Just when you thought you just bought (or just finished paying for) Adobe Creative Suite 3, get ready to take out another mortgage for Adobe CS4, which will be publicly unveiled on September 23. AppleInsider conjectures the software will drop in October.
Adobe will be delivering several webcasts that day to showcase the new software to the public. You can register here to participate in the webcasts.
Improvements to Photoshop and Flash are expected to headline the event. Adobe did not release any details about how the software will be bundled, nor any pricing information. Full versions of Adobe CS3 can cost as much as $2,500 for new users, and $160 for those who want to upgrade.
Adobe released preview editions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth in late May.
This little glitch has never happened to my iPhone, though I wish it had -- there's a glitch in the iPhone's camera that will occasionally cause it to slice up pictures like this, and our friend Veronica Belmont created a whole pool of the glitchy photos called iPhone cubism. Of course, if you want a picture of your little girl, it's more frustrating than anything else, but in an artistic sense, some of the pictures are really benefited by the random slicing. As if the iPhone didn't do enough, now it's throwing some art into the mix.
Of course, it's a bug, not a feature. Since several people are reporting this as a problem after 2.0 was released, we're guessing it's a software issue, perhaps a problem with syncing the little light sensor chip in the iPhone's camera. If you have some great pictures of this stuff, throw them into the pool on Flickr, and hopefully for the less artistic (and less bug-patient) among us, Apple will get this fixed soon.
A new tool for designers (or anyone who needs client input on proofs) is premiering today. ProofHQ is a web-based application for uploading, annotating, commenting and approving proofs with controlled access for multiple clients. It's not Mac-specific, but it's worth mentioning considering the large portion of Mac users (and TUAW readers) who fit into the creative/design category. It doesn't work on the iPhone, (why would you want to upload and proof on an iPhone, really?), but it's fully Safari-compatible and Mac-friendly.
Using ProofHQ's upload page or the Java-based Uploadr, you can send PDF, PSD, GIF, TIFF, JPG, BMP, Word and Powerpoint files and have them converted into Flash-based proofs at full quality. There's currently no support for Pages or Keynote documents, but you can export PDF versions and upload those. PDF files can be multi-page, and vector support is on the way. Comments and various levels of approval can be added from the viewer. You receive a public url, private url and embed code. The embed code makes it easy to incorporate ProofHQ into other collaboration systems such as Basecamp or Central Desktop. There's also direct API integration with Basecamp. New clients who access the proof can subscribe to it without signing up for ProofHQ, making it a less confusing system for clients than some of the other available options.
14 day free trials of all plans are available which allow full access to features. Plans range from the free personal account and the $29USD/month Solo plan up to the enterprise-level Corporate plan at $499USD/month.
As the economy makes with the poop, we can all use a little bit of extra help finding work. Whether it's side projects, or full-time employment, there are plenty of jobs available for system administrators, programmers, and creative people -- all who use a Mac.
I've assembled a collection of sites and job boards that cater to those with a technical and creative skill set -- people who probably use a Mac. This is by no means a complete list, but should help anyone starting to look for work.
Comments consisting of "how could you dare possibly omit [insert name of board here]" will be met with resigned sighs from me, but cheers from our readers. So feel free to point people in the direction of boards that you've used or trusted before in comments.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on cool software for K-8 classrooms.
Canvastic LLC has announced a new version of the Canvastic graphics, writing, and publishing tool. Canvastic is designed to be used in K-8 classrooms, and is fun and productive for students.
Canvastic 3.5 is designed for use on both PPC and Intel Macs (which is great, as many American schools still use older Macs). The student publishing tool includes drawing, text and presentation tools, plus an Audio Tool for voice recording, insertion of sounds and integration with iTunes. Audio tracks can be played in documents or presentations.
Other new features include:
Transparency and color tones in graphics and text
Teachers can enable or disable spell checking, and also keep students from "customizing" the dictionary
New brush shapes
The ability to import digital photographs
Additional templates, backgrounds, and art
As before, Canvastic presents a customized user interface depending on the grade level of the student. Canvastic 3.5 is a free upgrade for all registered users, and those with free site licenses can upgrade for 50% of the posted educational prices. Pricing ranges from US$39 for one user to US$949 for an unlimited school building license. Schools can do an unlimited pilot of Canvastic for up to 60 days, and many school districts qualify for a free site license for half of their schools.
