As I wrote before, I am eight kinds of geek. Kind number 4 is space geek. I am an unabashed fanboy of the Apollo astronauts. Among my space geek collection I have Neil Armstrong’s autograph and a lunar module pencil sharpener. ’Nuff said. This week’s anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission has brought a ton of space goodies to share. So tear open a bag of freeze dried ice cream and read on.

John Nack has a nice set of space links, including my favorite, We Choose the Moon, where you can follow along with the mission in real time. For those of us too young to remember or experience it for ourselves, this is as close as we’re going to get to the feeling of witnessing the moon landing.

Spacefacts has a nice map of the roamings of Armstrong and Aldrin.

Astronautix (aka Encyclopedia Astronautica) is a great resource, boasting over 25,000 pages of content, including day-by-day accounts of the space race, astronaut and engineer bios, detailed breakdowns of hardware, and a Paths Not Taken section of canceled designs and missions to make you wonder what if…

Ninfinger has a huge collection of space models, as does Apollo Maniacs. You can even to try your hand at making a papercraft lunar module.

BoingBoing has links to newly-restored video of the One Small Step.

In fairness, not everyone saw Apollo 11 as mankind’s greatest moment. Witness, Gil Scott Heron’s Whitey On The Moon.

OK, on to the publishing tech links.

Adobe Genesis is an attempt at taming the tangled desktop via Flex. It allows users to create persistent personal portals (try saying that three times fast). It’s newer than new (you can’t get it even a beta yet), but as I understand it, the idea is to break applications and web services into tiles and assemble just the piece you need for your workflow in one window. Fill your plate from a workflow salad bar, if you will. Here’s a better explanation.

Need to learn (or deal with) TeX or MathML in a browser? Check out the MathML browser test, where you can see examples of rendered math and click on them to get the code.

Would you like to create a custom blog theme, without the coding chores? Check out Artisteer. Thanks to her geekness,  Anne-Marie Concepcion for the tip.

The 80’s pretentious-pop band the Fixx once asked “Are We Ourselves (And Do We Really Know)?” It’s a real question now as the importance of social media continues to rise. When anyone can grab any username, how do you KNOW who’s who? Protect your name/brand, and claim your name. You can check the availability of usernames/IDs on tons of social media sites at Knowem.com. You may also discover new social media sites you want to join. Thanks to PrepressPilgrim for the idea.

Francesomugnai.com has the 30 Most Interesting Photoshop Tutorials of 2009 (so far).

I leave you a trio of posts from InDesign Secrets (none of which is mine…I’ve been sitting in a tin can, far above the world).

Fritz posted about the amazing folding calculator. If you need to set up InDesign templates for folded publications, you really should check it out. It’s also a very cool example of what you can do with an interactive PDF.

David posted a fun 2-part series on A Trip to Adobe, in which we get to see InDesign in its native habitat of Seattle. Beware the Fremont Troll!

Till next time, take your protein pills and put your helmet on.

If you somehow were able to pry yourself away from the wall-to-wall, King of Pop coverage this week, you may have noticed a little news item: Sarah Palin is quitting her job as Alaska governor. There’s plenty of speculation about her motives (run for higher office, impending scandal), but the main reason she cited was to protect her family from mean-spirited attacks. Specifically, she cited the straw that broke the camel’s back was a Photoshop job done to her son, Trig. Initially, it was a pretty innocuous bit of satire about a right-wing radio jock on a blog called Celtic Diva. It wasn’t even directed at Palin or her family. But when Palin got so upset, calling it a “malicious desecration,” well, that was like pouring gasoline on the fire. A meme was born. Now every pixel jockey with a copy of Photoshop was replacing Trig’s face with just about anything you can imagine.

Regardless of what you think about the soon-to-be-former governor of Alaska, I think it is remarkable that publishing technology, in the form of Photoshop and blogs (two subjects near and dear to my heart) may have directly contributed the resignation of a national political figure. Just imagine if Photoshop had been around in the past. Our history could’ve been a lot different.

Poor Lee Harvey. I always knew you were set up.

By the way, the source of the Life cover here is Coverbrowser.com, an incredible resource/time suck archive of book, magazine, and comic book covers.

Last time out I wrote a bit about Gridiron Software dropping da bomb, with Flow. If you’re interested in a detailed breakdown on why Flow is the coolest thing since ever, check out my post on InDesignSecrets.com, Let the Good Times Flow.

I let my Lynda.com subscription lapse when I had to make a budgetary choice between online video training and cat food. Well, I just re-upped with Lynda. Sorry, kitties. I’m sure there are plenty of tasty squirrels on the back yard. I need access to stuff like David Blatner’s 10 Things to Know about Interactive PDF.  While we’re talking about David, you should also check out the Adobe white paper on Accessible PDF that he authored.

Codefear has 30 insanely beautiful and inspiring Photoshop Text Effects.

Pantherkut has a Worth 1000-like set of Photoshopped mutant animals. Disturbing stuff, but you can’t stop looking at them.

Abduzeedo has inspirational examples of 3D typography.

Design Mag has over 200 Photoshop paper brushes.

Potato Project has a nifty tutorial on how to create a 50’s retro poster look.

There, I Fixed It.com isn’t so much about publishing tech as duct tape and bailing wire tech. See if you can spot the real low tech fixits from the Photoshop fakery. My personal favorite TIFI, harkens back to the days of Quark XPress 4.11. A bunch of us production types would suffer through the updating of hundreds of pieces of “modified” art every time the clocks changed due to daylight savings. We’d have to hold down the Enter key to say “OK” hundreds of times. Then an ingenious co-worker named Jim Haggerty placed his stapler on the Enter key and went to lunch. When he came back, all his art was updated. Thus the Haggerty 2000 was born.

In the tradition of Ahmadinejad Sucks at Photoshop, The Epoch Times has a send-in-the-clones job that appeared in the China People’s Daily.

I have heard of folks struggles with Adobe customer service, but Consumerist.com has a nice story about some great customer service by Adobe.

If you’re a Photoshop brush hound, check out Brush Pilot, a $15 app for previewing your brush collection.

VLC is an open source media player that can play just about anything, and it’s just been released in version 1.0. I’ve been using beta versions for years and love it.

That’s it for now kids. Till next time remember, wield those pixels carefully. You never know when you might change the course of history.

They say celebrity deaths come in threes. I say, you see what you want to see. But this past week was pretty hard on 20th century cultural icons. If you’ve lost track of who’s still with us, consult Dead or Alive? Oh, nevermind, I’ll save you the trip: Abe Vigoda still walks the earth.

First off, poor Ed McMahon. The guy spends decades in the public spotlight as Carson’s sidekick. Night after night, and with Memorex precision, he delivers the chiseled-in-the-collective-memory line, “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” For a side gig, he props up a molten Jerry Lewis every Labor Day for the final timpani. He even has the cartoonish celebrity second act with Star Search and the thing that wasn’t quite Publisher’s Clearinghouse. And when he dies, he gets two seconds of attention.

Next up, poor Farrah. I never quite got the obsession with her or her bodacious hair. Yes, Farrah was incredibly beautiful. But I had only one true love during my single-digit years, and that was Lindsay Wagner, aka Jaime Sommers, the true, be-scarfed Bionic Woman. Still, the impact of Farrah’s locks and teeth is undeniable. And happily, she earned major props for her acting craft as well as her looks. So she got four seconds of attention this week.

Which brings me to the King of Pop. What more can anyone say about the Curious Case of Michael Jackson? I was a teenager in the 80s, but it never occurred to me to actually buy Thriller. It would be like buying air. I watched MTV for about four years straight, without blinking, from 1982-1985. I heard Thriller on a daily, if not hourly basis, for years on end. It was like life in a prison in the Phillipines. Now I watch this video of him auditioning for Berry Gordy at age ten, channelling James Brown with such precision that it freaks me out. For his otherworldly talent, this ten year old kid got his childhood replaced with showbiz, and became the most famous person on the planet. The unraveling that occurred afterward, is amazing to me, only in that it took so long.

