign was obviously developed with PageMaker code, after Adobe bought Aldus). I started using and writing about PageMaker over 20 years ago. After about Version 6.5, with each new upgrade, before actually seeing the software, I began asking myself,  “Why another release? Everything is already there?” PageMaker and InDesign are, after all, just page layout programs.

With each upgrade, however, Adobe has managed to introduce some pretty handy new features—features that caused me to sit back and ask myself, “Hmmm…  Now why didn’t I think of that?”

InDesign CS4 is no exception. As I usually do after installing newer versions of the software I use in my business, I checked out the new wiz-bang stuff to see how they work and if they can help me be more creative or productive. I found a slew of new things that are definitely going to make my life easier.

(Looking for good info on InDesign? Go here: http://indesignsecrets.com/

InDesign Goes Multimedia
Ever thought you’d be using page layout software to create interactive Flash movies? Me neither. With InDesign CS4 you can save your layouts to Flash XFL files for importing into Flash projects, or you can simply export them to ready-to-go flash SWF movies. The amazing thing is that the text elements you export from InDesign to XFL files remain fully editable in Flash. You can even create interactive buttons and hyperlinks in InDesign, that, when saved to SWF, work in Flash Player, allowing you to create some pretty snazzy interactive movies without ever opening the Flash authoring environment.

For a description of Adobe Flash’s new XFL format, go here: http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000269.html

InDesign now allows for some fairly simple ActionScript commands, limited mostly to document navigation and hyperlinks—you won’t be making any sophisticated Flash applications in your page layout software. But then again, you don’t have to import all of your layout elements into Flash to make your documents interactive. So now any brochure, datasheet, or whatever you create in InDesign, can easily become an interactive electronic slide show. And let’s face it, laying out pages in InDesign is much easier than messing with the Flash stage, sprites and timelines.

Page Transitions
If you don’t use InDesign for anything but laying out print media, then you could care less about this feature. But nowadays, nearly all documents created for the printing press also wind up on the Web as PDFs. This feature allows you to apply some of the same transitions available in Adobe Premiere and Microsoft PowerPoint—blinds, dissolve, fade,  and so on—for export to both PDF and SWF formats. Transitions add a little more pizazz and polish when navigating from page to page in an electronic document.

Dynamic Index Cross Referencing
I’ve laid out many a booklet and book-length document in both PageMaker and InDesign. The index cross referencing feature has been helpful, but far from perfect. My biggest gripe has been that, once the index is created and placed, if you make any changes to your document, such as delete or move things around, your index is hosed—no longer accurate. You either have to manually update the index references or generate and place the index all over again.

InDesign CS4 to the rescue. The software now has the ability to update index reference page numbers as you edit and move information around in the document.  For those of us who layout long documents, this feature is going to save us a lot of time.

Smart Text Reflow
Most of us who have been doing page layout for awhile usually create and edit our text stories in Word (or some other word processor) and then import and place the story in InDesign. Invariably, though, we wind up adding text and making further edits during the layout process, causing text oversets or empty pages. This handy new feature allows you to set default settings to automatically create new pages when oversets occur and delete pages when your edits remove all the text from an existing page. You can tell InDesign where to create new pages, such as End of Page, End of Story, and End of Section.

Granted, this feature won’t eliminate the need to print composites and check them visibly for layout problems, but it could very well limit the number of composites you print, by automatically correcting problems you might otherwise miss.

Other Notable Features

 A few other handy new features in InDesign CS4 include: Conditional Text, Smart Guides, Spread Rotation and Live PreFlight. Conditional Text allows you to easily create different versions of the same documents based on the same source file. Smart Guides allow you to align, space, rotate, and resize single or multiple objects by manipulating a single guide. Spread rotation allows you to rotate a spread view without physically turning your monitor. Live PreFlight alerts you to potential layout problems, allowing you to navigate to the problem and fix it before printing composites or going to press (I opened several of my pre-CS4 documents, only to discover that my layouts don’t often conform to what InDesign considers good (or standard) layout practices.).

You can get full descriptions and demonstrations of these and other new features on Adobe’s Website at http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/indesign/features/?view=topnew.

Bill Harrel – www.williamharrel.com