Yes, the iPadcalypse is upon us. I find it thrilling. I’m a usually a mello Jack Johnson-listening vegetarian, but the Apple-Adobe war makes me want to chew raw red meat with “Achilles Last Stand” cranked to 11, as I simultaneously read dueling blog posts by Lee “Go Screw Yourself, Apple” Brimelow, and John C. “Why Does God Need a Starship?” Welch. Get Tarantino on the phone, I want to pitch InGlourious Flashers to him.

So what do I think I think?

As they say in the Book of Faces, it’s complicated.

One one hand, a lot of my friends, and people I would like to be friends with, are critters in the Adobe ecosystem. They either work for Adobe, or are closely connected in one way or another. So some part of their success is related to the success of Flash, or Adobe in a broader sense. And for these people, I wish all good things, so by extension, I root for Flash to be as ubiquitous and powerful as the evangelists say it is.

On the other hand, browsing the Web sometimes makes me feel a little like old Atlas here.

I have been a Mac user longer than I have been an Adobe user. And the Mac user in me hates Flash. If I am having any problem browsing the Web, there is a 99.9% probability that Flash (OK, Flash Player. Still.) is the culprit. Even the beloved WordPress platform that gives life to this blog suffers from Flashitis when I try to check my stats.

How much of my life has been wasted staring at a spinlocked cursor whilst some animation gets all its bits in order (if indeed it ever does)? How many dancing babies trying to entice me to refinance my mortgage must I endure? I care not to know. It would just make me sad. And for this reason, I fully understand Apple’s policy of blocking Flash, even cross-compiled Flash, from the iPhone/iPad/iPod. When John Q. Websurfer’s cursor starts spinning, Apple’s going to catch the crap because they make the thing he’s holding in his hands. Spinning cursor = iPad is slow and lame.

And, on the third hand, the consumer in me just doesn’t care. I don’t  care whether my videos are H264, HTML5, H1N1, or H67-5309. They just have to work and look good. By the same token, I couldn’t care less what kind of paintbrushes VanGogh used, what kind of amplifier Jimmy Page used, or what kind of freezers Ben and Jerry’s use. I just care about the experience of seeing Starry Night, hearing “Achilles Last Stand”, and tasting Cherry Garcia. There are limits to geekdom. You can’t be a geek about everything. Renaissance geeks scare me.

I also wonder about the possibility of Apple buying Adobe. Steve Jobs is sitting on a ginormous mountain of cash ($41 billion). Today, Apple stock hit an all-time high, and they beat sales estimates across the board, for Macs, iPods, and sold a ridiculous 8.75 million iPhones. Apparently the lack of Flash isn’t toooooooo much of a drag on sales, eh?

To put things in perspective, Apple’s current market cap is almost $222 billion. Adobe’s is $18.4 billion. That makes Apple twelve times the size of Adobe. Not exactly Kraken vs. Perseus proportions, but definitely not a clash of equals.

Since a mere 10 miles separates the Infitinte Loop from Creative Suiteland, Jobs could send a 100% carbon-neutral bike courier over to Adobe with a cashier’s check for 20 big ones, and still have enough left over to buy Iceland (with their Bjork/herring/volcano fueled GDP of $11 billion). Dear Steve, I’ve taken the liberty of mapping out the route.

Even so, Apple is pushing every advantage to the limits of hubris. It may be their tragic flaw. And the fictitious fact remains that little Perseus did defeat the giant Kraken, with the help of another titan. Maybe Adobe is PerCS 5.0…

Stay tuned.

After last year’s O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, I wrote a post called Is This What a Kindle Killer Looks Like? in reference to a cool prototype I saw for the Plastic Logic Que reader. To me, it was immediately evident that this device had virtues that would far surpass the klunky Kindle. The Plastic Logic device was iPod like whereas the Kindle was definitely Zunesville, Daddy-O. Y’know, for squares.

About that time I also read a piece on Ars Technica about Apple’s stance toward ebooks, which said that King Steven could rule the land of ebooks if he so much as lifted a finger to do so. But the word was that he deemed the land of ebooks to be a barren waste, unworthy of conquest. Or maybe he was busy breaking in his new liver.

Fast forward to present day. The iPad makes its debut in two weeks. The first day of pre-orders for the device was like tickets going on sale for a Lady Gaga show. If everyone attending the show got a free cone of Ben & Jerry’s and a minute in the money booth. Analysts estimated that 120,000 units shifted that first day. And Apple’s well on their way to over a million sold before they hit the stores on April 3. That’s over a million sold before almost anyone has even seen one of the things in real life. How funny would it be if the iPad didn’t even really exist? When April 3 comes, there’s just a video playing in all the Apple stores of Steve Jobs laughing and saying, “I was just screwing with you people! Can’t believe you dumb shmucks believed in a giant iPhone. We didn’t even bother to think up a cool name and you still bought it. Hee hee.”

Ah but the iPad is real, and it is not just a Kindle Killa, it is the asteroid streaking into the atmosphere, and ending on the Age of dedicated eReadersaurs. And even if the iPad doesn’t destroy dedicated eReaders by itself, it is soon to be followed by a raft of other tablet devices, by HP and others. There could be 50 or more models on the market by next year, and with sales expected to be 10.5 million units this year, and 50 million per year by 2015, well, you get the picture.

So why am I so convinced that the iPad will destroy everything in its path? Well, I have 3,000,000,003 reasons. Give or take. The 3 billion comes from the number of downloads from Apple’s app store. And the three are my mom, my wife, and my daughter. Current users of a Windows laptop, a MacBook Pro, and a Nintendo DSi, all of which could be replaced with iPads to great effect, methinks. The laptops are overkill, and the Nintendo is underkill. As long as we can keep watching Harry Potter Puppet Pals on YouTube, we’re good.

So Steve, please put us down for three iPads, come Christmas time. And some gift cards for the iBooks store. You need any more organs, I got a kidney I could probably spare.