So to Ed, Farrah, and Michael, I will picture you three moonwalking off the stage together. Rest in peace.

Oops, in my self-indulgence, I forgot this is a blog about publishing technology. How about some links?

First, GridIron Software has just released Flow. It is way cooler than sliced bread. How would you like for your files to know how they are all related? Images know which InDesign layouts they’ve been placed in. PDFs know which documents they were created from. You say you only remember the name of a layer in a Photoshop file? No problem, you can find it. And so on and so on. I don’t like to throw around the word “amazing,” but Flow really is A-freaking-mazing. I’ve installed the trial version and I think living without it is going to be impossible from here on out.

From the how did we ever live without Photoshop category, part 1: Gizmodo has 65 Ancient Video Games I Wish Existed.

From the how did we ever live without Photoshop category, part 2: Wonkette has Sarah Palin’s quixotic and hopeless war vs. Photoshop.

Ever wonder how Adobe came to be? Wonder what it might have to do with Xerox? Check out a nice little bio of founder John Warnock.

Here’s a couple of my recent posts from InDesign Secrets: Honey, I Blew Up the Color Panel, Bridge Font Blind Spot, and Eye Candy, Part 5: Blending a la Mode.

As the digital revolution comes full circle, the phrase “Web to Print” is going to be heard a lot. Bitstream’s Pageflex Storefront uses InDesign Server to power its piece of the Web to Print pie.

GREP Master Peter Kahrel has posted a brilliant tutorial on Dealing With Long GREP Expressions. My advice: caffeinate heavily before reading.

At work, I was asked to evaluate someone’s choice of 100c70m drop shadows. My evaluation was “um, no.” Here’s how to make a blue shadow in real life.

Brian Lawler (author of the Official Adobe Print Publishing Guide) has posted an interesting idea for using Photoshop’s Count tool.

From the It’s A Small World, But I Wouldn’t Want to Print It Dept: How about a digital archive that contains all the peer-reviewed mathematical literature ever published? That’s about 100 million pages. No sweat, say the folks behind the Digital Mathematics Library Project.

Print and prepress guru par excellence Steve Werner is giving a eSeminar on InDesign Best Prepress Practices on July 1. If you miss it, you can catch the recorded version.

Thomas Silkjær has posted a nice set of highly-organized pre-defined styles for InDesign, which you can modify to suit your own needs.

ShapeCollage is a nifty, free tool for making collages out of your photos. You can arrange any number of pictures into any shape.

Popular Science has a prototype color-picking pen, that mimics Photoshop’s eyedropper. It’s supposed to scan the color of any real life object and then recreate that color with ink. Too bad the desinger needs a remedial lesson in the physics of subtractive color and CMYK. Still, it’s a mind-blowing concept.

There are many ways to train people to use complicated new software. You could sit down with each new user individually and show them what to do. Because you have 300 people on staff full-time to do that. The training might be a live demo of some of the processes, or one of those movies. It could be a series of online modules that take the user through various steps of various workflows. There might be a quiz at the end. Everybody likes quizzes.

We chose a variety of training approaches. This is a nice way of saying we didn’t really have a coordinated training approach. Our training started out with the best of intentions, of course. Unfortunately, our system was pressed into service before it was really finished, so the training program was REALLY not really finished.

Our first attempts at training involved the time-honored “live demo in front of a group of people” technique. I wonder if there’s anything more useless. Imagine a group of 20 people who don’t really know what’s going on, in a darkened room, staring at a projection of a completely foreign UI, listening to some dork (me) droning on about “tagging” and “attributes” and whatnot. For an hour. And at the end, being told to go back to their desks, and the software would be installed within the next couple weeks, and there are no handouts or manuals, but when you get the software, start using it all day as this is now your new way of working. We didn’t even offer snacks.

So that having predictably failed to impart all the vital skills they needed, the next step was to sit down with them individually or in very small groups and, with one of the users driving, talk them through the tasks they needed to do. “Click on the File menu . . . no, the Documentum file menu, not the Netscape file menu . . . good!” This actually worked pretty well. The only downside is the “trainer” has to spend all day doing it. And the trainer is never really “the trainer”, they’re more like the project manager who’s dropping everything to train people as they have questions.

To try to organize the random training and ensure that everybody in the group was getting the same information, we decided to hold weekly meetings to go over any questions that came up. Emergencies would still be handled as they occured (an emergency being an “I can’t do any work until you explain to me how to do this” situation). Unfortunately, or maybe inevitably, no questions ever came up in these meetings. I’m not kidding. “So how’s everything going?” “Fine.” Then an hour later 15 phone calls come in asking for individual help.

Then there’s the problem of “rogue training.” There’s always somebody who kind of gets it, assumes they totally get it, then trains their colleagues on their own. It is, after all, easier to ask the person sitting next to you than calling the person who caused all this pain and inconvenience in the first place. This caused no end of issues for everyone involved. Someone determined a simple 35-step procedure for creating a page and printing it out for further editing. The problem: the same thing could be accomplished in 3 steps, which had of course been covered in the original dark-room demo, but everybody forgot about that. And even better, the page didn’t really need to be printed out every time as it was after all a PDF file which could be viewed onscreen. But that rogue trainer had shown everyone their technique, everybody started doing it, and hours upon hours were wasted waiting for pages to process and print. And even after we discovered this and showed everyone the “right” way, many people still did it the “old” way because that’s what they were comfortable with.

(We also had someone come up with “rogue documentation” which was presented to me at a project postmortem. “Look at how complicated it is to use this!” “Where did you get this documentation?” “I wrote it up myself because this is so hard I needed a cheat sheet.” “I understand your frustration. I wish you would have talked to me during the project because most of this could have been done differently which would have made it easier.” ” . . . “)

When it finally became obvious that our ad hoc training program wasn’t going to cut it, we assigned someone to be a trainier and come up with a hands-on training program. And it wasn’t me. That was one of the happiest days of my career. It was one of the users, who knew what the users were going through, and spoke their language, and had credibility within their ranks. O joy! I just peeked in on the first couple sessions to make sure they weren’t talking crazy talk. And they weren’t. And everything went pretty smoothly from then on. Imagine that.

Had a “whoa” moment a little while ago. Whilst taking a deep dive into Adobe history and technology, I came across an article on the math behind Bézier curves. If you’ve ever used any of the Creative Suite apps, you know what these are. They’re the edges of objects you shape by pulling little control handles attached to the ends of lines. You can draw pretty much any shape by varying the number, length, and angle of the control handles.

I’d known for many years about the man who invented these curves, Pierre Bézier. He was a French engineer who used them to design precisely manufactured auto parts for Renault. They also come in quite handy in computer graphics. But what I’d never seen before is the control handles in the context of the 3-D shape they describe: a parallelepiped. Here’s the article that blew one of my 100 amp geek fuses. What amazes me is that I never realized how I was in effect, pulling and pushing these control handles in three-dimensional space. Hence the “whoa.” You are warned, there is math involved. If you ever wish you could play with Bézier curves in real life, you can, and probably already did as a kid, with string art.

I’d be remiss to be talking about vectors, without mentioning the VectorBabe, Sandee Cohen. You may know she’s the author of The InDesign Visual Quickstart Guide by PeachPit Press. You may not know she recently launched a blog called From Design to Print to augment her book of the same name.

Sumo Paint is another “whoa” experience. It’s a free, web-based painting application with an interface so full-featured and well-executed, you won’t believe it. Makes you think you could create anything with Flash.

Sixrevisions.com has an awesome list article on 25 Excellent Typography Tools for the Serious Designer. Silly designers, you can click the link, but don’t let me catch you goofing around. No funny business.

While you’re at Sixrevisions, also check out another list: Ten Unusual Places to Get Design Inspiration.

Thenextweb.com has an entertaining man-in-the-street video, produced by Google wherein the question posed to the public is “What is a browser?” How horrified you are at the answers = how much of a geek you are. Personally, my favorite is the WAY over-caffeinated lady who says, “I use the Yahoo!”

Occasionally, we are reminded the world is more than pixels and prepress. You can show your support for those protesting the election in Iran by changing your avatar.

