New Adobe suite for moving publications to iPad

According to a post written by Terri Stone on Creativepro.com, "you can go from InDesign to iPad using tools that are now available in beta form on Adobe Labs. The full suite will ship next year, but be warned -- it won't be cheap." Stone said:

It's no secret that the iPad versions of Wired and The New Yorker were created using private, prerelease versions of Adobe software. The prerelease program wasn't limited to big corporations; CreativePro.com's sister publication, InDesign Magazine, used the prerelease software for its iPad app, too. But details about the process have been sketchy -- until now. [Read More]

Adobe estimates that it will release the full Digital Publishing Suite sometime between April and July of next year.

At an Adobe Photoshop CS5 Training

Click on photo to enlarge

I am in South San Francisco at the Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers tour workshop. These are great tours and I missed the training for CS4. I am looking forward to this. The instructor is Ben Willmore, this is his first CS5 session ever! He is an excellent trainer. But, this training was not as good as previous sessions of his I have attended.

Apple vs. Adobe and More!

Adobe has responded to Steve Jobs' letter about why the iPad does not run Flash. In newspaper ads Adobe has proclaimed its love for Apple. The Mercury News said.

Adobe Systems declared its love for Apple, but continued the companies' very public squabble Thursday over the Cupertino computer maker's decision to ban the Flash video platform from the iPhone and iPad. [Read More]

Jobs is right about the resource intensive nature of Flash, the closed nature of Flash and the open nature of the emerging HTML5 standard. However, there also is the very real issue of the proprietary nature of Apple's H.264 video codec. There are several sides of this argument. This whole thing needs to be played out.

Meanwhile with the iPad, in my opinion: Apple has created a new device. Apple has defined a new market and Apple is running with it. Apple is establishing market dominance and Apple is, with the iTunes Store, taking ownership of the content distribution channel; big time.

In the future, watch for Apple to almost give the iPad away to maintain ownership of that content distribution channel. That's where the action is. The iPad is the Barbie Doll, content is the doll clothes.

That's what this battle is really about. It's about the doll clothes.

Thoughts on Flash, by Steve Jobs

For those who have criticized Apple for the company's position on Adobe Flash content, Steve Jobs recently published this essay:

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain. [Read More]

This is good reading. The fact is Flash is old technology. New open standards like HTML5 are going to confirm Flash's status as legacy. Especially in education, it's time to prepare our students for life after Adobe Flash. We need to be teaching HTML5!

Adobe CS5 is coming, you should be there

Monday is the launch for Adobe's new version of creative suite; CS5. This is way more exciting to me than the launch of a new Apple or Microsoft Operating System. Here is a page where you can register for the Monday launch event and learn about new features in CS5.

Creating EPUB formatted documents in InDesign

The book features of the new Apple iPad really hold the potential of mainstreaming the EPUB ebook document format. At least with Adobe InDesign CS4 creating EPUBs is not as easy as exporting to PDF. Here are some guidelines for producing them using ID CS4 from Adobe.

Adobe InDesign CS5 is scheduled to be released on April 12. I really will be looking to see how this format is supported in this new version.

Adobe Flash is not where it's at

Joe Brockmeier of Linux magazine wrote a good story on the future, or potential lack of it, for Adobe Flash. According to Brockmeier, development of HTML5 has the potential to largely supplant Flash on the Internet. Brockmeier wrote:

By 2012, you might want to have a Flash plugin handy to view legacy content that’s still lying around. But, by then, Flash will be well on its way to being an anecdote about the bad old days when too much of the Web was bound up in proprietary and non-standard technologies. [Read More]

Moral of the story, don't base your plans for embracing "new media" on concentrating on Flash. By the time you graduate Adobe Flash may be considered largely out of date.

Photoshop CS4 Magic!

Content Aware Scaling

This Lynda video featuring Deke McClelland illustrates an almost unbelievable feature that Adobe says will be part of their Creative Suite 4 version of Photoshop. It is absolute magic!

[Click here to view video]

Stephen Johnson Photographer & Author

Johnson: The Ansel Adams of Digital Photography
Johnson started taking digital landscape photographs in 1994 and is a pioneer of the medium. Last night I went to the most recent meeting of the local Photoshop User Group. The meeting was at Adobe Headquarters in San Jose not far from SJSU. It featured Stephen Johnson and it was a real treat. Johnson blew me away. He is to digital landscape photography what Ansel Adams was to black and white film landscape photography. I was not prepared for the awesome quality of his work. I was amazed. This guy really knows his stuff. I learned so much from his free talk:

• He talked in depth about the Camera Raw format and what it really is. He said, "a RAW file is not a photo it is a data stream." His comparison of Camera RAW, film and the Zone System (made famous by Ansel Adams) was something I have never seen before.
  
• He talked in depth about camera sensor technology and particularly the Foveon X3 sensor, how it compares to Bayer sensors (and film) and what makes it so special.
• He brought huge photos taken with his BetterLight scanning camera, talked about his decade long photo project and his new book.
  