Of course the iPad has its nasayers, who have been saying nay from the rooftops. It doesn’t do Flash, it doesn’t have a camera, it doesn’t multitask, it’s not widescreen, it’s a walled garden, the app store has draconian terms that treat developers like crap, it’s got a dumb name, etc.

For a rebuttal, we go now to Senior eBook analyst Stan Broflovski. Stan, what do you say to all the iPad critics’ charges?

“Dude, we don’t care.”

See, Stan agrees with me that the iPad heralds no less than a new new age of computing. It is the asteroid dealing the death blow to not only to the Kindle, the Nook, and plodding dinos like my mom’s laptop, but also sending my wife’s velociraptor of a MacBookPro scurrying for cover. My daughter’s DSi is probably small enough to survive for now, but she will soon graduate to an iThing, no doubt. The simple fact is, outside of work, most people don’t need computers to accomplish the vast majority of their digital tasks. In fact, when you get right down to it, most people don’t even want computers.

Right, Stan?

“That’s right Dude. Computers are complicated, expensive, time-consuming, pain-in-the-ass appliances. Most applications are bloated, slow pieces of crap with a million useless features. Even mice suck when you really think about it. People just want to do what they do: find, use, and share information, communicate, connect, and create. They need to shop and pay bills. They like to listen to music, play games, doodle, and watch Terrance and Philip videos. People put up with crashes, viruses, slowness, upgrades, drivers, plug-ins, backups, etc in order to get the good stuff. They just want things that work fast and work every time. And if a tablet running sandboxed apps lets them do what they want without all the crap, well, then tablets are the future of computers. And reading books and magazines will be just one of a million things you do on a tablet. Nobody will even think twice about it a few years from now.”

Thank you Stan. I’ll put you down for an iPad too, m’kay?

Zealots and partisans, hacks and shills, fanboys and girls, in mortal mental combat, using only their bare fingers and keyboards to beat each other senseless. Gives me chills.

A quote from Jobs calling Adobe “lazy” surfaced after the iPad demo and only poured gasoline on the fire.

Then a blog post by Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow showed a series of popular websites that wouldn’t work on the iPad. Included was a screenshot of a porn site and Adobe was accused of  “playing the porn card.” The screenshot has since been taken down and apologies offered.

The battle of wits (and the witless) rages everywhere I go. Either Apple is a greedy, arrogant, company on the verge of becoming Steve-il, and bent on destroying the internet as we know it, or Adobe is a lazy, incompetent fraternity of morons who wouldn’t know a good piece of code if it bit them in the ass. Of course, there are rational grown-up voices in the debate too, but their entertainment value is far lower.

As for me, almost my entire computing life is Apple and Adobe. Neither is perfect. What company is? But for the most part, those companies have delivered great stuff. They give me the a place to do my work (and play) and the tools with which to do it. A significant portion of my life has been spent using their products and they have become embedded in my digital DNA. So when they go at it, I get a very “mom and dad are fighting again” vibe.

As I said, the message threads on this topic can be hugely entertaining, but they are also a bit overwhelming. Some are 500 comments long, and who is a geek enough to read all that? Well, I am. So as a public service, here is the first in what I hope will be a series of graphic summaries of the debate from different websites. This one uses quotes from John Nack’s post (and reader comments) Sympathy For the Devil. Click the image for a full-size (1280×800) version.

And Austin! And Detroit, Minneapolis, and Secaucus, NJ!

These cities are the first announced stops on the InDesignSecretsLIVE! 2010 tour.

Click the image to go to InDesignSecretsLIVE for details.

Also on InDesignSecretsLIVE, you’ll find information about the single biggest, coolest, most awesome InDesign event of the year: The InDesign Print and ePublishing Conference. This is going to be absolutely sick. And by sick I mean ridiculously fun. Here are some of the details:

Print and ePublishing Conference

Seattle, Washington USA
May 12–14, 2010
Join the world’s top InDesign experts and the Adobe InDesign team, May 12-14 in Seattle for the InDesign event of the year! Find answers and valuable insight on the topics publishing for eBooks, print, interactive documents, and more! Be inspired by fresh ideas and new products. Includes 1-day pre-conference tutorials, then 2-day multi-track conference.

Not your typical InDesign Conference

Founded by world-renowned InDesign experts David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción, and dedicated to the proposition that InDesign professionals deserve a great learning experience, the Print and ePublishing Conference brings together over a dozen of the leading InDesign experts minds for three days of non-stop inspiration and education!

Topics include:

• InDesign CS5: What to Expect
• Boosting efficiency with InDesign’s automation features
• Best practices for a cross-media workflow
• Creating and managing ePub and Kindle documents
• Working with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash
• XML, XSL, and You

Speakers include:

• David Blatner
• Anne-Marie Concepción
• Russell Viers
• Rufus Deuchler
• Mordy Golding
• Michael Ninness, Group Product Manager, Creative Suite
• Chris Kitchener, Senior Product Manager, InDesign
• Olav Martin Kvern
• Diane Burns
• Keith Gilbert
• Claudia McCue
• Mike Rankin
• David Creamer
• Gabriel Powell
• Colin Fleming
• Pariah S. Burke
• James Fritz
• Adobe Engineering Team
• Steve Jobs
• James Cameron
• Lady Ga-Ga
• Chewbacca
• President of the United States, Barack Obama
• Marcel Marceau
• The Rockettes
• The ghost of Jimi Hendrix
• and a special keynote address by Samuel L. Jackson

OK, I may have gotten a little carried away there somewhere after the Adobe Engineering Team, but you get the point. It’s going to be awesome. And yes, no joke, I am going to be speaking there too. And who knows, maybe we can channel the ghost of Jimi to give us some GREP tips on his guitar. See you in Seattle!

Recently, I received a comment on my last post about the ACE ebook asking, “why would I want to be an ACE?”

Excellent question! And one worthy of a detailed answer.