Speaking of the Iranian election, I don’t know if it was rigged, but I do know that the government needs to spring for a few of Deke McClelland’s Lynda.com Photoshop videos. Because, as BoingBoing said, Ahmadinijad Sucks at Photoshop.

You can’t get Flash on the iPhone, but thanks to AIR, you can get the iPhone in Flash. Desktop iPhone is an AIR application that simulates the iPhone on your desktop. You can even make phone calls with it.

Drupal is everyone’s favorite open source CMS, n’est ce pas? RefCardz has a free Guide to Getting Started with Drupal.

MarkLogic is offering another free eSeminar for publishers. This time the topic is Three Ways To Innovate: How Smart Publishers are Thriving Now. Count on a lot of “XML is da schizznit” rap.

Finally, Meninos is at it again, making me lust after geek merch. This time it’s Illustrator and Photoshop palette, er, panel magnets. No geek fridge should be without ‘em.

So Father’s Day is less than a week away and you’ve procrastinated once again. What are you going to get the old man? Fear not, Publicious is here to help. We’ve got you covered. Provided your dad is a publishing technology geek, who loves free online goodies. Otherwise, you’re on your own.

Let’s face it, he probably doesn’t want a tie. Buuuut, if he’s a CMYK-D.A.D., he might fancy a halftone tie.

You can come up with your own tie patterns if you read my latest post on InDesign Secrets, Pattern Swatches.

How about a portrait of pop? All the cool kids (and most of the geeks) have jumped on the “drawing with type” bandwagon. If you can’t spare the time to pick just the right glyphs for dad’s eyebrows, use the iPhone type drawing app.

If dad’s a type maven, head straight to CreativePro, as Pariah Burke’s done an amazing job tracking down 103 free fonts.

You can’t make dad rich, but you can get him a rich internet application. Adobe’s announced that the AIR framework has been downloaded 200 million times by people installing RIAs. So AIR Nation would be the 6th most populous on Earth, after China, India, the US, Indonesia, and Facebook. TechCrunch has the details and links to some of their favorites.

Dad’s hair thinning? Forget Rogaine. Get a new hair brush. Not the plastic kind, the Photoshop kind. So you can draw Rapunzellesque locks on Pop.

If dad’s out of shape? No problem, download hundreds of custom shapes for Photoshop.

Speaking of Photoshop, take a minute and read the story of Photoshop’s two dads, the brothers Knoll. You must click this link, if only to see the very first Photoshop icon. I am making a t-shirt with that if it’s the last thing I do. I bet a lot of kids won’t even know what it is.

If you were ever a fan of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, you must remember the ones where Calvin showed his dad charts and graphs indicating the steeply declining popularity of dad’s rules. Well, Calvin was no dummy. He automated the making of those charts, with XML data fed into Illustrator.

Finish off Father’s Day with a treat. Cut dad a thick slice of pie a la mode–blending mode, that is. Digitalartform has one of the most thoughtful (and useful) pieces on blending modes I’ve ever read.

You probably know that Microsoft has released its own search engine to try and topple Skynet, er, Google. A few days ago, in the WordPress stats I started seeing referrals from Bing.com. Literally, Bing hits. Heh. So I searched for “Publicious” on Bing, and we got 9 out of the top 10 spots. Righteous.

If you weren’t totally exhausted from all the Flash Catalyst stuff I posted last week (or if you ignored it completely) you might want to check out Adobe’s summer-long eSeminar series on the Flash platform (Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst). Please don’t call them “webinars.” Eeeech. Ugliest word ever.

If you want to see what some people are actually creating with all this Flash stuff, check out Smashing Magazine’s 50 Beautiful Flash Websites. Don’t forget to follow Smashing Mag on Twitter for tons more.

Here’s my post on InDesign Secrets about continuation of Adobe branding into our geeky lifestyles, Coasting Into A Suite Life. By the way, I’m all for it. I’d buy some InDesign bedsheets in a heartbeat.

By the way, yesterday was Adobe Patch Day. Get’cher security updates while they’re hot.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, unless it comes in a Bezier box. Best Design Options is offering 100 Websites Where You Can Download Free Vector Graphics.

While you’re up, can you grab me a few free patterns from the PatternCooler? Thanks.

With all that money you saved on your vectors and patterns, you can head over to FlashDen and purchase some little Flash applications. It’s a little app market where developers can hawk their coded wares. Even if you don’t intend to buy, it makes for some fun window shopping.

Want to influence the future of Photoshop? Take John Nack’s survey. Vote early and often.

Gurus Unleashed has a really cool new feature, a monthly wrap-up of the best news, tips, tutorials, etc for your favorite graphix apps. Here’s the May wrap-up for InDesign/InCopy. You can also find wrap-ups for Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, MacPaint, etc. Just kidding, I think the MacPaint news would be pretty sparse. Then again, I could dominate it…

Whoever says print is dead is all wet. Literally, now that you can get almost anything printed on a shower curtain. These will be the coolest thing in the bathroom till we get shower curtains that are tv screens.

Or you can get a monitor that’s bigger than a giant flatscreen TV. It’s only $8,000, and so big it has to be curved around you.

Finally, I leave you with some high art, from Prepress Pilgrim, an excerpt from the world’s first prepress romance novel.

So let’s say the stars align and your child’s unicorn is delivered on time, and you actually do have a dedicated documentation writer and training developer on your project. What kind of documentation works best?

I suppose everybody prefers something slightly different. (I personally would love to see the “kinesthetic” documentation for an XML workflow. “Aural” would be cool too.) Most of the time, though, documentation is going to be a fat binder with page after page of text and screenshots, or something online with similar text and pictures linked together in some fancy way.

I feel that you need to have several kinds of documentation available to users. For our content model, we created a very detailed catalogue of all the XML elements and attributes, with tree models to show how the parent/child relationships worked, and output screenshots to show what the XML tagged content would look like “on the page”. I thought it was very thorough yet concise at a mere 300 pages. The users thought it looked like “stereo instructions” and didn’t find it helpful at all. I guess the fact that I helped develop the content model, so I pretty much knew it backward and forward to begin with, clouded my judgment of the catalogue’s usefulness.

So based on that epic fail, we created a booklet of “quick topics” that featured lists of steps in various procedures. Need to know how to import an art file? Here’s the step-by-step instructions. Some of them even had screenshots to show what menus to choose or buttons to click. These were slightly more useful than the catalogue, but most of them had 20 steps or more—the steps add up when you make “click on the OK button” its own step. And there are 12 instances of that in a particular process. (Maybe our processes were too complex? A topic for another time perhaps.)

We also had a design catalogue of the various styles available. This actually was helpful as authors and editors developed the concept for certain kinds of pages. When there are 14 different styles available for questions, it’s nice to have a picture of what they all look like. But even this was limited. They had to look in the catalogue to match the design to the XML that was behind it. And they already didn’t like the catalogue because it was too confusing.

I think our main failure was to organize the documentation and training around how the system worked, not how the users would work. A chart of elements and attributes is pretty useless when you don’t know what any of the elements and attributes are for in the first place. Describing steps in using software in terms of the software rather than in terms of your user’s workflow and tasks is also less than helpful. I’m not “uploading a binary object into the docbase”, I’m “putting the picture of George Washington into the system so I can put it on this page.” I’m not “editing formatting attributes for composition”, I’m “making this paragraph be in 2 columns so it fits right.”

For our new attempt at an XML workflow, I hope we can develop documentation that’s short, uses language familiar to users, and is well indexed so it’s easy to find everything. Ideally it would be available online in a help menu within the interface itself. I wouldn’t go so far as to want that stupid talking paperclip thing that interrupts you when you’re typing, but some contextual help would be very cool. We should still have exhaustive catalogues of our elements and attributes, but those would be for the technical people working behind the scenes.

Back ‘07, I went to an Adobe MAX conference in Chicago with Eric. Had a lovely time, enjoyed the vocal stylings of Richard Cheese, and was intrigued by a little thing shown in one of the keynotes, called Thermo. It was a tool that would allow designers to work in their designy ways, and build UI for Web applications without having to write code. Filed it away until recently, when the buzz about it became so loud it penetrated the constant meowing of my Siamese cats. Renamed Flash Catalyst, the application is now available for free beta testing on Adobe Labs.

