Application program Help is all over the place on the Mac platform. Sometimes, you'll see the standard OS interface, other times, it will be a proprietary interface, and in Adobe's case (for CS4 that is), it's all web-based.

Yes, that's right, CS4 help is web-based. Now at first glance, that may sound ideal and when you first try it, you might be impressed to find that any search will return results not only from the Adobe website, but anywhere on the web.

However, this can be a hindrance and not help. If you use a focused search on something like "Knife Tool", in Adobe Illustrator CS4, you may get some results that are directly about CS4 and some that aren't. In earlier versions of Adobe products, the Help file would be only about that particular product. It becomes more frustrating in Flash, when you're doing searches on ActionScript particulars. I thought the earlier help tools were much more helpful, though maybe not as broad, than the current version.

The most frustrating thing about the new help system is that, if you don't have an internet connection, you can't get help! That just doesn't seem right.

What are your thoughts?

On another note, it's been a while since I've posted here. I've been posting at my other blogs:
http://usingflash.blogspot.com
http://usingillustrator.blogspot.com
http://usingindesign.blogspot.com
http://usingphotoshop.blogspot.com

I'm also feature in another blog from the school where I'm currently teaching:
http://www.cdiabu.com/blog

Finally, I'm also blogging for my place of work at:
http://boggse-learningchronicle.typepad.com/the_online_conte/
in the Tricks and Tips for CSS, Flash, XHMTL Category.

Labels: Adobe, Flash, Help, Illustrator, InDesign

An interesting article, on IT-Enquirer, reveals that Quark performs better than InDesign in a variety of tasks. The result is that for speed in performance, Quark was faster in 79% of tasks, leaving a paltry 21% for InDesign.

We found that QuarkXPress 7 has better support for design departments where more than one person must be able to control and manage the layout process by offering support for Job Jackets, Composition Zones and sharing colour management elements. In many areas, QuarkXPress 7 also is just faster, supporting the creative process better by including –right within the application– Web and Flash layouts, and the most often needed creative tools and effects.

So just remember, that Quark isn't going away.

Labels: Adobe, InDesign, InDesign CS3, Quark, Quark 7, QuarkXPress

I went to the Adobe CS3 Creative License conference yesterday at the Hynes convention center in Boston and was splendidly surprised at all the whiz bang of it. Aside from the presentations, they gave us a whole month's worth of training from Lynda.com. Plus, the people at On1 software gave us $400 worth of plug-in software for Photoshop CS3! In our little Adobe bags they also included a DVD version of the video workshop which includes video tutorials for all of the products in the creative suite. Well worth the $79 price for attendance.

First up, Terry White gave us an overview of the entire suite. He got a lot of oohs and ahhs from the audience by showing the new Quick Select tool in Photoshop, Smart Filters, and the ability to load and play video files. There were some cool new features in Contribute that allow you to edit and update a blog. Terry took a couple of snapshots of the audience and then posted live to his own blog. I was impressed with the new version of Premiere and the ability to drag and drop After Effects comps directly into Premiere.

Terry and the next presenter Sebastian, spent a lot of time extolling the goods of Bridge. The new Bridge home has some video tutorials that you can view online. Sebastian then went into all of the cool new features of Camera Raw 4.1 like, parametric curves, clarity and vibrance, and split toning. The wildest thing that he showed though was the Auto Align and Auto Blend features in Photoshop. You can align images on multiple layers. The Auto Blend features works well when stitching together panoramas.

Sebastian then went into Kuler and talked about how you can use it with the Live Color feature in Illustrator. The ability to manipulate colors in a smarter way with color groups in the Swatches palette and the new color guide are going to improve the non-color savvy designers creations. InDesign has some great new transparency and effects. Now you can have transparency for fills, stroke, type, and object. InDesign CS2 only allows object transparency, so this is big.

The web portion of the presentation was particularly weak. The presenter (Kyle) had a lot of difficulty getting anything to work and within a few minutes he had blown his demo completely. It was hard for me to pay any more attention to him because he kept mucking things up so badly. People in the audience had to help him remember things and Terry white had to help him through his demo on FireWorks. He fumbled through the Spry Framework in Dreamweaver, which was a particular bummer. He was able to recoup though, during the Flash portion, showing us the new primitive objects and native Illustrator/Photoshop support. Copying and pasting motion tweens from one object to the next is really great and, of course, copying a tween as ActionScript is even cooler.

Towards the end of the day, it was all about video and Kevan showed us some awesome features in Photoshop. Yes, that's right, I said Photoshop. You can now export from Vanishing Point an image in a special 3D for After Effects VP Exchange format. Once in After Effects, you can treat the object as a 3-D element and do pans and motion. There's an awesome and hilarious new feature in AE called the puppet tool. Kevan took a live action shot of a person doing kung-fu and rearranged the kick of the person to reach out to different locations, kicking away a piece of text. Finally, he showed us some very cool features of SoundBooth, which has some really remarkable audio clean up tools.

All in all, it was a great day of learning and I am very excited about the possibilities. I'm really excited about Flash and After Effects especially.

Labels: Adobe, After Effects, CS3, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop

Planning on ramping up your skills for CS3? Well our friends at Adobe have created a video tutorial library called the Video Workshop. I hope they keep it going because it's great!

Labels: Adobe, CS3