To become Adobe Certified, you have to devote a significant number of hours of preparation and study when there are probably many other things you’d rather be doing. Then when you’re done studying, you have pay $150 for the privilege of subjecting yourself to a rigorous test. Why would any sane individual do this?

Before you even look at the testing objectives, you should have some good answers to this question. That’s why I devoted a chunk of the first chapter of the book to answering the “why” question. Here’s an excerpt:

Professional Rewards

1. Shared Branding When you become an ACE, you can put the Adobe brand to work for you. Adobe has worked hard over the years to build a brand that is synonymous with excellence in technology, graphic design, and cross-media production. PDF, PostScript, and the Creative Suite are respected worldwide. So much branding goodness is tied together in that red A. One of the benefits of being an Adobe Certified Expert is that you are given permission to use the Adobe logo. If you’re in business for yourself, you can put the ACE logo on your business card, website, and other promotional materials. People recognize Adobe, and the use of the Adobe logo lends instant credibility to you.

2. An Asset in the Job Hunt In a competitive job market, you want every tool at your disposal to get and keep the attention of prospective employers. In a stack of resumes, certification might be the difference between “keep” and “toss.” It also gives you something to smile about and highlight in an interview. Obviously, certification
is no substitute for years of industry experience and an impressive portfolio, but it complements those assets and adds another detail to your story of why they should hire you.

3. Attention From Your Current Employer If you’re seeking a promotion, or even just trying to stay employed in a tough economy, you must continuously develop your professional knowledge and skills, and demonstrate them. Getting certified is a very “show-me-don’t-tell-me” kind of thing. You can’t fake it. You can’t get by on reputation or luck. You have to earn it. Being thought of as someone with the initiative to take on a challenge and the chops to pull it off can only enhance your value in your boss’ eyes. You can proudly post that certificate in your workspace as a bit of personal advertising. You may find that your opinions carry a little more weight and you become the “go to” person when it comes to all things InDesign.

Personal Rewards

1. Confidence and satisfaction There is nothing like the confidence that comes with knowing what you know. Work approaches something more like play when you know all the tools in your toolbox. You can build new projects that are fundamentally solid right from the start. When changes are needed, you know how to make them happen smoothly and efficiently. If big problems occur later on, you’ll know the best way to fix them.

2. It’s fun! I know some of you are thinking, “Fun? Are you nuts? You have issues.” Be that as it may, hear me out. I think it’s fun to devote yourself to a large and difficult
task, meet it head on, and succeed. I am assuming you want to get certified, and no one’s put a gun to your head. I’m also assuming you don’t find InDesign impossibly tedious or difficult, and that you actually like sitting in front of a computer and making stuff. In other words, you’re a geek like me. If that’s the case, then yes, there is an element of fun in this.

3. Revenge Revenge? Yeah, sure, why not? Ever been made to feel a fool by some nasty über-geek because you didn’t know an obscure bit of digital trivia? If you study for and pass this exam, you will be able to throw a bucket of cold knowledge on the Wicked Geek of the West, who will disappear into the floor shrieking, “I’m melting! Oh, what a world! Who would have thought a good little geek like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?” Or you might just get a grudging nod of respect.

But you can always hope for the melting.

My first ebook is published and now on sale!

Click here to visit the InDesign Secrets store.

Here’s the official description:

The InDesign Secrets Guide to the InDesign CS4 ACE Exam eBook (PDF, 150 pp) is the most thorough resource available for anyone interested in becoming an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) in InDesign. More than a simple study guide, it offers you a comprehensive plan for preparing for and passing the exam.

The Guide breaks down every one of the 58 InDesign CS4 testing objectives (as published by Adobe) and shows exactly what you need to practice and study. Objectives are illustrated with screenshots from InDesign and are hyperlinked to the relevant information in InDesign’s online help, so you can get immediate answers to your questions. Each chapter ends with sample test questions (and their answers) to help you gauge your progress as you go.

Additional chapters detail the testing process, self-assessment, personalized study plans, study tips, and test-taking strategies, and re-certification. With The InDesign Secrets Guide to the InDesign CS4 ACE Exam you can accelerate and focus your preparation so you walk into the testing center with confidence, and walk out an ACE.

• Download a Sample Chapter (11 pp, a 2.2 MB PDF) to see how Mike breaks down the test objectives (in this case, tables) into clear, concise, and generously illustrated explanations.
• Only $9.95 for each copy of the full e-book (150 pp); download it immediately after purchase.
• 25% Introductory Discount off your order if you enter the discount couponRANKINRULES in the shopping cart before Nov 30, 2009.

No doubt, I’ll have a lot more to share on this topic, but for now it’s just…woo-hoo!

If you have ever been the victim of “death by bulleted list”, or suffocated by a boring speaker droning on until all the air is sucked out of the room, I think you will love this book. Over the years, I have endured many a dreadful presentation consisting of a person basically reading over a set of ugly, confusing slides, that taught me nothing. Presentation Zen recommends quite a different approach: clean slides with very little text, bold visuals, and..get this…speaking in a real human voice. What a revelation!

The author practices what he preaches. The book is beautifully designed with lots of white space surrounding the text and examples, so reading it is a pleasure. It’s the rare book where you feel like you learned something on every page. Edward Tufte’s data-ink ratio is honored. Nothing is wasted. Inspiration is drawn from daVinci, Einstein, Thoreau, and that master of Zen presentation, Steve Jobs. 

There are plenty of examples of good and bad presentation design. Most of the bad stuff comes from people mistaking decoration for design, or trying to make their PowerPoint slides into full-fledged documents, aka slideuments. Slideuments suck. Your slides are not supposed to be pages in a document, crammed with tiny details. For that, you should create an actual supporting document to hand out to your audience after the presentation. Giving it to them beforehand, or even worse, giving them your slides printed out, is the kiss of death. Everyone is so busy flipping back and forth, dividing their attention between page and screen, that they will remember nothing. I’ve seen it many times.