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to attend the “wicked awesome” Flash on Tap conference in Boston (more to come on that!). One of the Adobe keynotes featured a demo of Flash Catalyst (henceforth “FCat” in this post). It looked even cooler than what I had remembered from Thermo days in Chicago. You can use layered AI and PSD files as the basis for your interactive designs. And when the design changes, you can re-open a component in Illustrator or Photoshop and make your changes. That is frigging sweet. But even that wouldn’t mean much if FCat generated mucky sucky code. Happily, we are promised that the code FCat generates is rock solid and clean as a whistle. OK, sign me up. Time to start playin’. Just one problem. How do you learn it? Fortunately, with the release of FCat on Labs, there is a flood of tutorials and talk about this new tool.

So, I give you the Flash Catalyst Iron Man Trainathalon. Only the world’s strongest eyeballs and mouse fingers will survive.

Start with Kevin Lynch’s FCat chat at Web 2.0.

Then go peruse Adobe Labs own list of tutorials.

Click over to Lynda.com for Mordy Golding’s freebie introduction to FCat. And for Bonus Mordy, read his essay on MogoMedia.com, Futuristic Hype or Realistic Future?

Back to AdobeTV for FCat videos.

Then hop on your bike and pedal over to the newsstand or library to check out issue 155 of Web Designer magazine, featuring an introduction to FCat.

Go to the FCat Help page on Adobe.com, and download the PDF version of the Help.

Watch FlashBlog’s a 2-part video tutorial FCat.

Then partake of O’Reilly’s Inside RIA screencast on FCat.

Chug a RedBull. There are miles to go!

Put on your swimsuit and take a deep dive into Peachpit’s lengthy article on FCat.

Then towel off and get ready to climb a mountain: Ryan Stewart’s Digital Backcountry blog, for a tutorial in both text-based and video versions. If you’re like me, and have some serious Mac OS beachball issues, you might want to check out Ryan’s Flash Catalyst performance Tips.

After all that, splash yourself with some cold water and read some posts that are not so enthusiastic about FCat. FlashMagazine’s middle-of-the road take on FCat, We Say No To Flash Catalyst Until.., and Catalyst or Catastrophe?

Fortify yourself with a bite from Wikipedia’s page on FCat.

Sprint for the finish line: FCat’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

Did you make it? Good! Rest up, kiddo. Tomorrrow we start the ActionScript 3 Steel Cage Learn or Die Death Match.

I wrote a post awhile back where I confessed to my ineptitude with drawing. I said no amount of training would allow me to be an artist because I don’t have the brain upgrade required to transform 3D reality onto a 2D piece of paper. I still believe this is true, but there’s a problem I didn’t consider. What if my boss showed up one day and said 20% of my job now entailed drawing pictures? Do I quit? Take a 20% pay cut? In this economy? My only choice would be to try my best to figure out how to do it.

The same goes for authors and editors who work for companies that are implementing XML workflows. Yes, they were hired for their writing and editing skills. But as technology progresses, so do our jobs. We all figured out how to use computers when they came along. I’m sure some people are still more comfortable with a legal pad and pencil or an IBM Selectric, but their job requires using new equipment, which requires new skills.

Depending on where you work, training is either a fully-supported discipline with dedicated professionals whose only job is to make sure you know what you’re supposed to be doing, or you work someplace where they throw you a manual and a typed-up “tip sheet” that some guy put together in his spare time 3 years ago and you’re pretty much on your own. And of course there are shades of gray in between.

Our XML publishing system had a hodgepodge of approaches for training. We had the professional manuals created by Arbortext and Documentum for their products. We even had an Arbortext trainer come in to “train the trainers”. A caution about that: if you assume you’re training trainers, then you need to make sure part of their job description now includes training, or you’ll end up with a couple people who know what to do spending odd moments tutoring others as they have time. This is not exactly a rigorous approach.

But because there’s nothing in the Arbortext or Documentum manuals that actually explains how WE were using those products, we needed to create our own documentation. The manuals might show how to log in, but they don’t say what to do after that. At the beginning, we actually had a training department. I met with the person assigned to the project and explained how it was all going to work. She took screenshots and wrote up some procedures. Then there was a merger or something and that department was disbanded. So we had a 15-page Word doc with about a quarter of the procedures we needed documented.

Which brings up another point: if you’re working on a complex project that’s going to fundamentally alter how people are going to do their jobs, and training and documentation are not part of your project plan, then you’re asking for trouble. The kind of trouble where you have a roomful of people showing up tomorrow to learn their new tasks and you have nothing to give them.

And, of course, that’s exactly what happened with us. It almost felt like a form of abuse when we had a group of editors watching me click through their whole new world, and there wasn’t even a handout to give them at the end. I’m sure you can imagine the number of calls I fielded when they finally started working in the system. And the enormous frustration they all felt. Toward me. Awkward.

So what’s the big deal, you might be saying. Write something. Annotate screenshots. Whoop-de-doo. And I agree. It shouldn’t be that big a deal to do this. What is the big deal is doing it at the same time the project is being developed. It’s hard to do use cases and testing and bug reporting at the same time as crafting easy-to-understand documentation and training modules. There’s only so much time in the day.

It would therefore be ideal if at least one person on the project was responsible for documentation and training. And they should be there from the beginning, so they understand all the little details and workarounds that inevitably crop up during development. When the project goes live, so should the documentation and training program. And the documentation and training should be constantly revised as new features come on line or new processes are discovered as the system is put through real use.

Also unicorns should be assigned to every child under 12 and my car should run on wishes. But we can dream, can’t we?

For the next few days I’ll be at the Flash on Tap conference in Boston, listening to the best Flash developers, and feeling very old. As I sat in the Papervision and Flash to iPhone seminars, I was surrounded by kids with mohawks, wearing their underwear on the outside, nodding in rhythm to the jargon. Meanwhile, I felt something like this old guy that my daughter drew.

Since you probably can’t read the words, here’s the transcript:

Kid: “You are weird!”

Old Man: “You’re too young! You’re hurting my eyes!”

That is how she thinks of kids vs. adults. Their youth shines like a beacon. Looking directly at it gives us pain. In some ways, she might be right. So I’m going to SuperCuts for a mowhawk, and putting my undewear on the outside, and posting some of the good links I’ve come across recently:

Papervision is a real time 3D engine for Flash. It’s the means for developers to create the virtual worlds for us to move around in Flash apps.

Took a class today on ActionScript 3. Very good. Totally over my head. But that’s OK. If you never get out of your comfort zone, you could relax yourself into oblivion. Here’s the instructor’s companion Web site.

VectorTuts+ offers 15 Great Resources for Learning Adobe InDesign. I’ll try not to be too upset that Publicious didn’t make the list, since InDesign Secrets is at the top.

Is a Photoshop backlash brewing? The NY Times has an article on some magazines making news by declining to ’shop their models. In Europe, there is a movement afoot to force something like warning labels on published Photoshopped images. Sort of a “Truth in Pixels” law. As always, Photoshop Disasters is required viewing.

This week Adobe released a new feature on Acrobat.com, Presentations, which you use to make…presentations. Apparently they’re either out of application names, or they’re trying to corner the market on Obvious. It’s pretty neat. Try it out. Between this and Keynote, there will be no excuse to use PowerPoint(less) going forward.

I Love Design is a site owned by Quark (hey, remember them?) offering downloads, templates, job listings (UK), blogs, and a gallery of things to look at.

Adobe also released an update to Camera RAW, with support for new cameras.

Also on Adobe Labs (not Acrobat labs), is info about a curious thing called Story. It’s a collaborative script-writing tool. Unfortunately, it’s not available yet. Still, when I finally take a crack at one of the screenplays I have rotting in my brain, I may check it out. Maybe I’ll pitch InDesign on Vacation to Spielberg. Too bad I couldn’t show it to him. YouTube took it down because of the Go-Go’s music in the background. Sigh. I’m sure Jane Wiedlan would’ve loved it.

