Lifestyle and Emerging Technology In Plain English

Tag Archives: Adobe

Adobe Creative Suite 6 Kicks!

Posted on by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

cs6banner.jpg

If you’re doing any­thing at all cre­at­ive with your com­puter, you’re likely aware of the excel­lent suite of cre­at­ive tools from Adobe (coin­cid­ent­ally called the Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite).

Well earlier today, Adobe announced a huge upgrade to the suite, Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite 6 — CS6 — which con­tains a lot of new fea­tures to all products within the suite and is also designed to drive Adobe users to their new subscription-based (and also announced today) Cre­at­ive Cloud service

Aimed at the ser­i­ous cre­at­ive hob­bi­est or pro­fes­sional, Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite has long con­tained many of the industry-standard cre­at­ive tools includ­ing Pho­toshop and Illustrator.

Creative_Suite_6_Design_Standard_mnemonic_RGB_300px.jpgAnd if you’ve been using an older ver­sion of Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite, here’s some of the new fea­ture you’ll find in CS6.

  • Content-Aware image retouch­ing tools
    Retouch images with stun­ning res­ults in Pho­toshop Exten­ded. Use the Remix tool to move a selec­tion with auto-recompose and blend. Content-Aware Patch lets you con­trol patch samples.
  • Fluid grid lay­out for mobile devices
    Design and develop con­fid­ently for mobile devices with advanced tools in Dream­weaver CS6, includ­ing CSS3-based lay­outs that scale respons­ively to vir­tu­ally all screen sizes and form factors.
  • Global Per­form­ance Cache
    Cre­ate more in less time with unpre­ced­en­ted 64-bit Per­form­ance. This revolu­tion “under the hood” makes After Effects CS6 fast and respons­ive by tak­ing full advant­age of the power in your computer’s hardware.
  • Extraordin­ary image edit­ing
    Use the Mixer Brush and Bristle Tips in Pho­toshop CS6 Exten­ded to explore life­like, nat­ur­ally tex­tured paint­ing. Add dimen­sion to your imagery with 3D extru­sions using Adobe Repoussé tech­no­logy, and make pre­cise image selec­tions with Truer Edge technology.
  • Inter­act­ive doc­u­ments and present­a­tions
    Cre­ate mem­or­able doc­u­ments and present­a­tions with inter­activ­ity, motion, sound, and video in InDes­ign CS6. Enhance lay­outs with rich media using motion pre­sets and sup­port for FLV and MP3 audio file import to engage your audiences.

As with pre­vi­ous CS releases, Adobe has bundled tools into vari­ous con­fig­ur­a­tions and pri­cing. Accord­ing to Adobe’s news release, CS6 and Cre­at­ive Cloud will be avail­able within 30 days — we’ll update this post when we have pre­cise details on their arrival and pri­cing at Future Shop.

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Three essential PDF readers for iPad

Posted on by Brad Grier • 6 Comments

A while ago I wrote about ways to read PDF files on your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad. Well that post is show­ing it’s age, so rather than com­pletely redo it, I thought I’d dis­cuss my cur­rent three top PDF read­ers, and why.

GoodReader
GoodReader is my first choice, go-to PDF reader on my iPad.

First off, get­ting files into GoodReader. It’s simple, and sup­ports iTunes file trans­fer, Net­work trans­fer via WiFi, or down­load­ing from shared ser­vices such as;

  • Drop­Box
  • Google Apps
  • Mobile Me
  • Sug­ar­Sync
  • FTP serv­ers

Next, it’s under act­ive devel­op­ment, with fre­quent new fea­tures, updates and bugfixes.

As expec­ted GoodReader sup­ports PDF and TXT files, but it can also dis­play all of the most pop­u­lar file types including:

  • MS Office — .doc, .ppt, .xls and more
  • iWork’08/’09
  • HTML and Safari webarchives
  • High res­ol­u­tion images
  • Audio & Video play­back in some formats

Yes, GoodReader is my PDF reader of choice. But, there are cases where an altern­at­ive is import­ant. Enter…

CloudRead­ers
This is a more simplistic app that I use primar­ily for read­ing graphic nov­els and comic-book files. Some are in PDF format and oth­ers in CBZ or CBR format.