Dissolves, logos, 3D effects, and tired PowerPoint templates are all to be taken out behind the barn and shot, for the crime of crippling human communication.

One of the most interesting points the author makes is that slide presentations have more to do with comics and documentary film making, than anything else. It’s about the story, the audience, and using emotion and visuals to maximum effect to get the audience to remember your story (and you, BTW).

Presentation Zen also has a companion website well worth visiting. I’d recommend you check the book if you plan on speaking in front of an audience any time in the foreseeable future.

Yes, we have a soon-to-be published author in our midst. Read about Cinnamon’s upcoming book, The Everything Cast Iron Cookbook, at her blog, Poise.

Yummy! And congratulations to my multi-talented friend.

The book won’t hit the streets for a bit, buy you can pre-order it now at Amazon. At just over $10 it’s a steal. And if you order now, I’ll throw in some extra kerning for free.

Now if only I could get Eric to write a book on cocktails…

At least he was wearing a warm sweater. In retribution for failing to protect one of their kind from the neighborhood bullies, pauvre Pascal was kidnapped by a marauding band of garish helium hooligans, never to be seen again.

He would be in his 60s by now. Be brave, Pascal.

Now on to this week’s links:

Web 2.0 Journal has a look at the Nook (hey, that rhymes) vs. the Kindle.

2010 is going to be the Year of the E-book. Don’t take my word for it, PCWorld has a roundup of the new combatants in the War on Paper. Old Publicious pal Plastic Logic will ring in the new year in January with the QUE.

XML Journal has more on the Nook, and how Adobe worked with Barnes and Noble to get PDF and EPUB on the gadget.

Need to design and produce accessible PDF? Then you need to read Adobe’s resources on the subject. How to create accessible PDF from Word, InDesign, etc.

LiveBrush is yet another free and interesting drawing app.

‘Tis the season to be gory, and Naldzgraphics has gathered 45 horrifying Photoshop tuts. How to zombify, vampirize, etc.

Flash without ActionScript is like ice cream without hot fudge, whipped cream, and a cherry on top. That comes zooming onto your table from stage right. Enter ActionScript.org to help you learn the magic words.

Flash on the iPhone? Sorta, kinda. Newsfactor has an article on Apple v. Adobe.

VectorTuts has a tut on creating a vector texture with a wonderfully old school twist.

Creately is an online diagramming app that’s either free (basic version) or pay what you want (souped up).

InsideRIA is a great site from O’Reilly for keeping tabs on developments in the rich internet app realm.

Lastly, thanks to Pariah Burke and his column Free For All on CreativePro.com (required reading for destitute designers everywhere), for the heads up on FontCapture, a free online tool for making a font out of your handwriting. I don’t know why I think this is cool. I don’t try to write in Helvetica, so why would I want to type in Rankin? But I really do.

Till next time, think of Pascal, and keep watching the skies.

DTP tools has just posted the public beta for a suite of InDesign plug-ins that are the brainchild of my partner in blogging crime, David Blatner. I got a look at these a while ago and they are very cool. My favorite restores an ability I’d lost when I consigned Quark XPress to the dustbin of DTP history: the ability to assign any keyboard shortcut to any style. That was my #1 pet peeve when I switched to InDesign and remains a (healed over) thorn in my side to this day. In fact, Blatner Tools goes even further, allowing you to assign keyboard shortcuts to swatches and layers too. Other features include the ability to find and replace colors, automatically generate styles from unstyled content,  automatic fraction building, side-by-side comparison, and so on. If any of ths sounds cool (and I’m betting it will to 99.9% of Publicious readers), check out the public beta.

Now if only someone would make a DTP army knife for real!

Oh, and memo to the FCC and anyone else who cares: I have not received any compensation for this post, though I think David once offered to buy me a cookie after we had dinner. Nuff said.

You’ll get cleaner results with Illustrator, but Photoshop can get you almost there in much less time.

Anyway, the tutorial is a good reminder of Photoshop’s Threshold command, but as I read it, I was thinking how some images could be quite frustrating to Threshold. Finding just the right spot to divide light from dark may seem impossible….unless you remember that the most powerful adjustments in Photoshop can be performed on individual channels. You’re not limited to working with the composite channel when using Threshold, Curves, etc. Here’s what works on individual channels.

Why is this important? Take for example, this picture of a fence.

Say you wanted to include the fence in your stencil look, but not the sky or clouds. With the composite channel this is impossible. By the time you’ve blown out the sky, the fence is gone too.

But if you isolate the Blue channel (just click on it in the Channels panel)…

…you can immediately see that the fence and sky occupy two different ranges of values. Then, in the Threshold dialog, it’s a cinch to find the sweet spot.

Now you need to apply that Thresholded channel to the whole image to work it into your composition. To do that, select the composite channel (again, just click on it at the top of the Channels panel) and choose Image > Apply Image. Then in the Apply Image dialog box, select your Thresholded channel as the source, and apply it using the Normal blend mode.

Now the whole image is thresholded in a way that you could not achieve by working with the composite channel alone. Obviously, you’ll get the most powerful results from isolating channels on images with saturated colors. The more saturation, the more your channels will differ. Good times.

But wait, there’s more. When I’m struggling with an adjustment in Photoshop, I always remember the sage words of Photoshop author Dan Margulis, that every image has ten channels. Ten? Really? Yup. R-G-B-C-M-Y-K-L-A-B. By switching modes you can access ten different versions of an image instantly. For example, if you just want to isolate the blackest shadows, you can work with the K channel, Yellows, the Y channel, and so on. Actually, every image has an infinite number of channels, if you consider color profiles, but that is a story for another day.

Kungfugrippe has a hilarious take on SnowLeopard and the cult of Mac.

Speaking of SnowLeopard, wikidot has a SnowLeopard compatibility list, so you can see if anyone else has got SoundJam to work in OS X 10.6

If you’ve ever wanted to try out Adobe apps, but not actually go through the trouble of installing them, you can use Runaware to check out demos from within your browser. Not all apps are available, but Photoshop, Framemaker, and a few others are.

