1/7/05
Illustrator Symbols at the Adobe Studio siteI posted some icons at the Adobe Studio site for download. Click on the drop down next to the Illustrator icon and choose Symbols. They are called odd icons.
10/1/04
Adobe Photoshop ACEI finally took and passed the Adobe Photoshop ACE exam. I am now officially an Adobe Photoshop Expert.
5/5/04
Creative ResourceI stumbled across this site while looking into the Flash Forward Conference. Very cool information on running your business, getting new gigs, getting inspiration, and other topics.
4/13/04
Blogging En MasseThis months Wired Magazine had a cool article about getting news updates from several different blogs. There are a couple of free services mentioned and I tried bloglines.com and I'm very pleased. Now I can troll the web for information on topics that I want to know about. Just register once and subscribe to whichever blogs you want to. Very sweet!
2/22/04
GarageBand is awesome!I am just totally amazed by GarageBand, part of Apple's iLife package. I'm sure there are a lot of cool apps like this in the professional music realm, but this app kicks butt. The only problem Is the lack of loops. No problem. I found a few downloadable loops around the web. Here's a few:
- http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14195
- http://www.access-music.de/
- http://www.drumsondemand.com/apple.htm
Also, there is a cool GarageBand community website at MacJams.com. Some really interesting stuff is being done with GarageBand already. While I'm at it, does anyone have any suggestions for a good MIDI interface? I've seen some ranging in the $200 price range, but I could use some suggestions on that.
1/22/04
Apple Keynote/iLifeI was completely impressed by Apple's new iLife presented at this year's Macworld event. The best part was when John Mayer was brought onto the stage with Steve Jobs and using Garage Band, started recording digital music via MIDI in seconds. I was sold immediately. I bought iLife right away. Now all I need is a good MIDI input device and a DVD burner. Any suggestions?
12/4/03
National Association of Photoshop Professionals Site re-vamp.NAPP's website seems to be more user friendly now. In the past, all of the content was pretty much hidden, except to members. A new feature called NAPP resource center has a bunch of tutorials on the new version of Photoshop. There's even a set of Quicktime movie tutorials, which appear to be done by members. Good stuff!
10/17/03
Apple announces iTunes for WindowsYou know the link. I thought my eyes were deceiving me tonight when I was watching an advertisement during the most disappointing game of the ACLS series. iTunes for Windows? I knew you could use an iPod for Windows, but not iTunes. Once again, Apple is forging ahead making a name for themselves with products and services that are innovative. At present, the Microsoft website (don't even expect a link) doesn't seem to have anything to say about it.
10/17/03
Apple to release Panther on Friday Oct. 24thPanther info. Another cool cat will be replacing my operating system next week. Panther will prove to be yet another incredible innovation from the people @ Apple. I'm looking forward to Expose, which allows you to see miniaturized versions of all your running applications at once to choose from. The new Font Book, font management application will be a welcome addition, since I can't get Font Reserve to work reliably on Jaguar. But its the speed increase that I'm looking for. My dual 500 MHz, 1GB RAM, G4 will hopefully benefit from Panther's performance enhancements. Dual processing is a real boon to Apple's product line and maybe Panther will convince more people that dual processing is the way to go. Now if I can only get a G5...
10/1/03
Adobe Announces new productsAdobe has announced the release of new versions of Photoshop, In-Design, GoLive, and Illustrator. An interesting new feature of ImageReady is the ability to export animations in the SWF format for Flash import. As usual, Adobe seems to be moving Illustrator and Photoshop closer and closer together. You can now put text on a path in Photoshop. A lot of improvements have been made to the File Browser and more additions to this version oddly named Photoshop CS. CS stands for Creative Suite, I'm just glad it's not Photoshop X something.
Adobe Illustrator has added a few new features like 3D Effects and more support for PDF files. Tighter MS Office integration with the ability to save files in "a format optimized to print and display in Microsoft Office Products." Hmm, we'll just have to see how that works.
GoLive has always been an interesting web page design tool, but its never been in the top tier for HTML editors. The new version seems to be expanding into areas of concern with web designers these days, like Visual CSS authoring, source code completion, XML editing and validation. Another nice new feature is the InDesign package which allows you to use XML to transfer a print publication's text and image assets from Adobe InDesign to GoLive. That's pretty cool.
Oh, and by the way, you can get all these packages + InDesign in the Adobe Creative Suite for just $1,229.00. Yep, I might be forking that kind of money over. But wait! You can get the standard version for just $999.00. Good deal.