dekeBlog

Hail, dekeOmmunity. I'm thrilled to announce that Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One, the book, is now in stock. The timely appearance (as well as, literally, the generally awesome appearance) of this book is creditable in large part to the collaboration of our resident Design Mastermind, David Futato. David has been in charge of the final design of the One-on-One books since the beginning, so he's got cred on the streets of dekeVille (where he's running for City Council). As soon as we stop keeping him up all night working on books, he's planning on joining us here as a contributor.

In fact, unbeknownst to him, he already has. I posted an excerpt from the book wherein David explains the new features of the Links palette over in dekeStuff. You can read the excerpt of the excerpt just below, but you need to be a registered member of our community to read the whole thing. (And then you need to get the book to read the whole, whole thing.) Welcome David, and congratulations, and thanks!

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So one of the things I saw demo-ed at Adobe max earlier this week was the new Pixel Bender plug-in for  Photoshop CS4. The plug-in allows you to collect a bunch of very cool filter effects and access them through your Photoshop Filters menu. It's pretty dang cool as you can see from my groovy effect (CircleSplash) applied to this photo from Monday's keynote.

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Just back from two days at Adobe MAX (I know MAX is a fake acronym and Deke and I toyed with making it "Max"; But I apparently got brainwashed by the giftbag, t-shirt, and MAX logo everywhere I turned for the past two days). Despite is unfortunately capitalized name, MAX  going on in beautifully useasonably warm San Francisco. The theme for the show this year: Connect. Discover. Inspire. MAX is traditionally a developer heavy show, but this year many of the sessions were geared toward design-types. The keynote featured Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch, and the First Lady of California, Maria Shriver. This shot does not feature either of them.

While Adobe MAX can be a bit developer-focused, I did find an enclave of design types at Russell Brown's ADIM@MAX (whatcha gonna do with those caps, Deke?) ADIM, as some of you may know, is Russell Brown's notorious Art Director's Invitational Master class where creativity and sometimes clothing run free. The ADIM@MAX version was a little tamer, only naked 3D dinosaurs running free, while the people remained clothed, perhaps in 3D dinosaur shirts they created during the two day class. The real benefit was of course that everyone in the seminar got a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 One-on-One, and the five people who accurately told me what object I am holding in the book (no, I am NOT that lady with the paddle at the end, sheesh!) won copies of Adobe InDesign One-on-One hot off the presses to-day. (I haven't even removed the shrinkwrap on my copy yet.) Read more » 

Hey all. We found out this week that there is a flaw on the DVD that contains the practice files for Photoshop CS4 One-on-One. (Thanks for letting us know, leachr and RobertJ!) On page 23 of the book, step 2, you are instructed to open the Balloon Thief folder.

Unfortunately, the folder's contents did not reproduce correctly on the DVD. (How's that for passive, non-accusatory language that doesn't place any blame?) Please download the zipped file you'll find here and use it to replace the existing subfolder in the Lesson 1 folder you got from the DVD. Your pilfered files will be restored, unlike poor Sammy's balloon.

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First of all, I have to say, Chuck Joiner of MacVoices.com is a gem. If you haven't heard of him, you got to check out his site. Because the guy is the most congenial, warm-hearted, patient host you could hope for. And his list of interviewees reads like a who's who of the Mac community.

In my case, he's content to say about three words and listen to me rattle on like a mental patient for one 70,000-word sentence, and then act like I said something insightful and ask his next question.

If nothing else, it's a wonderful experiment in word conservation. Chuck makes his extremely wise points in as few words as possible, and I make no point whatsoever using up as many words as I can possibly utter without punctuation.

Based on this podcast, my favorite words include: "Uh," "um," "we-a," "but-a-but," "the the," and "and and." You owe it to yourself to check it out, if only because freakish things peak your curiosity. Read more »