Discovered a cool RIA today, Fractal 4D. With it, you can draw some really cool vector shapes and export them to Illustrator.

Speaking of Illustrator, didja know that the Illustrator team at Adobe has their own blog, with the cool moniker Infinite Resolution? You do now.

Jostens.com sponsored a contest where kids could design their own high school yearbooks using InDesign. Judging from the looks of the winners (and even the honorable mentions) there are some scary-talented young InDesigners out there. 

ContentServ offers some interesting-looking Web to print solutions for InDesign.

ZenTextures has hundreds of cool, free textures for Photoshop 

Know those hip “painting with light” effects used the Sprint ads and elsewhere? Well, if you ever wanted to try your hand at it, check out Designmag’s post on Light Effect Brushes. 

On the other hand, if you’re designing a logo, Tripwire magazine has a huge set of logo design tips and tutorials.

Adobe wasn’t satisfied with just buying Omniture. They also scooped up online business solution Goodbarry. and rebranded it Business Catalyst. It’s not too hard to imagine a web designer clicking an Export to Business Catalyst button in Flash, Flex, or Dreamweaver soon. TechCrunch has more details.

Working on PSD files without Photoshop? Blasphemy! Yet, there is more than one way to skin a pixel.

I love restoring old photos with Photoshop. TipSquirrel has some good info on bringing back ancient faded photos.

If you ever need to illustrate a professional quality map, definitely check out Ortelius.

Lastly, Halloween season is here, and with it the Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack will once again be playing in our house nonstop. If you know any kids (of any age) who are fans of Jack Skellington (and you don’t mind a bit of über commercialism) check out Create Disney, where they have Flash drawing apps where you can make all kinds of creations with the Pumpkin King, and many other minions of the Mouse.

Uh, sorry, spaced out there. The thing about insomnia is, I can never complete a thought after undersleeping for any extended period of time. Reminds me of the time my daughter was born. Little tyke didn’t sleep through till she was 4. That was about 1500 days of lousy sleep, give or take. So from 2002-2006, I had one long, unfinished thought. The upside was wakeful dreaming, so my PB&J could easily transmogrify into rattlesnake aspic, and the row of tulips in the Public Garden became soup ladles, gently chiming in the breeze. At least I think it was the Public Garden, maybe I just wandered into the kitchen scene from Goodfellas. Hi Hendry, how’s your mother? Still, I never saw anything so disturbing as the Bearsharktopus.

All this to say, I came up with a perfectly good theme for this week’s links, and then immediately forgot it. Or did I dream it? Oh well, on to the linkage.

First up, me. My latest post at InDesignSecrets, Find-Change Scripting Goodness. Wherein I point out some great scripts for formatting and cleaning text in InDesign.

The Light’s Right is offering a free Photoshop CS4 panel that is to the standard Unsharp Mask panel as a Swiss Army knife is to a butter knife. This looks seriously cool and I can’t wait to try it.

CarDomain Blog has an interesting post on how automotive designers use Photoshop. In it, the author uses the term “vexel” which I’d never heard before. Cute.

Kung Fu Grippe has a post taking Adobe to task for increasingly bloated, buggy software, and some advice for how to improve it. This article is part of what seems like a rising tide of anti-Adobe sentiment on the Web. Adobegripes is a blog devoted to crashes, bugs, and wtf dialog boxes. Maybe it’s just that Adobe’s grown so big and powerful that there’s no one else left to blame for your computer problems. Maybe trying to be all things to all users inevitably leads to application degradation. Maybe the Creative Suite should be smashed into a multitude of suitelets, targeting user needs with laser precision and speed. I use the Creative Suite apps every day, at home and work. I do my share of crashing, stalling, grumbling at bugs, stupid default settings, wonky tools, and missing features. I do the exact same thing with my Apple apps. Firefox is the crashiest app on my machine, by far, and I still like it. I totally agree that the Creative Suite apps are far from perfect. When I find bugs, I spread the word. Repeatedly. But context is everything. You may come across those wtf dialog boxes in the midst of hours of productive work. In the realm of training and support, I have dealt with lots of cases over the years where someone was pissed at the application, when really it was a case of RTFM. So if we’re serving up some blame pie, user error gets the biggest slice.

Tripwire Magazine has a Massive Collection of Stunning Photoshop Actions.

Ever heard of seam carving? If you use Photoshop, you will. CS5 is reportedly going to bring seam carving technology to Photoshop, and the world of retouching will never be the same. The fact that it’s going to apply to video too, is mind-blowing. Speaking of retouching, the movement in the UK and France to require labeling on retouched images continues to gain momentum. Although, I think they’ll just have to put a warning on the cover of some magazines stating that EVERY image inside has been retouched. Would save a lot of effort.

Finally, I did find the cure for my insomnia. Just swallow 2 Benadryl, and watch Microsoft’s so-bad-it-has-to-be-on-purpose-to-try-and-start-a-meme video “How to throw a Windows 7 release party at your house” Mission accomplished, Redmond.

Nighty-night.

Enjoy the links, and remember to wash your hands after each click.

Smashing Magazine has a Back to Scchool list of 40 Illustrator tutorials, some of which are mind bogglingly photo realistic.

SitePoint has a nice little tutorial on filling shapes with text in Photoshop.

Colorburned has a downloadable set of “57 tape” brushes.

Photoshopstar has a tutorial on making wooden applique effects in Photoshop.

CSSCreme has a bevy of cool Photoshop tutorials worth checking out.

Adobe made waves recently by purchasing the Web analytics firm Omniture for $1.8 billion. Either this was a savvy, bold move to the social media future, or a colossal overpaying blunder. Depends on who you ask.

Want a sneak peek into Flash CS5? Check out Flashmagazine’s report from Flash on the Beach 09.

