For most all users of Adobe InDesign CS3 since updating to OSX Leopard, using the "Hide" feature, either via the InDesign menu item, Command + H, or Option + clicking on the desktop or other application window, results in the inability to get InDesign back as the foreground application. This leaves you with no other alternative but to force quit InDesign. Thankfully there is a fix available that works on every Mac I've tried it on.

1. Go into your User/Library/Caches/Adobe InDesign folder and move the contents to your desktop. For most, this will be a single folder called "Version 5.0" which contains several files.
2. Relaunch InDesign and the Hide option should work.
3. Once you've tested the Hide option via one of the methods above, and are satisfied that all is working normal with InDesign, delete the original "Version 5.0" folder from your desktop.

None of your InDesign preferences should have changed, so you should be good to go at this point.

Package design is a highly specialized and difficult niche to master. Thinking in 3D is hard enough, but pulling it off is even more difficult. If you're looking for a little inspiration, check out DZineBlog's Package Design Inspiration article.

If you work for a large publication, or even a large design firm, you may be familiar with Adobe InCopy as part of your InDesign workflow. If that is the case, you've probably noticed the lack of coverage in the mainstream blogs & sites around the Web.

Thankfully, the publishers of InDesignSecrets have launched a new site called InCopySecrets and it's loaded with tips, tricks, tutorials and more for users of Adobe InCopy. There's also a few general InDesign tips tossed in there, so it's worth checking out even if you don't use InCopy.

Please Digg this if you find it useful.

A few years ago, I posted a long list of free online file sharing services. If you haven't used a sharing service to transport large files from one computer/location to another, you're missing out. It's a whole lot cheaper, and most times, faster than burning CDs or lugging around an external hard drive. It's also a little more secure than just tossing your document onto a "who knows how reliable" USB keydrive.

Rather than post an exhaustive list of services, I decided this time to focus on 20 of the better services I've come across. I have tried every one on this list and found the experience satisfactory to excellent.

If you use the Del.ici.us Bookmark service and you're a fan of Firefox, you'll be happy to know that they have finally updated the plugin for Firefox 3 beta 5.

You can read more and download the plugin from the Delicious blog post here.

Smiley emoticon courtesy of Tony Gines.

Among the numerous resources that can be found over at CreativeBits are a set of image templates for identity design. These "blanks" are perfect for showing off your design ideas to clients.

There are around 200 images in 5 different categories available. The downloads are broken up by category and are anywhere between 7 and 17MB each.

You can download the templates here. The download links for each category are below the photos.

You've got your entire system profiled, color is perfect in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, your scanner and printer are calibrated. But there's one important app missing on the list. Your Web browser.

If you're using Safari, you have limited color management built-in. Safari supports color profiles, but doesn't allow you to customize it. But if you're using Firefox, you've been left out in the cold... until now.

Firefox 3 supports color management with the addition of the Color Management plugin. Unlike Safari, Firefox's method allows you to choose which color profile on your system you use for viewing images.

Color Management works with Firefox 3b5 on the Mac and Windows.

I'll tell you right up front, this is a long-winded, foul-mouthed, inconsiderate rant. I've been storing some of these comments up for weeks, and in some cases months, just waiting to explode. Below is my abbreviated list of people who can just shut the hell up:

MacHeist, developers, and participants:
To all of you "other" developers who cry and complain that MacHeist (and similar promotions) are hurting all developers by de-valuating applications and the work it takes to create them. Please, do us a favor and shut your yap.

I'm fairly certain that nobody from the MacHeist crew held a gun to the head of the participating developers and forced them to jump on-board. They did it to make money - the same reason you make your products. If they sell their apps for cheap, then they'll have to deal with the consequences of making less money but still provide the updates and support required. Worst-case scenario is that they made a little extra money that they probably wouldn't have made otherwise. It's their call, So just shut up.

And for all the cry-babies and whiners who complain about the quality or selection of the applications made available for MacHeist (and other similar promotions). Please do the rest of us a favor and shut the hell up.

MacHeist gave away nearly a dozen apps for FREE! As in, it didn't cost you a stinking dime. So shut up. The bundle of applications at the end cost less than half what it would cost you to buy separately, so it's a smokin' deal. We're all terribly sorry that you expected Adobe Photoshop to be included in the $49 bundle, but you're an idiot and we're all tired of seeing that sewer beneath your nose spewing silly requests and comments like that.