Sketches was one of the apps I picked up the very first day the App Store opened -- in fact, it was the first I ever bought, and I bought it as a mistake: Apple's one-click shopping bit me for $7.99 (the app has since dropped in price to $5.99). But it turns out, as a mistake, it was a fortuitous one, because it's one of the apps I've been most impressed with. There are a few other "Paint" style apps floating around the store nowadays, but Sketches is worth the price of admission for doing exactly what it says: letting you easily and quickly draw whatever you want on whatever you want.
The quantity of options in a simple app like this are surprising. Choose from six different kinds of backgrounds, including photos shot with the phone's camera, existing album photos, a solid color, a webpage pulled from an in-app browser, a map of your location or a library of six included backgrounds.
Next, select from a bevy of colors and line thickness for drawing or the provided clip art. Finally, save the sketch in the app, export it out to your photo album or send it to Twitter. And even as you use the app, more fun appears -- there's a cool Etch-a-Sketch-like shake feature to erase what you've drawn, and the zoom button can move you in close for even more detail.
Text input is missing (and reportedly will be included in a later version), but as a quick sketch creator (you won't be designing the Mona Lisa with this, more like circling something on a map or pic before a quick upload to Twitter), Sketches is a really fun, very professional app. LateNiteSoft has it up to 1.2 so far, and even though I had no intention of buying it when I pressed the "Buy App" button without thinking (weren't we all a little feverish when the App Store first dropped?), I don't regret my purchase one bit.
Love it or hate it (with the burning fire of a million angry suns), Quark yesterday released QuarkXPress 8, which features new tools for developing for the web, workspace enhancements, and refinements to tools to finally bring it into the 20th century. Steve Sande mentioned back in May that it was coming, and now it's finally here.
Quark 8, the William Shatner of page layout software (old, bloated, sweaty, and desperate to stay relevant), allows you to create content for the web using HTML and Flash without writing any code. This has been a feature of Quark since QuarkImmedia and Quark Interactive Designer, but now appears to be fully rolled into QuarkXPress, to the abject horror of web designers everywhere.
Also, a new feature: A measurements palette. That's right, it's 2008, and they're adding a measurements palette. Also: east-Asian language support and hanging punctuation. Wow. Well done, Quark.
I've been using QuarkXPress since version 3, and having very briefly tried the new version, it's a little depressing to see them keep trying to reclaim their glory years. Small design shops, freelancers, and many printers have largely moved to InDesign for their page layout software. Yes, Quark 8 is light-years ahead of where they were, but still light-years behind where they need to be.
Quark makes its money on giant-scale installations at newspapers and magazines, so we'll see how quickly their enterprise customers adopt this new version. My guess: not very, as many printers I've dealt with overseas, especially in Asia, are still using QuarkXPress 6.
A 60-day trial is available, and is a whopping 517MB to download. It requires Mac OS X 10.4 and a G5 processor or higher. New licenses are $800, and upgrades are a scant $300. Discounts are available for education and non-profit customers, too.
Sometimes I see the name of a new piece of software that someone tips us off to, and the name conjures up something completely different from what the reality is.
PhotoTiles, for instance, brought to mind the ability to create those cool pictures that are made up of all of your other photos. You know, like having a TUAW Logo that is made up of 2,500 thumbnail pictures that are chosen for their hue and intensity, then placed in the proper location.
Well, PhotoTile doesn't exactly do that, but this small program from Limit Point Software is a handy utility. Instead of doing what I imagined, it basically takes a folder of image and turns that into one grid-like "über-image."
For example, I took my Photo Booth folder, added a TUAW logo to round up to an even number of pictures, and dragged it onto PhotoTile. In a few seconds, it created the image that you see at right.
This is great for creating contact sheets of photos. PhotoTiles is donation-ware. If you use it, make a donation and you'll get an unlock code that unlocks all utilities from Limit Point Software including PhotoTiles.
If you're bored silly with the typical theme backgrounds in Keynote, pop on over to iPresentee's website and check out Keynote Motion Themes 2.0. These themes, which were released today (7/7/08), add five more motion themes to iPresentee's product line.