Back in the glorious 90s, the vector world was divided between the Illustrator Hatfields and the FreeHand McCoys. Then one day, Adobe arranged itself a shotgun marriage to Macromedia and sent Cousin FreeHand off to live in the hills.  But it turns out reports of FreeHand’s death have been somewhat exaggerated. FreeFreeHand.org is a community site devoted to what some folks still believe is the best vector illustration app ever. And yes, they’ve found it works in Snow Leopard.

Vector-Art has a fun little collection of free recording studio design elements, like cassette tapes, microphones, etc.

I’ve been neglecting my InDesignSecrets duties lately, but here are a couple of little posts that may be “new to you.” Pasteboard Notes and Type OFF a Path.

Speaking of InDesign Secrets, Steve Werner has posted info on Creating eBooks in InDesign, a topic that will only grow more important now that Print est mort. I have my own Publicious take on creating eBooks in InDesign, though Steve’s may have a wee bit more useful info.

Brushes, brushes, who’s got the brushes? Designrfix has what they claim to be the Ultimate Resource list for Photoshop Brushes. From the looks, they may be right.

GraphicsArtsOnline has a piece about a product called PageZephyr, which can extract content from Quark and InDesign files for re-purposing in ebooks etc.

Last, because you can never, ever get too much InDesign, here are links to every update ever, from 1.0 to 6.0.4 in Mac and Windows flavors.. Collect ‘em all kids.

Till next time, have a nice …cough…gasp…wheeze…gurgle…thud.

This book was published in 1986, which may explain some of the “fashionable” feline attire, and other details like phones with cords on them.

It got me to thinking, what would a sequel to this book look like? So here’s my take on..

How An E-Book is Made

I’m the design and production cat. I’m creating the template in InDesign and exporting the stories to InCopy.

I’m the author. I’m writing the content directly in InCopy. I can see the fit and layout.

I’m adding graphics, hyperlinks, and other interactive elements, plus running spellcheck and other QA.

I’m tracking changes.

I’m proofing.

I’m outputting to PDF.

I’m creating the book’s website.

I’m publicizing the book on Twitter and Facebook.

I’m desperate for Google Juice.

I got listed on Amazon!

Oprah likes my book!

Now maybe I can replace this computer from 1986.

LOL! I’m so glad print is dead.

Who killed print?…

Let’s take a closer look at this dirty deed.

Save it for the litterbox, lady.

Um, no, since you’re pointing to a mouse, not a word. In fact, you’re illiterate. You’re a cat!

Not as scary as a giant black and white polka dot tie with a red striped shirt. This is your designer?

That copyeditor looks like he needs some catnip or he’s gonna start shredding the manuscript. Give the poor guy some yarn at least!

Actually the copyeditor (copycat?) really said, “Here’s another !@#$%! mistake!”

Of course, the printer was in China so the production director should have said “良好的厚纸!”

Seriously, an ascot? Since when did Charles Nelson Reilly do prepress?

OK, fair enough.

I think the prepress cat is going to kick some tail when he hears this crap.

Why are these cats so relaxed when the book is totally screwed up? Can’t they see the deadline right behind them? Sure enough…

Sigh. This is not going to end well.

Assuming there is a next job.

I think a few whiskers ended up in the F&Gs.

Uh, yeah. But instead of going out and selling the book, the cats started a website filled with photos of themselves with silly misspelled captions. And they all got rich and never made another book again.

And then little kitten fell asleep, wishing for an iPhone.

The end.

PS If you want to know where these images came from, check out Who Killed Print, Part 2.

Ever since he was first spotted, that damn rodent’s been following us around all summer. Now on to the links.

First up, my latest post at InDesign Secrets, Document Differencing.

Layers Magazine has an article on using Conditional Text in InDesign. Aside: ten years later, I still hate the phrase, “in InDesign.” AwKward.

What do you get when you cross Mad Men with Illustrator? Sketchpad, a 1963 computer illustration program created by Ivan Sutherland at MIT.

Thanks to mehallo.com for the heads up.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow (leopard, that is). Here’s a PDF on Adobe’s Creative Suite compatibility with Apple’s new version of OS X.

Elpical has a product called Claro Layout (which I haven’t tried yet) which gives you the ability to optimize and enhance your photos from within InDesign.

Vectorsonfire.com has a vintage Ford Thunderbird drawn in Illustrator that is so awesome it’s either going to inspire me to refresh my vector skills or make me never touch the Pen tool again. Too soon to tell which.

Examiner.com has a story about some members of the UK Parliament considering a ban on Photoshopped images for ads targeting kids. They’re upset about the widespread Photoshopping of already attractive people into poreless, wrinkleless monuments to Barbie-doll perfection. Here’s an interactive example of the typical process. Of course, this has been going on for a long time, witness the these pics of 18th century First Lady Dolly Madison:

Before

After

Prompting Ben Franklin to say, “M’lady, thou art a hottie.”

Designussion (i.e. Design Discussion) has 13 Amazing Vector Cartoon Tutorials.

If that wasn’t enough for you, Designreviver has 50 Illustrator Cartoon Tutorials.

Ever heard of Flash cookies? AKA cloud cookies? Apparently some sites now keep cookies on your surfing habits on their machines. Thus removing the last shred of a hint of the illusion of privacy. Might as well just post your browser history on your Facebook wall.

Wish you knew more about CSS? Existingvisual.com has 250+ Resources to Help You Become a CSS Expert. Hmmm, wonder if those resources include six months off from real life and a fresh brain.

Stumbleupon has the definitive list of Adobeans on Twitter.

Finally, if you just didn’t get enough rodent, here’s more squirrel bombing and an automatic squirrelizer app.

Now I’ve got my eye out for a nice, dry PrinerGrigio, or Typefi Shiraz.

I once worked a freelance gig where a I’d come into work to find empty bottles and dried red wine circles on my desk. Apparently the late shift had all the fun. ‘Cept I think they were drinking Quark 20/20.