Finally, you don’t have to hate your InDesign documents to want to punch, rip, and burn them. Just check out my latest entry in the InDesign Eye Candy series: Punch-outs, Stickers, and Rips.

Oh, I think I just broke a hip! My eyes!

I know, I know: what the hell is educated cheese?

“Educated cheese” is a phrase uttered by Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley in his color commentary during a recent Red Sox game. It is my favorite new term, and I use it as much as possible, simply because it the caviar of baseball slang. And it makes me giggle and be glad to be alive. So I am trying to ignite a grassroots movement to increase its popularity. In baseball, “cheese” is slang for a good fastball. See also, “easy cheese”, “hard cheese”, and “cheddar.” “Educated cheese” is what a veteran pitcher throws when he no longer has the physical dominance to throw fastball after fastball. He can’t blow away the hitters, so he picks his spots. He finds a rhythm, and when the time is right, he lets it rip. Educated cheese. If he’s having a really good night, he may even “paint with educated cheese and salad.” But now we’ve gone beyond caviar slang to flying fish roe floating in a flaming absinthe smoothie slang.

So like that pitcher, I’ll pick my spots and hope to paint this post with nine slices of educated cheese.

First up, a tremendous short video on The Secret History of Fonts. It’s one of the Ignite series of brief, structured presentations. Most of the time, I love the Ignite format (aka, Enlighten Us, But Make It Quick). But this time, I was left begging for more. The presenter, Bram Pitoyo, should do a longer version. Beware of poor audio in spots. But it’s still worth it.

@students Creative Resource is a nice treasure trove of graphic resources and links, mostly Web related.

If it’s the second Tuesday of every third month, it must be Adobe Patch Day. That’s Adobe’s new scheduled day to release security patches, a la Microsoft. Nice to know they’re taking security as more of a job than a hobby. Not so nice to know that they have to.

Mr. Doob’s blog is where you will “find some random experiments done with Flash, pv3d (Papervision 3d), and ape”. Some really interesting/entertaining bits. My favorite is the one where you can literally bring down Google with one mouse click.

Creatives Are is a browser toolbar add-on for Firefox, IE, and others that puts all kinds of resources for designers, illustrators, and other creatives at your fingertips.

Not sure if you can afford an enterprise class publishing system? Rent one. K4 is now available for rent. How long till you can rent InDesign for a week, month, year? Hmmm. Or maybe even shorter, like you have a project and you need Photoshop but just for the weekend? $9.95 for 72 hours? Just sayin’.

Despite all our troubles: war, disease, recession, climate change, and the downsizing of the Cadbury Egg, the ’00s have been one helluva clean decade—if you judge by trends in graphic design. Everything is shiny. Blame Apple perhaps, for spreading the shiny germ. Here’s your chance to jump on the shiny bandwagon before the inevitable matte-lash: my post in InDesign Secrets, Shine On.

FreeConferenceCall.com  sounds too good to be true, and they know it. There’s a “something’s fishy” graphic on the homepage. Free conferencing, free recording and downloading, up to 6 hours per call, up to 96 participants, no ads, no spam, etc. But as someone who’s used it a couple of times, and know folks who’ve used it more, I think it’s legit. And an awesome resource to take advantage of.

Last, I leave you with my favorite images of the week: the headless brides. They’re Photoshop templates for graphic artists to insert models’ smiling noggins into. Certainly this offers us a wonderful opportunity to make Frankenbrides, cat-brides, etc. ’shop on, kids.

We’re in the process of building a new XML publishing system. It’s going to be swell. But it doesn’t exist yet. We have an “old” XML publishing system that’s kind of languishing right now. No new projects are going into it. Lots of the people who used to work with it are either reassigned or no longer with the company. And there are over 100,000 pages of stuff in it.

Occasionally, one of the books that was created in the old system comes up for reprint. We like to take those opportunities to make corrections. Well, what do you do when most of the people who used to do this kind of work are gone? And on top of that, what do you do when the reprint work is assigned to a vendor who doesn’t have access to your system?

You panic. You hurl accusations. You scream about lack of planning. Then you relax and try to figure out what to do.

In our old system, each book exists as a set of XML files and a high-res PDF that was sent to the printer for the original run. If the corrections are light, then it’s possible to make them in the PDF files themselves, avoiding the whole XML thing. That at least gets the corrected book printed. I suppose it would be nice to make the same corrections in the XML files as well so our content is synchronized. But if we have the ability to do that, then why not just fix the XML and make a new PDF? The problem right now is nobody is available to fix the XML. So we’re essentially going to have bad XML, and if we ever want to move it into the new publishing system, somebody is going to have to remember that it needs to be fixed first. What could possibly go wrong?

Another idea would be to give the vendor access to the old system. But that’s fraught with peril as well. Technical and security issues aside, what’s the point in training a vendor to use a system that you’re planning on discontinuing? And what if there’s more than one vendor that we’re planning on using for this kind of work?

We could also give the XML to the vendor and have them figure out how to make pages with it. That’s kind of the beauty of having vendors: you can tell them all kinds of crazy things and it’s their job to figure out how to make them work. But imagine the time and expense they’d have to put in to make it work. We’d essentially be asking them to replicate our system in their shop. That ain’t right.

So what’s the solution? Seriously, what is it? Because I have no idea. Anyone?

I am eight kinds of geek. Among my varied geekery is film geekery. I took a lot of film classes in college, mostly from a wonderful man named Arthur St. Leger Grindon, who taught me ways of seeing, not just what’s up on the screen, but everywhere. Thanks, Lege. Nowadays Netflix is my film school, augmented by the ridicuously good podcast/blog, Filmspotting (née Cinecast).

So this week, I was watching Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Buñuel and some punk named Salvador Dalí. Among its many charms are ants crawling from a guy’s palm, dead donkeys on pianos, and the notorious eyeball shot.

Watching UCA is like getting beaten with a sack of puppies, but it is a cornerstone of modern art and cinema. Plus, we would never have had Monty Python without Buñuel and his ilk, so you gotta love it, dead donkeys and all.

In the DVD commentary Buñuel’s son told how his father was once so bored at Charlie Chaplin’s Xmas party, that he and some accomplices stood up and stomped the Xmas tree and presents to pieces. Just to be, y’know, subversive. As you might imagine, Chaplin was rather miffed. But sometime later, after the holiday, he invited Buñuel back to his house and surprised his guest with a completely new Xmas tree, loaded with presents. Chaplin asked Buñuel to stomp everything again, but this time do it first, so they could enjoy a nice peaceful dinner afterward. So in honor of Buñuel and Chaplin’s random acts of weirdness, I give you eleven pieces of the ultimate surrealist work: the Internet.

First off, I can’t believe it’s taken me over a year to mention Deke.com. Deke is, of course, Deke McClelland, author of ten trillion books on Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. I watched Deke’s videos (on actual video tape!) back in the day to study for the Photoshop 6 certification exam, and to this day I still “hear” many of the keyboard shortcuts in his voice. In Deke We Trust.

In case your eyes hurt just thinking about that shot from Un Chien Andalou, soothe them with my latest post at InDesign Secrets: InDesign Eye Candy, Part 1.

Want another great InDesign resource? Check out Gabriel Powell’s Instant InDesign. Great info on template design and high-speed production skills. Videos, tips, and excepts from Gabriel’s book.

Sherman, set the Way Back Machine for last fall, when I was raving about a new Adobe thing called TLF. Well, it looks like someone at the New York Times agreed with me. This week the Times launched a new AIR-based online news reader. It’s getting rave reviews, and it relies on TLF. Here’s the behind-the-scenes story from Adobe. TLF guys, remember your friends when you’re rich and famous!

This week’s Adobe Developer Summit has been great, so far. It’s amazing how easy and well Adobe Connect works to deliver the conference to those of us who couldn’t make the trek to Seattle. If you want to glimpse the direction that the big A is pointed in for the future, check out the conference. In particular, pay attention to technologies like Configurator, which allows you to create custom interfaces for Photoshop, and will be extended across the Creative Suite.

