The Graphic Mac

CS5.5 focuses on digital content creation

Adobe has announced the next version of their Creative Suite software. CS5.5 is heavily focused on designers wishing to take their work to tablet, smartphone, and EPUB users. All versions of their individual apps will be updated (except Acrobat, which remains at version X), as will the Creative Suites that comprise the apps – including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash.

Beyond the numerous features for building interactive documents for use on iPad, iPhone, and other tablets and smartphones, there’s not much information available covering feature updates for print-based designers.

An Adobe CS5.5 pricing chart is available to help you decide what versions of the Suites or individual apps you wish to purchase.

This is where it gets interesting. Adobe has also announced a new month-by-month subscription plan for all their major Creative Suites and individual applications. For instance, you can rent Dreamweaver for as little as $19 per month, or the entire Creative Suite Web Premium for $89 per month. Serious Creative Suite users will most likely still want to purchase their preferred Suites, but for those who just need to complete a quick website and only own Design Standard can rent Dreamweaver for the price of a week’s worth of coffee at Starbucks.

With any Adobe Creative Suite update comes discussion of frequency and cost of updates. Adobe is making changes in this area. From now on, the Creative Suite will be on a 24-month development cycle for major upgrades (CS3, CS4, CS5, CS6, etc.). Every 12 months they will also release a mid-cycle update (such as the CS5.5 just announced) which will offer only minor feature enhancements, bug fixes, and code tweaking. Previously, Adobe released Creative Suite upgrades around every 18 months.

Unless you’re doing a lot of work destined for a tablet, smartphone or ebook reader, you’re probably going to skip this release and wait for Creative Suite 6. But if you do that type of work, CS5.5 appears to be a dandy update.

This tutorial illustrates the HTML 5 grayscale image hover technique

The benefits of HTML 5 are starting to pop-up on sites all over the web. One you may have seen is a technique where a grayscale image turns into a full color version (click here for demo) when you hover over it with your cursor. The technique can be achieved with simple Javascript and multiple images, or using Flash. But with HTML 5, you only need a bit of HTML code and JQuery.

WebDesignerWall has put together a quick tutorial to show you how to enhance the appearance of your web portfolio using this HTML 5 grayscale image hover technique.

When Apple introduced Quick Look in the Mac OS it was a huge productivity boost to many designers and photographers. Quick Look allows you to view QuickTime compatible files in an overlay right in the Finder simply by selecting the icon of the file and pressing the Space Bar. It wasn’t long before users began seeking out plugins to view more file types than just PDFs and JPG images though.

SneakPeek Pro, by Code Line Communications (the company that brought us Art Directors Toolkit, arrived on the scene and took Quick Look to a new level. This simple Preference Pane allows you to view layered Adobe Photoshop files, Illustrator .ai and .eps files, and InDesign documents. SneakPeek doesn’t stop with just a preview image of your document though. The Quick Look overlay SneakPeek provides also displays information about Illustrator and InDesign files, such as the colors used, the images placed in the document, fonts used, and general file information such as multiple page previews (see the image below).

SneakPeek Pro for Mac allows you to view your graphics files in the Finder

I’ve found SneakPeek Pro for Mac to be a valuable addition to any designer’s toolbox. But with more and more designers working on the road, the ability to view graphics files on the iPhone would be nice addition. Thankfully, Code Line has finally brought the power and usefulness of SneakPeek to iOS device users.

SneakPeek renders previews of graphics files stored on your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It works by providing an “Open in SneakPeek” button to your favorite iOS applications like Mail, Dropbox, Safari and just about any app that gives you access to files.

SneakPeek for iOS allows you to view the same file information as the desktop version

With SneakPeek installed on your iPhone, you can check the InDesign file for a client’s new business card layout that just got emailed to you without waiting to get back to the office. And rather than viewing a jagged JPG file attached to an email of a new logo, you can view the actual Illustrator file. SneakPeek for iOS also offers you the same file information as SneakPeek Pro for the Mac – such as fonts, images and colors used.

SneakPeek Pro for Mac is available for $19.95, and offers a 15-day demo for you to test out. SneakPeek for iOS devices can be had for only $9.99 directly from the Apple App Store. Both versions of SneakPeek can save you a lot of time, and are well worth the cost of ownership.

There are numerous ways to customize your Mac’s appearance, and one of the things I love about OS X is the ability to quickly change the views of your Finder windows using easy to remember keyboard shortcuts.

Here’s a list of some of the commonly used keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to customize the way you view files in Mac OS X’s Finder.

• Command + Option + T hides the toolbar across the top of your window
• Command + Option + S hides the sidebar on the left edge of your window
• Command + [ takes you back
• Command = ] takes you forward
• Command + Up Arrow opens enclosed folder
• Command + Control + Up Arrow opens enclosed folder in a new window
• Command + Down Arrow opens the highlighted item

Here is a more complete collection of keyboard shortcuts, straight from Apple.

Boldin - 3 bold typefaces

I’m always on the lookout for great display fonts for use on my posters, postcards, brochures, and outdoor design work. Boldin fits the bill. Boldin is a free font, and comes in three typefaces: Bold, Black and Outline.

File recovery applications have been around since the early days of the Mac OS. There’s nothing worse than deleting a file, only to realize a few days later that you really didn’t want to do that, and you have no backup.

Apple has made backing up your hard drive easy when it began including Time Machine with every Mac. The problem is, not everyone has an external (or a second internal) hard drive for Time Machine to back up to. This can be particularly troublesome if you’re on the road with your Mac Book and you accidentally delete a file you need. If you have Disk Drill Pro installed, you may be in luck.

Disk Drill, by Cleverfiles, offers affordable ($89 for the Pro version – Get 15% OFF using coupon code TGRC-MC at checkout) drive monitoring and file recovery from HFS, HFS+, FAT, NTFS and other file systems, including USB and Firewire drives and memory cards from your digital camera.
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WebINK brings Adobe fonts to web designers

Extensis announced that they are working with Adobe to deliver the Adobe Font Collection typefaces to the Web with its WebINK web font service.

Over 180 Adobe fonts are now available on WebINK, including some of their most recognized type families. Myriad Pro, Adobe Garamond Pro, and Chaparral Pro are just a few of the families available as Adobe Web Fonts.

“Extensis WebINK makes web site development and design easy, and integration with Suitcase Fusion 3 is a great feature for designers,” said Caleb Belohlavek, principal product manager for Type Development at Adobe. “We’re excited to collaborate with Extensis to provide customers with high-quality Adobe type for the web.”

Until recently, web browser and font license limitations have constrained Web developers to using only a handful of typefaces in their web designs. Extensis’ recent debut of WebINK breaks down these barriers, instantly delivering custom fonts straight to web browsers using WebINK’s global network. With WebINK, web designers simply indicate their chosen fonts using the @font-face rule in CSS. Developers can now choose from a huge array of fonts and quickly reference them within the site’s HTML code.

WebINK has a free 30-day trial, so you have a great opportunity to test your own website using custom web fonts. And don’t forget, WebINK is integrated into Extensis Suitcase Fusion, making it even easier to use.