Sometime Monday the domain mapping that transforms mild-mannered “pubtech.wordpress.com” to it’s super hero identity “publicious.net” expired. Silly me, forgot to pay the bill. For about 48 hours, I was thinking I had offended some very important bots in Internetland. All the incoming links to Publicious disappeared and traffic was down more than 90%. It felt like Publicious had been put in solitary confinement.

After the inital shock, I said, “Oh well, whatever. Home alone at last. Now that everyone’s gone, I have all the time in the world and the whole internet to myself. Maybe I’ll just put on some Carpenters, kick back with bag of Cheetos, and check out SpongeBob On Demand.”

Every sha-la-la, Every whoa-o-oh, still shines.

But then I got lonely. I finally figured out I should check one of the sites that links here and see what happens. Bingo. A hop, skip, and credit card payment later, I am once again master of my domain. Now, help yourself to some Cheetos. On with the show.

Might as well start with my latest post at InDesignSecrets.com, Snippet Style InJectors. I stumbled on this idea when I was preparing for a presentation last fall, and noticed that all the document resources used by a snippet get placed before the snippet itself. I said to myself, “Self, this could be useful someday.”

Drawn! the cartoon and illustration blog has an interesting video of an artist laying out a comic book in InDesign. You’ll never look at the Pencil tool the same way again.

Miverity has a tutorial on how to build a Flash XML slideshow app for a website.

Smashing Magazine has an article on Ten Simple Steps to Better Photoshop Performance. Life is short, no time for beachball cursrors.

The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog has an good article on ebook format wars. Which one will end up the Betamax of the 21st century?

Speaking of which…

InformationWeek weighs in on the same ebook format issue, with a Sony v. Amazon angle.

Gigaom is ready to declare a winner: Adobe, because of Sony’s embrace of EPUB.

Relatedly (is that a word? if not, I just made it one) Digital Media Buzz has the scoop on Adobe’s Open Source efforts.

Thinking of using an online word processor? Read Linux.com’s comparison of GoogleDocs, Zoho, and Buzzword.

Quick, how do you make a dotted line in Photoshop? Sitepoint has some nice quick tips about using Photoshop brush options for dotted lines and such.

One NYTimes.com writer thinks the bloom is off the Rich Internet App rose already, with the arrival of Google’s Chrome. Please, don’t be evil, Google. Please.

Graphics.com has some ‘tony tutorials (as in duotone, tritone, etc).

Finally, if you’ve ever wished to see Photoshop and Illustrator battle to the death as giant transformer robots with foul language (and who hasn’t?) I recommend checking out GoMediaZine’s ongoing Photoshop vs. Illustrator series.

So far, about 27,000 people have clicked that link too. That is some good Google Juice for this humble little blog. Hopefully not too many of them left disappointed or disgusted after they saw it was a gag. Maybe I should add a disclaimer.

And then there are tools like the scrapers who re-posted “CS5 Revealed!” after carefully removing the references to Publicious from it. Thanks guys. A link would’ve been nice.

Sigh. C’est la vie.

Hmmm, maybe I should do a “CS6 Revealed!” post…

Hey film fans, welcome to the first ever Publicious Movie Review. There aren’t a heck of a lot of movies that feature publishing technology, but last week I did catch one: Welcome to Macintosh.

Written and directed by Robert Baca and Josh Rizzo, this film is a documentary take on the history of Apple Inc., not just Macintosh, so the title is a bit of a misnomer.

I was really excited to see this film since I have been a MacHead for more than 20 years. My first Mac was a 512k-e in August of 1987, though I’m sure I used them briefly at school before that. The 512 lasted me until 1994 when I got a Performa 630 CD. CD-ROM baby, yeah! After the Performa came a parade of iMacs, a G5 tower, 3 laptops, and the current top dog in the household (more of a chihuahua), a 2.26 GHz 13″ MacBookPro. Since I use them at work too, I figure that for the last 15 years I’ve spent the majority of my waking hours sitting in front of Macs. So I was totally ready to love this film. But I didn’t.

Welcome to Macintosh felt like a TV special. And a missed opportunity. Apple is a huge subject to cover, with an impact on technology and culture that people are passionate about. Maybe the filmmakers bit off more than they could chew. Or maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I’m one of those hardcore Mac geeks that wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than a Ken Burns 12-part Encyclopedia Macintoshia, complete with full-color booklet, and scratch-n-sniff pix of Woz’s garage.

The film starts out strong, with juicy details of the formation of Apple. Original logos. Lots of shots of ancient, wooden(!) hardware. But then it quickly dawned on me that the voices I most wanted to hear: The Steves, Jobs and Woz, were silent. There are no interviews with the two men who brought the Mac to life, and the film suffers as a result. It’s also missing input from lots of other folks who had a hand in the Mac magic. People like Susan Kare. She gave the Mac its face, designing the icons and graphics for the original Mac GUI. Susan designed the Mac city fonts, Monaco, Geneva, New York, Chicago, etc. and everything from the Happy Mac to the Command key icon. Wouldn’t you like to see her sketches or hear her stories and thoughts? BTW, Susan now does icons for Facebook. And you can buy sticky notes with her original Mac icons at MoMA store.org.

Another voice I want to hear is Jonathan Ive. He’s the principal designer of the iMac, Powerbook, iPod, and iPhone. He’s the guy who brought Jobs’ modern visions to life and helped resurrect Apple over the last decade. He’s responsible for Apple stores being mobbed with people who see little shiny things and must have them NOW.

Who we get instead are the affable Andy Hertzfeld, the BS artist/evangelist Guy Kawasaki, and Ron Wayne (the original 3rd co-founder of Apple) along with Jim Reekes (made the Mac startup chime) and Leander Kahney (author of  Cult of Mac). They provide some interesting anecdotes, but in the history of the Mac, they’re the supporting cast. The stars are missing. Reekes is pretty entertaining, though. He comes across like Apple’s version of Dwight Schrute. Sardonic does not begin to describe this guy. He seems completely unimpressed by Apple and the people who love their products. He is the sour antidote to the saccharine MacWorship that is always lurking when Apple is discussed.