Ever wonder what typeface the Adobe “Periodic Table” of logos is set in? It’s called Adobe Clean. It was designed by Robert Slimbach and used to be called Gauge. While you can’t buy it, you can read the story behind it.

Tweets in Space! Twitter has now gone beyond a worldwide phenomenon, with the first astronaut to tweet from orbit. Can you imagine if we had Twitter during the Apollo days? DrRendezvous RT@CoolNeil: “The Eagle Has Landed!” http://bit.ly/N4sA11

That’s all for now, kids. Beware of Spaniard Surrealists bearing straight razors, and remember the words of poet Frederico García Lorca:

On the empty plain
an olive tree goes walking

Just one lone
olive tree

Well, a little. If you like your geek in big thick slabs, check out the Adobe Creative Suite Developer Summit. It runs through Friday, May 15th and offers live, free sessions (via Adobe Connect) on many cutting edge  Adobe technologies, including stuff that may find its way into Creative Suite 5.

Note that this is a developer conference, not a user conference, so be prepared for tech talk about creating apps and plug-ins and features. Still, you don’t need to be a developer to appreciate the impact of what they’re talking about.

If you can’t watch the sessions live, many of them are being recorded so you can catch them on demand. I’ve seen some really cool stuff so far, mostly to do with Flex and Flash working their magic on the user interface of Creative Suite applications. One more reason to attend: if you watch the sessions and fill out the comment forms, you’re eligible for a free copy of Flex Builder, so you can make your own cutting edge goodies.

We’ve covered content modeling, authoring, and content management a bit in this series of posts. The next step is doing something with all that shiny XML. Keeping it cooped up in a database of some sort isn’t going to pay the bills.

Naturally, and as usual, I can’t tell you how to do anything. I don’t know what you’re making. Maybe you’re making something that’s going to compete with something I’m making. Awk-ward! But there are some general pathways that we can go over.

You can transform your XML into another flavor of XML. Maybe you have an existing XML-based system that would very much like to ingest your data. You can transform XML to another kind of markup, like HTML or whatever the kids are using these days. You can wrestle it into all kinds of proprietary input formats for various applications. If your equipment is fancy enough, you can even create PDF files.

So about that fancy equipment. You need something that can manipulate the XML, because doing it by hand is simply crazy and nobody would ever consider doing it that way. Forget I even said that.

One step above retyping everything with new tags (which is laughable and totally not worth doing) is using a text editor of some sort to execute find-and-replace functions to transform the XML. Maybe your XML has lowercase tag names, and the target content model has capitalized tag names. If there are no major structural differences, maybe a simple find-and-replace would be adequate. A slight upgrade to this tactic would be to use something that allows for grep searches. This dramatically expands the level of complexity you can have in your searches. Instead of “find all the lowercase n’s” you can do “find all the lowercase n’s that appear after < at the beginning of a line and are not followed by o, l, d, q, or z”. Because you’re going to need to do that at some point.

This would be a very cheap implementation, but it’s kind of like the MacGyver duct tape method of problem solving. You’ll look really cool, and it will probably work fairly well, but certainly with a little more time and planning you can come up with a more elegant solution.

There are many free or cheap XSLT engines available online. Just search for “XSLT engine” and behold the bounty. The advantage with these is, um, they’re specifically designed to manipulate XML data. So you get nice things like validation. These can also be plugged into a workflow of some sort to allow for automation.

There are also fancy commercial content engines available. These are designed to be used by companies that have lots of data to transform, and are often plugged into content management systems. There will be consultants involved. They might have one of the free engines as part of their chewy core (the engine, not the consultant), but with clusters of nougat and whatnot bolted on for your transformation pleasure. I guess read the brochure and ask the consultants why their product is any better than the free ones. See how many times they say “seamless” and “robust”. Remind them you are not buying gutters or coffee beans.

I’ll leave you with this anthem to transformation. Enjoy. Sorry.

Cross-Promotional Log Rolling Nugget:

Last time out I forgot to add a link to my latest post on InDesign Secrets, Flattening Fun.

I had this one stuck in my craw for about six months. Man does it feel good to have an empty craw. After doing about 100 tests, I think I sorted out all the variables involved with the resolution and color space of flattened graphics. Basically the point of the post was to demonstrate that InDesign can change the color mode and resolution of graphics in some surprising ways when you flatten transparency. And also to give some face time to my 1968 model Godzilla.

I don’t have a cure for the H1N1 virus, but good links are good medicine for whatever ails ya. Unless you’re ailed by attention deficit disorder. In which case, they’re poison. Anyhoo…

Thus far, I’ve been able to avoid the Swine flu, but I think I’m coming down with a case of the Whine flu. Symptoms: dissatisfaction with my software and hardware. Not fast enough. Not up-to-date enough. Buggy. Case in point: Adobe’s back with another warning about the security of Javascript in Acrobat. Some folks are so fed up, they’re dumping Reader for alternative PDF software. Sheesh. Adobe invented PDF. “How embarassking,” as Popeye would say. The new patch is promised by May 12th. Till then, I guess, just rub your screen with Purell, and disable Javascript in Acrobat.

Not to kick a giant corporation while they’re down, but there is more bad news in Adobeland. Not only did they have shutdown weeks where all employees were forced to stay home, layoffs, wage freezes, and now financial analysts downgraded Adobe stock from “buy” to “hold,” even though it’s stumbling between $15–$25 lately. The thinking is that Adobe’s stock will stay low till Creative Suite 5 appears. Let’s hope CS5 is a home run. But of course, if you read Publicious, you already know what’s in store for CS5 If you don’t want to take my word for it, check out the  interview with CEO Shantanu Narayen. I’m sure he mentions Publicious in there somewhere…

Actually, he’s more focused on Flash, making deals with Netflix, Comcast, and Disney to deliver content in Flash to your TV. The question is, do you want Flash on your TVs? Personally, I don’t. TV’s craptacular enough as it is, without having to install the latest plug-in version and reboot the set before you can watch MythBusters. Or commercial pop-up ads. Or the prospect of having the SuperBowl “Unexpectedly Quit” while a team is driving for a touchdown. When it happens (and you know it will), it’ll be a 21st Century Heidi moment.

Want to know who else is reading Publicious? Check out Quantcast.com for a look at yourselves. It’s fun to see where everyone is coming from. I’d like to give a shout out to my 10 unique cookies in Bulgaria. Yo! S’up, Razgrad?

Trying to enhance your software developer skillz? By all meanz, check out Refcardz.com for free PDF “cheat sheetz” chock full o’ information and well-dezigned.

Also worth checking out are Adobe’s new “marketplaces.” Claiming to be “the ultimate resource” and “the most comprehensive collection products, services, and communities available.” Sounds like Exchange on steroids. So far there are two marketplaces, Photoshop and AIR. If they succeed, there will no doubt be more.

I’ll give you three guesses who just bought Stanza, the eBook reader app for the iPhone, and the first two don’t count. If you said Amazon, you win (or do you?) Hmmm.

By the way, Amazon just announced a large format Kindle, aimed at the textbook market. My heart’s still with the underdog, PlasticLogic guys. But either way, if my son’s backpack can get under 20 lbs, I’m good.

Looking for a perfect Mother’s Day gift? Sure, Facebook was ruined when your mom joined, but at least you have Twitter, right? Well, before mom starts following Ashton Kutcher and tweeting links to your prom photos, you might be proactive and give her the new Twitter book from O’Reilly. Who knows, maybe she’ll become a niche titan and buy you a shiny new MacBook Pro.

Finally, I leave you with the disturbing images of the real origin of swine flu: Johnny Cash singing with Miss Piggy.

Be good, and remember, cough into your elbow to keep your PDFs virus-free.

The ability to change course as circumstances dictate is the strength of the project management philosophy we’ll look at now. Agile development is based on the idea that development is an iterative process that uses cross-functional teams to solve problems and develop solutions. Adaptability is the name of the game.