Johnson's work is lovely, it was almost melodic. His work has a masterful combination of art and craft that is magical. I do not know if Johnson is a musician like Adams was, but his photographs were like a song, like Adams's are. I am not a landscape photographer. That is not what my heart and my eye see's. I will never shoot like Johnson, and that is okay. His book by O'Reiley , Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography, is a must buy for me. Just listening to him has changed my photography. That was a real treat!

Technorati Tags: Stephen Johnson, Digital Photography, Ansel Adams, Landscape Photography, Zone System, ssloansjca

In Design User Group Meeting

In Design User Group Meeting, Wed., Nov. 14
The next meeting of the Bay Area InDesign User Group for Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 6:30pm, to be held at Adobe San Francisco, 601 Townsend St, at 7th St. .

Come join us in learning about InDesign's Transparency features!

InDesign CS3 introduces some powerful and innovative transparency features. Now you can apply transparency effects independently for an object's fill, stroke, content, and text and you can apply almost all Photoshop effects inside of InDesign. This presentation will show how to make these effects work and -- even more importantly -- how to get them to print successfully by following some important transparency best practices.

As always, the evening will conclude with the group's customary raffle of valuable software, books, and prizes.

I plan on going and welcome folks who may wish to carpool with me. To register, or for more information, go here.

Adobe Photoshop Meetup July 10

Bryan O'Neil Hughes said:

This month we welcome Uwe Steinmueller and Mike Chambers to bring us up to speed on how to make fine prints from Photoshop. Both our presenters are well known pundits of printing perfection. We will get the latest in color space travel and workflow methodology. Bring your questions and your curiosity to the Adobe Photoshop Users Group this July, 10th.
We'll have pizza and drinks at 6:30, and the meeting will start at 7:00. Please note that is not the third Thursday of the month, as the meetings usually were. We will meet in the Park Conference Room of Adobe Systems' East Tower, 321 Park Avenue, San Jose.
To park underneath the Adobe building, use the Almaden Avenue entrance, under the East Tower. If the security guard at the parking entrance asks for an Adobe contact, use Bryan O'Neil Hughes's name. He's our contact there (as well as the Photoshop Product Manager). Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you know who might be interested. If they would like to be on our email list, have them respond to: dan@weinberg-clark.com. See you there, Dan Clark and Tom Upton

Host: Bryan O'Neil Hughes, Location: Adobe San Jose, 321 Park Ave., San Jose, CA 95110 US, When: Tuesday, July 10, 6:30PM, To RSVP: Phone: 408-921-8142

Technorati Tags: San Jose, CS3, Adobe, Photoshop, ssloansjca

Converting from Adobe PDF to Word

Luanne Fose, Ph.D. an Instructional Technology Consultant for The Center for Teaching & Learning, at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo has a blog post that is pretty cool. She shows step by step how to take a PDF file and convert it to editable Microsoft Word format. This is done using Adobe Acrobat Pro. This is one to remember. I would think this would only work in documents where the text is created and saved as text and NOT where a document is scanned as an image and then turned into a PDF as in the latter case the text would actually be a picture of the letters and not letters with associated font information.

InDesign User Group Meeting Next Week

There's still time to register for the next meeting of the Bay Area InDesign user group on May 16th, and we want to see you there!

We'll be welcoming InDesign CS3, with Lisa Forrester of Adobe Systems to introduce us to its exciting new features and its integration within Adobe Creative Suite 3. If you are interested in seeing the newest features, you won't want to miss this meeting. Among those that will be showcased are:

• Finer transparency controls
  
• Creative object effects, including feathered gradients
  
• Multi-file Place
  
• Faster frame fitting
  
• Placed InDesign documents
  
• Nested style looping
  
• Table and cell styles
  
• Text variables
  
• Expanded Quick Apply
  
• Advanced bullets and numbering
  
• Export to XHTML
  

Wednesday, May 16, 2007, 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM
Adobe Systems Inc. San Francisco, 601 Townsend St., at 7th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

(Plenty of public transit options and on-street parking.)

Agenda

• 6:30 - Check in, pizza, and socializing
• 6:45 - Announcements
• 7:00 - InDesign CS3
• 8:45 - Rafflemania
• 9:00 - Meeting adjourned

==========================
Please register to attend
==========================

Dreamweaver CS3 Interview

About Dreamweaver CS3
This is great for web developers, or those who want to be:

If you create web pages for education institutions and are as concerned as all of us are about accessibility and 508 compliance, in short, you have got to check this out. In this Scoble Show interview Robert Scoble talks with Kenneth Berger, Adobe’s Product Manager for Dreamweaver CS3. Scoble and Berger talk about many of the new features of the new CS3 version of Dreamweaver, including accessibility compliance. There are some great new tools here!

Technorati Tags: Robert Scoble, Scoble, Scoblizer, SJSU, CSU, California State University, Education, Section 508, Adobe, ssloansjca