My other main problem with the film is that it’s too hardware focused. People love the Mac because of the experience of sitting down and using it. Since it’s inception, it’s been the coolest, most beautiful, most fun way of interacting with a computer. We love it mostly because of the operating system and software. What about MacWrite? MacPaint? What about System 7? Mac OS X? I don’t think the word “Finder” is never even mentioned in the film. With apologies to Mr. Ive, you could stick the Mac OS in a boring beige case, and I’d still use it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that Ive makes it sexy, but I love this thing for it’s brains, cleverness, and sense of humor. Maybe the movie I’m looking for is Married to Macintosh.

Despite my objections, I’m still recommending anyone who likes and uses Macs to see Welcome to Macintosh. It’s worthwhile, but it could be soooo much more.

Welcome to Macintosh is available on DVD for $19.84. Cute.

You can also follow Welcome to Macintosh on Twitter or Facebook.

So to sum up,

Pros: Great subject. Good early history of Apple. Reekes channelling Schrute.

Cons: No Jobs, Woz, Ive, Kare. No Mac OS!

Rating: 2½ Macs

3 o’clock – roadblock

Hey Mr. Cop, ain’t got no

(what you say down there)

Ain’t got no birth surfer ticket on me now

-Bob Marley, Rebel Music

In recent weeks, a growing mob of “birthers” has besieged Publicious World Headquarters, demanding to see my paperwork. They claim certain irregularities in my published documents call into question the legitimacy of my right to blog. Well, to them I say, phoooey!

However, you the loyal readers have a right to know, so to end this controversy once and for all, I am posting a scan of my original, unaltered, notorized blog certificate. I hope this will serve to prove beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt, that I am the legitimate owner of this blog.

Feels good to get that out in the open. Now, on to the links!

Some things are OMG, others are WTF, most are somewhere inbetween. Here’s the OMG-WTF Spectrum to help you sort things out precisely.

New Era Cap has a fun Flash RIA for designing your own baseball cap. It’s also a contest and if your design wins, they’ll manufacture the cap (there goes that crowdsourcing again. lazy bastards). Anyway, if you really want to trick out your design, you can download PSD and AI templates and go to town.

Speaking of RIAs, Sitepoint has the 18 Coolest AIR Apps for Designers.

The Graphics Fairy has a free vintage (Victorian) clip art and a fun idea/project for the kids, making a game of concentration out of your favorite graphics. My kids would probably prefer the Creative Suite icons…or SpongeBob.

Smashing Magazine has the A-Z of Free Photoshop Plug-ins and Filters

Tutorial Lounge has 25 Astounding Typography Tutorials.

Deke McClelland is posting a Top 40 Photoshop Features Countdown over at Lynda.com.

Now that people have had a chance to use Flash Catalyst, they’re starting to uncover some glitches in the Creative Suite-RIA connection. I stumbled on an interesting post about gradient fidelity and FXG generation tools.

Inkscape is a free, open source vector graphics tool (that I haven’t had a chance to play with yet). If anyone has tried it, please let me know your experience and opinion of it.

Divine is a tool that gives you the ability to convert Photoshop documents into WordPress themes. Sounds interesting. too bad it’s PC only, or I’d be trying it at this moment.

Digital Photography School has a basic tutorial for how to use textures to enhance photographs. Very simple technique that can yield great results.

Finally, after spending the better part of a weekend like a dog chasing my digital tail, I posted the Top Ten Reasons to Quit Out of InDesign and Call It a Day (or Night). Know when to say when, my friends.

That’s it. Till next time, be well, and if a birther jumps out of the bushes and demands to see your paperwork, hand ‘em one of these.

Here’s your template:

Intro paragraph citing some current event, 
with possibly strained metaphor to publishing technology.
Jokey second paragraph with parentheticals (galore).
<<insert goofy Photoshopped graphic>>
Closing paragraph, ending with a one-word sentence. Really.

Adobe is taking this crowdsourcing thing seriously, with a few new initiatives that seek to tap the power of the hivemind. First, Adobe Community Publishing is a rich internet application that allows/requests/begs you to write and upload content related to Adobe applications to their site.

It’s like a blogging tool where your content is published directly to Adobe’s site. After you sign in with your Adobe ID, you pick a template:

And have at it.

Secondly, Acrobat.com is also looking for a few of your good ideas. Got a feature or functionality request? Go over to ideas.acrobat.com and make your voice heard.

Also in a nod to crowdpower, Serna has make its Syntext XML editor open source.

Back in the day, the only people who could see music were in psychiatric wards and Grateful Dead shows. Now any shmoe with Photoshop can see music, edit it, and save it back as a sound file. Head over to Photosounder for info on editing audio files as images in Photoshop.

Design Science, makers of MathType, Math Flow, and Kraft Matharoni and Cheese (jk), has a useful guide to Math in eBooks, in the ePub standard.

While we’re on the XML subject, might as well point out the XML in Practice Conference coming up at the end of September in D.C. I learned a ton at the one in Boston a couple years ago. And I got a MarkLogic t-shirt, which catapulted me to a level of geek usually unseen in the Boston area outside the MIT campus. Maybe I can get Johnny Cupcakes to hack the design, and we can sell ‘em for $40 a pop.

Don’t touch that PDF if you don’t know where it’s been. Especially if it has a trojan virus embedded in a tiny Flash video.  Apparently we still have to be suspicious of PDF from unknown sources.

Typophile has a neat Flash tutorial on Typography 101.

Laughing Lion Design has a tutorial on achieving a letterpress effect in Photoshop.

Finally, over at my home away from home, InDesign Secrets, Steve Werner has posted tips and tricks for interactive Buttons in PDF (via InDesign).

Till next time, (insert closing).

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I am teh FAIL!

After resigning myself to a life unburdened by credibility, I uploaded new and improved PDFs, this time without any hyphens whatsoever. Take that, lousy H&Js!