In our current XML publishing project, we’ve split the initial development phase into several parts. Different teams are focusing on different parts of the system: content modeling, authoring, content management, and composition. Each group is responsible for research and requirements gathering. By splitting the tasks between groups of experts, we’re speeding up the whole project, but still are able to delve deeply into each topic.

Contrast this with our previous project, which used the traditional waterfall methodology. In that project, everyone worked on everything. Time and personnel alone imposed limitations on the project. Instead of small groups working in parallel, we had one big group lumbering along, taking on each issue in sequence.

It’s kind of like the old christmas-tree lights where if one burned out they all stopped working. What a revelation when they came out with the ones that kept working despite one burned out light.

There are dangers with agile development of course. One of the groups could go off the deep end or down a rabbit hole, or fall victim to any number of cliches as the project wears on. Different groups may have slightly different ideas of what the project is all about. For this reason there still needs to be a strong project manager who’s in charge of it all–a benevolent dictator who has the authority to say “no, that’s not what we’re looking for.”

So far, on our project, this methodology is working fairly well. Each group is able to spend ample time researching their area of responsibility. We’re getting better information than if we were all lurching around together. It’s nice not having to have every aspect of the project in your head at all times. I never learned how to juggle, after all.

At certain points, though, we all have to come together to compare notes and make sure we’re on the right track. Inevitably somebody puts together a presentation that gets shown to the management sponsors of the project. Words of encouragement are offered, opinions are aired, and we move on.

As our project continues, I’ll be keeping track of any good or bad aspects of agile development. I’ve never worked on a project to completion using this methodology before. I’m curious to see if it really will help us deliver a better system when we’re done.

Let’s assume that you’re going to build an XML-based publishing system. You’ve gathered requirements from the various stakeholders, have a design in mind, and have vendors or your own people lined up to make it happen. You’re good to go. You still have to decide one key thing: how will this system be built?

We really didn’t think about this. We came up with a fairly standard method to manage our project. Requirements gathered. Check. Systems designed. Check. Programming implemented. Check. System tested. Check. Boom. Done.

Sounds fine, right? You need to do certain things in a certain order to accomplish anything. But then reality hits. What if the requirements aren’t captured completely? What if the design doesn’t deliver what was expected? What if, and this is completely hypothetical because it never happens in the real world, something changes during the course of the project?

We weren’t consciously aware of it, but we had adopted the waterfall method of project management. The whole project with all its moving parts is considered at once. Everything is developed at the same time. When one stage is finished, that’s it, because it’s very detrimental to the schedule and budget to revisit past decisions and do rework.

Why is this a problem? Because this programming methodology was developed when guys in white shirts and skinny ties were doing projects on room-size computers that only the richest kings of Europe could afford. You had to have everything planned and ready to go because your computer time was Thursday from 4-5:30. These people did amazing things of course. You try launching rockets to the moon using only punch cards and slide rules.

Of course today, in the impossibly futuristic year of 2009, computers are somewhat more available. There are computers in greeting cards that play stupid songs when you open them. Then you throw them out. My washing machine has more computing power than that room-size thing from 50 years ago.

So why would we use such an outdated project management methodology? I don’t know. Seriously, who thinks about stuff like this when you’re trying to build a hugely complex new thingie on time and within budget? Well, add it to the list of things to talk about while planning a project.

It became clear during development that our methodology was hurting, rather than helping us. The core reality of our existence was, all together now, WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING. All the requirements and design done before implementation were based on our assumptions and the prior experience of our vendors. Speculation, really. An image of the future that we thought made sense at the time. Something like this.

Then the thing gets built and the testing starts, and we realize we’ve made horrible mistakes. Gross miscalculations. Silly omissions. And, by the by, the market has changed a bit during all that planning so some of the stuff we planned for and built was no longer needed, and new things that were now needed weren’t included because, um, they didn’t exist during the planning phase.

Inflexibility is the downfall of the waterfall. It’s just too costly to redo the thing once it gets started. Rather than rethinking and reworking major missteps, we were forced to make slight modifications to what we had, which resulted in inadequate solutions and workarounds. Spending all that time and cash, and ending up with something that doesn’t quite do everything it needs to do is beyond disappointing.

Next week we’ll look at another methodology that may help solve some of these problems.

This is kind of a continuation of the content management stuff I’ve been writing about. It pertains to software in general though. In our case the problems were with the content management software, but anytime you’re developing something based on a commercially-available platform, this issue comes into play.

It’s silly, but in our rush to bend our content management system to do what we wanted, we neglected to really explore what it already did. That is, we didn’t familiarize ourselves with the “out of the box functionality*” that we were getting.

My main excuse is, of course, the familiar and painfully true: WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS. Once again, it would have been nice if our vendor had helped us out a bit more.

One of our team members raised the warning during a UI review-type thing where the vendor showed us an interminable presentation depicting in stunning wireframes the UI representation of each use case. So basically, “if you want to do XYZ, click this button and choose this menu item.” Oh, yes, it’s just as exciting as you’re imagining right now. And did I mention it was in PowerPoint, and we were projecting the slides in a dark room? Probably right after lunch?

Our team member, who wasn’t dazzled by the 2-d renderings, asked a simple question along the lines of “what do all those grayed-out menu items do?” You’d think she’d hurled a molotov cocktail at the presenter’s head based on the reaction. The presenter, the other reps from the vendor, and our own corporate project manager all basically told her “don’t worry about it” but used more and louder words with wavy hand and arm gestures.

Undaunted, she pressed on, asking something like “but don’t we need to know everything this does before we can tell you what we don’t want?” Again, the arm waving and near-apoplexy with the general message of “we’ve already figured that out for you based on your requirements.”

Oh, my. It pains me to recount this ugly incident. And, like cowards throughout history, I went along with the loud majority, in this case our vendor. Because of course they have our best interests in mind, and they’re the experts, and they’ve assured us that this really is the way we want to go. And the second payment is due next Friday.

My colleague let it go, but with a “you guys are wrong and this is going to come back to hurt you” look that haunts me to this day.

Obviously, she was right. Months, and even years, later, we’d come across something that didn’t quite do what we wanted, or we’d have a new requirement pop up. We’d ask our (completely different) experts how to make it happen. And imagine our anguish when they told us “this is already supposed to be in there.” And the absolutely devastating “in fact, somebody had to do a really complex workaround to shut off this core functionality.” And the humiliating “why did you want them to do that?”

The lesson should be obvious: if you’re using commercially-available software as part of your publishing solution, you’d better have a REALLY good reason to disable features and functions that are already available. I mean, come on. What were we thinking?

(* And may I just say how much I detest the word “functionality**”. But even more, the fact that after being bombardized by it for so long I end up engaging in its utilization because it provides optimal expressionality for my core meaningness? This instantiates my angrificity, which renders me beyond uncomfortabilitated.)

(** I did, though, enjoy titling a user guide “Utilizing the Functionality!” The exclamation point means fun!)

Y’arr, mateys. Your captain has sworn off rum in favor of GoogleJuice, so this week’s meme be pirates. Has anybody seen a stray parrot, answers to the name of “Preflight”?

By the way, according to the bean counters, InDesign CS4’s Live Preflight is worth more than a chest of Spanish doubloons. Well, OK, about $5 a week. Check out the Pfeiffer Report on CS4 ROI for details (Adobe ID required for download).

Next, read my 5 Random Tips at InDesign Secrets or I’ll have ye swab the deck.

Prepare the boarding party, part 1: More speculation on Apple buying Adobe.

Prepare the boarding party, part 2:  More speculation on Google buying Twitter.

Jack Sparrow just threw a squid at you on Facebook. Captain Hook’s posted a YouTube clip. Blackbeard’s tweeting up a typhoon. How do you get a handle on all the pirates in your life? Try an RIA that gathers all your social networks into one place, like Skimmer.

Flex Marks the Spot: Here’s a nice (and thorough) look at best and worst practices in developing a rich internet application: Architecture of RIA.

If your skull and crossbones is looking a little tattered, design a new emblem to strike fear into all who cross your path. psd tuts+ has an eye-popping tutorial on creating a Hellacious Flaming Skull in Photoshop.