If these bundles don't include the application you desperately wanted, and you can't believe the entire planet doesn't use, I have a suggestion. Shut up and go buy that app directly from the developer. They could use the money. But please stop trying to convince reasonable people out there that the bundle would be so much better and you would actually buy it if it only included your favorite sticky-note app. Nobody is forcing you to buy the bundle, and nobody cares if you don't.

Wow, that felt good to get that off my chest. Here's some more:

As most of us had guessed a few years ago, Adobe has finally killed off GoLive in favor of Dreamweaver.

For many professional Web designers, this is really no news. But for thousands upon thousands of "one or two small sites per year" designers, this is horrible. If you learned using GoLive, the switch to Dreamweaver for those one or two sites per year you design will be a huge uphill battle. I recently tried to build a 3 page site and couldn't even immediately see how to code a rollover navigation. Dreamweaver is absolutely NOTHING like GoLive.

Not all PDFs are created equal—just ask any prepress manager. With Adobe Acrobat offering so many versions of PDF documents, and so many options for creating them, it's hard to know what you need to do to prepare a truly press-ready PDF.

Layers Magazine has a great article on creating perfect pre-press ready PDFs for print designers.

For what it's worth, I stick with PDF/X-1a for my PDF output. PDF/X-1a create's a "dumb" PDF that will work on virtually all PDF-capable RIPs by removing all transparency, embedding fonts and basically offering the least amount of options in your PDF file.

To brush-up on the various PDF formats, you can take a look at this post I made a while back which features a brief description of each format.

Every InDesign power user knows the best way to be really efficient in this program is to use keyboard shortcuts. But finding and changing shortcuts can be frustrating. No longer!

The Keyboard Shortcuts plug-in was designed by David Blatner and DTP Tools to help you find and assign shortcuts quickly and easily. It is free of charge and works with InDesign and InCopy CS3. Note that both Mac OS and Windows versions are available.

Tired of setting your text wrap with each new object you create in Adobe InDesign? Much like setting colors or character styles globally, you can also set InDesign to always use your preferred text wrap method with new documents.

To do so, close all your InDesign documents and open the text wrap panel. Set your preferred text wrap method by clicking on one of the wrap icons. Now, whenever you create a new document, the default text wrap you chose will be used for all objects.

To restate the obvious, the new settings will only take effect in NEW InDesign documents.

If you're running Photoshop Elements 6, you may have had an issue where none of the effects or layer styles would appear in the Effects palette if you're running under a non-admin account.

For most users, this won't be a problem. But if you work in a corporate environment, you may not have an admin account, in which
this post over at MacOSXHints will fix your problem. Of course, you probably need admin access in order to use this tip...

When we talk about plugins, you generally assume we're talking about Photoshop add-ons. Most people don't even realize that you can add features to Adobe Illustrator using plugins, let alone name a good one.

Phantasm CS Studio 1.0 by Astute Graphics is not only one of those good ones, but it's a whole suite of good ones. Where most plugins have the goal of creating artwork for you, Phantasm CS is more of a production tool in that it's main set of tools involves the ability to adjust colors by Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Curves, Levels and more. But Phantasm CS doesn't completely leave you out in the cold when it comes to cool "design" features. The Halftone tools is uber-cool if you ask me, but I'll get into that later.

Blue Crab is a versatile program that you use to copy the contents of a website to your computer, in whole or in part, conduct fast offline browsing and searching without an internet connection, create a snapshot of a website for historical archiving, collect specific types of resources such as images or email addresses, search current content more thoroughly than a search engine right on your own computer and check a site for broken links, or generate an HTML site map.

This is perfect for Web designers and developers looking to learn how other sites are built, or to archive sites you want to view and store locally.

• Conduct fast offline browsing and searching without an internet connection.

• Create a snapshot of a web site for historical archiving.
• Collect specific types of resources such as images or email addresses.
• Search current content more thoroughly than a search engine right on your own computer.
• Check a site for broken links, or generate an HTML site map.
• Perform batch downloads of URL's.
• Create full page images of URL's (JPEG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, PSD, etc.).

With Blue Crab you can download all the content including HTML, PDF, graphics, video, file archives, etc., or use selective filtering to restrict downloads to specific kinds of files. For example, you can choose to save only the JPEG images Blue Crab finds, or just the PDF's.

BlueCrab ($25) works on OSX 10.4 or higher and is a Universal Binary application.