CloudRead­ers allows WiFi upload by run­ning a small server that you con­nect to using your desktop com­puter. Here’s some of the cooler fea­tures of CloudReaders:

  • Multi-task sup­port
  • Rota­tion lock
  • iPhone/iPod/iPad touch support
  • Auto­mat­ic­ally add books when files were trans­ferred via iTune application
  • Auto page align­ment (on iPhone/iPod touch)
  • Smooth­ing (from Set­tings app)
  • Default page-orientatin (from Set­tings app)

As a free eReader and PDF reader, it’s a bar­gain. There’s also an in-app pur­chase that allows you to share (via P2P) with other local CloudRead­ers users. Very neat.

Stanza
This is my go-to eBook reader on the iPad, and has been one I’ve used on the iPod Touch previously.

I’d writ­ten about it here, and it’s still a solid app you should check out, espe­cially since it’s free!

Checking out library books on your eReader?

Posted on by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

sonylib.jpgGot a Sony eReader and use the Sony Reader store? Well check out the little blue & white box in the right-hand side­bar on the page.

Yep, you read cor­rectly — you can check out books from the lib­rary and read them on your eReader.

In early Decem­ber, Sony (and tech­no­logy pro­viders Over­drive) will have hun­dreds of Cana­dian lib­rar­ies hooked up and ready to lend books; many lib­rar­ies are already set up and run­ning. As I under­stand it, only lib­rar­ies in Atlantic Canada will be missing…for now.

This Lib­rary search page will help you find a par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rary in your region. For example, enter­ing Alberta in the search field turned up a large num­ber of par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rar­ies in my province.

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The sys­tem requires you have an Adobe account to man­age the DRM and ‘return’ of the eBook you ‘bor­rowed’. Actu­ally the DRM just expires and you can’t read it after the lend­ing period runs out. Which is another way of say­ing you don’t have to remem­ber to return bor­rowed eBooks back to the library.

Not every book at your lib­rary will be avail­able for loan, but as lib­rar­ies start to con­vert their cata­logues to digital, you’ll find more and more of the pop­u­lar reads on your library’s vir­tual shelves. Wel­come to the 21st century :smileyhappy:

It was a dark and stormy morning

Posted on by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

Foggy Morning at the University (2c)

It’s been said that the best cam­era is the one you have with you — heck it’s even the title of a book on iPhone photography.

Which makes sense, because you can eas­ily stumble across a nifty scene, as I did here, and not be able to cap­ture it if you don’t have a cam­era with you.

True, the scene didn’t exactly look like that. I did enhance the dra­matic using Adobe Pho­toshop Light­room 2, to pretty good effect, I think.

But back to the point, car­ry­ing a cam­era with you will enable you to catch these unex­pec­ted scenes, and then take them back to your digital dark­room and explore the artistic possibilities.

How to view PDF and other files on your iPhone and iPod Touch

Posted on by Brad Grier • 27 Comments

This art­icle was ori­gin­ally writ­ten in April 2009. A few new apps have appeared since then, but one, GoodReader is now my daily go-to PDF reader right now. I touch on a few of the new apps here, includ­ing GoodReader, but you’ll be back on this page if you want to check out Stanza — a great eBook reader.


I have to read a lot of fic­tion in the next few months. A lot of Sci­ence Fic­tion to be pre­cice, and it’s so I can cast an informed bal­lot to help select the best of the genre at this year’s World Sci­ence Fic­tion con­ven­tion (World­Con).

As a mem­ber of World­Con, a packet con­tain­ing this year’s nom­in­ees arrived in my inbox earlier this week. Lots of PDF, RTF, DOC and TXT files, for many diverse cat­egor­ies includ­ing best Novel, Novella, etc. Not small files by any stretch.

So, to avoid cull­ing a small forest by print­ing it all out, I decided to try and read them on my iPod Touch. In the past I’ve enjoyed read­ing on my pre­vi­ous port­able device, the Palm T|X, so figured that I should give it a try on the Touch. And that got me won­der­ing, is there an iPhone or iPod Touch app to read pdfs? I’m happy to say the answer is yes, but.

The dilemma, how to get just under 200mb of data on to this little sucker. Well, I solved it, two ways. Here’s how:… More

Top of the World Provincial Park (2008)

Posted on by Brad Grier • 0 Comments

I decided to take a scan through some pho­tos from earlier this year. This one from our sum­mer vaca­tion stuck with me as one that I could play with.

And I did. Using Light­room again. A bit of Sepia. A bit of dodging and burn­ing, and I’m rather pleased with the result.

There’s an easter egg in this shot, though I didn’t notice it until I was fin­ished edit­ing! See if you can find it :)