Speaking of Photoshop, John Nack has announced that PICT is about to walk the plank. Wonder what InDesign and Illustrator features we can safely send to Davy Jones’ locker…

Till next week, I wish smooth sailing to you. And remember, dead men click no links.

Text assets, which make up the vast majority of our content, are a little trickier to manage than images. Text is everything from one letter to every letter we’ve ever written. Because the content management system defined assets as objects (or files), we needed to figure out how much text would go into each file.

First we identified all the products the publishing system would create. That’s one level of division for the text assets. But how practical is it to have to check out an entire book if you just want to edit a piece of it? We needed to identify smaller parts. The products could be divided into things like units and chapters. Smaller yet were things like quizzes and worksheets. And then there were the component parts that made up all those quizzes and worksheets. Where to draw the line?

We decided to create a new kind of content level, which we called Activities. The capital A was meant to differentiate these content assets from certain worksheets that were called “activities.” From an editorial perspective, an “activity” was a particular kind of thing with a particular structure and purpose. An “Activity” broadened that definition to be the “smallest teachable part.” In other words, what’s the smallest indivisible content chunk that a teacher would likely assign to a student, or that we would provide for the teacher as a professional development or classroom management tool.

An Activity could be one page, or part of a page, or several pages long. The concept of “page” was not important here. The information conveyed by the Activity had to be a single unit of content that could stand on its own. This is a tricky concept to explain to people who are used to thinking of everything as pages in a book.

There was one other content chunk that we normally dealt with on an individual basis: test items. Test items can be reused in a variety of products. If you have 1000 test items on a particular concept, you can mix and match them to create different products for different audiences. We knew this. We also knew that our content management system had to manage everything as a separate object, with separate metadata, and separate listings within the user interface. In other words, if we managed items individually, we’d have screen after screen of test items that you’d have to scroll through, or search, to find the one you’re looking for. This sounded obnoxious and difficult to deal with, from both a programming and user perspective.

Stupid thing 2: Sacrificing business requirements for development expediency.

It would have been very difficult to manage test items as separate assets. But test items are an extremely important part of our products. Maybe they’re the most important things that our publishing system would store, manage, and output. Our developer (who didn’t want to deal with it) advised against it from a time and money standpoint. Our team was more than happy to agree, because it would have been a pain for us to come up with the metadata and management strategy as well as the user experience. By that point the project was already getting behind schedule, so dropping this big challenging thing was very easy to do.

What we should have done: Suck it up.

Yes, even with the ensuing complications, we should have built the system to manage items as separate objects. Maybe it would have made the content management experience more difficult and slower than it already was. But it would also have made the system much more flexible and useful in its original mission of creating products from stored assets. The trade-off may very well have been worth it.

Now I’m not saying that you have to put in everything all at once. We had to sacrifice all kinds of things to schedule and budget. Most of them were small features that would have helped a small group of users, or were for a small group of products. And we had workarounds for all of them. Or we added them later. Leaving out a huge, core, central piece, one of the main reasons to do the whole project in the first place, was not a smart move.

Graphic Styles are among my favorite tools in Illustrator because they give you so many options and can save you so much time. Styles in general are terrific — Graphic Styles, Character Styles, and Paragraph Styles — and I will go into detail on all of those some other time. Today I want to focus on graphic styles because I use those the most and I find them to be my biggest time savers. Plus, when you apply them to fonts they give you some really cool type effects and I just love me my type effects!

You can make graphic styles as simple or as complex as you need. Let’s start with an apparently simple one — a circle with a 3 pt blue outer rule, a 4 pt white inner rule, and a tinted blue fill. You could actually draw concentric circles, but if you wanted to draw several different sized circles it would a time-consuming nuisance to have to calculate the sizes of the inner circles so that the proportion of the outer dark blue rule and the inner white space stayed the same. You can’t just scale them because they will keep their relative proportions and resize thicker or thinner depending on which way you scale the circles, like so:

So the easiest way to maintain consistent proportions on the concentric circles is to create a style that you can then apply to circles of different sizes. The way you create such a style is by using the handy appearance panel, which I like to keep grouped with the layers panel since they present data in a similar manner. You start off with a single stroke and a single fill option but you can add additional strokes and fills to create the appearance you want, using the way the strokes and fills stack the same way you would use layers.

To create a style for this appearance, I created a circle with a fill of 50% blue, a 7 pt white stroke aligned to inside, and a 3 pt. 100% blue stroke above that also aligned to inside. By placing the 3 pt. stroke on top of the 7 pt. stroke, that gives me a visible inner stroke of 4 pts. (7 – 3 = 4) and placing the fill underneath all of it creates the inner circle. Now the proportion of outer rule and inner rule stay the same no matter what size circle you apply it to, as you can see here:

Let’s take this simple set of circles and create a style that’s a little more fun. Instead of a solid color fill we’re going to use a patterned fill and apply an effect to it. If you already have some patterned fills you can use those or you can load one of the many patterned fills included in Illustrator — I’m using “Wild Flowers Color” from the Nature_Foliage collection and I used a color from one of the flower groupings for the outer stroke. Now we’re going to add an effect to make it more interesting. Select the fill, then go into the Effect menu and select Stylize, then select Inner Glow. Set Mode to Multiply and make the color 100% Black, set the Opacity to 60%, the Blur to 15 pts., and click on Edge.

As you can see, this gives the appearance of having a cutout over a print. The only thing you need to be aware of is if you are using a large tiled pattern fill, the area that is being used will change depending on where on the page it lies. If you have a particular area you want to use as your focal point you will need to expand the fill, which will also cause the rest of the pattern to appear under the clipping path.

Not only can you apply effects to the elements in a graphic style, you can also use the Transform effect to move one or more of the layers for even more fun, and these are the ones that can be so impressive when applied to type. In this week’s download is a graphic style that is set up similar to the ones mentioned above, but I’ve also gone in and used the Transform effect to move the strokes down and to the right as well as adding a drop shadow to the fill. It’s not so impressive when applied to a path, but with the right typeface, it looks like a famous sandwich cookie!

Once you have everything set up the way you want it, all you have to do to make it a graphic style is to select the path and drag it over into the Graphic Styles panel, then give it a descriptive name. To apply that new style to a path, just select the path and click on the name in the panel.

Stylin_Appearances.ai

Ah, springtime in Boston. The last remnants of dirty snow cower in the shadows near big box parking lots. The Emerson girls are trading in their UGGs for flip-flops. And with the first pitch at Fenway, the looooooooooooooooooong winter of ‘08–’09 was finally, officially, over ’round these parts. Now ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, introducing the starting lineup for the 2009 Publicious GREP Sox.

Batting leadoff, and playing centerfield, O’ReillyMaker lets you customize your own version of those iconicly weirdo book covers.

Batting second, and playing shortstop, a must-have iPhone app for fontgeeks: Bitstream’s What the Font? for iPhone. With it, you can go to the grocery store, snap a pic of a box of Cocoa Puffs, and WTF will tell you what typeface that crazy rooster has been dancing in front of lo these many years. I think it’s HelveticaBlackExtraCuckoo.

Batting third and playing second base, Squidspot’s Periodic Table of Typefaces.

Batting fourth and playing first base, David Pogue’s blog post on landscape vs. portrait orientation for PDFs. Touches on a lot of issues of readability and design.

Batting fifth, the designated hitter, the story of how the InDesign spell checker caused a controversy that lead to a newspaper recall. Actually, I think it was probably the person using the spell checker. But fine, throw ID under the bus. It can take it.

Batting sixth and playing left field, Apple and Adobe: The Odd Couple. Steve Jobs has to be Felix. Who at Adobe would be Oscar?

Batting seventh and playing right field, the Cut & Paste Digital Design Tournament in Chicago.

Batting eighth and playing third base, Adobe and Facebook getting social.

Batting ninth and catching, an anagram maker. Some of my faves:

Helvetica = A tech evil

Adobe InDesign = bondage inside, deadening bios, disdain begone

Publicious.net = bionic pustule, polite incubus, unlit poi cubes.

And the starting pitcher, THE greatest Looney Tune of all time: Baseball Bugs.