All of these themes provide moving backgrounds to catch the eyes of your audience. The five themes -- Money, Curtain, Rain, Story, and Exercise Book -- include 14 or more master slide layouts each.
Motion Themes 2.0 is available online for $25, or you can purchase individual motion themes for $10 each. And by the way, the free Keynote Objects icons are still available on the iPresentee site.
Keynote Objects is a package of 100 attractive icon-like objects that can be used not only with Keynote, but also with Microsoft PowerPoint and Word. All of the objects have a transparent background, and are easily resized, rotated, made more or less transparent, or shadowed.
I'm actually going to use several of the objects as icons for a new web site that I'm designing, simply because they offer an attractive and cohesive set of art objects. What will you use your free Keynote Objects for?
Ralf Herrmann recently took a look at the new typography features found in Firefox 3, pitting them against what's been available in Safari 3 for a while. The results show some major advances, and some major problems. The current OpenType or Apple Advanced Typography features in Firefox 3 include promising features like basic ligatures, which is exciting to those who live and breathe typography, but it fails in some non-English languages. Overall, it seems there are a lot of would-be nice new features that don't quite provide enough detail to be universally helpful. But it's a step in the right direction.
Another product announced at Macworld Expo, Extensis Universal Type Server, is now shipping. Universal Type Server is designed for corporate font management, requiring Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server 10.4 or 10.5 on a G5 or better machine. My personal opinion is that this would be a perfect application to run on a headless Mac mini.
There are two flavors of Universal Type Server - Professional, which is scalable to any size workgroup, and Lite, for workgroups of up to 10 users. The server and client applications are cross-platform, running on Windows as well as Mac.
Migration paths are available for users of Font Reserve Server or Suitcase Server. The Lite package is available for $1395 directly from Extensis, but you'll want to contact a reseller for the Professional version. If you want to kick the tires before you buy, you can download 30-day free trials for both Pro and Lite.
PopChar X, the little utility that gets all of those funky symbols, accents, and other special characters into your documents without having to remember arcane key codes, has been updated to version 4 for Mac.
PopChar has been around for over 20 years and is a favorite of editors and designers. To type a special character, you click on a P in the menu bar and a list of characters appears. Selecting the character you want drops it into your current document. Sure, you could always use Apple's Character Palette tool, but it's slow, and difficult to search for a special character in a particular font.
PopChar X 4.0 adds a new feature for searching Unicode characters by name across font boundaries. Ergonis, developer of PopChar, provides an example of searching for a "cubic meters" symbol in Helvetica. Typing in "cub" produces no results, but you can click a new "All" button to search across all Unicode fonts.
Side Effects is bringing Houdini, their professional 3D software, to OS X for the first time with the release of the Houdini 9.5 beta for OS X, Windows, and Linux. According to the company, Houdini "brings the 3D industry's first node-based workflow to the Mac ensuring that 3D artists can collaborate seamlessly in a multi-platform environment." This modeling and rendering platform has been used on a number of high profile projects like Spiderman 3 and Resident Evil: Extinction.
Houdini will come in four editions:
a free Apprentice edition for learning that includes watermarks
a non-watermarked Apprentice HD for $99
Houdini Escape "with modeling, animation, characters, lighting, rendering and compositing" for $1995
Houdini Master "with all of Escape's features plus particles and integrated dynamics such as rigid bodies, wire, cloth and fluids" for $7995.
Right now only the Apprentice and Apprentice HD editions are available for download, with the others expected July 15. Houdini is 64-bit Leopard-only.
Mac Pro users -- it's time to power up the graphics capability of your machine! ATI has announced the new Radeon HD 3870 Mac & PC Edition. Whether you're a serious gamer or a graphics designer, this new card features 256-bit 512MB GDDR4 frame buffer memory, 320 stream processors, twin dual-link DVI ports to run two 30" Apple Cinema HD displays, PCI Express 2.0 support, and more.
One of our readers pointed out that you can even use the HD 3870 in Windows running in Boot Camp on a Mac Pro. The Radeon HD 3870 runs in any Mac Pro and will be available in late June for a MSRP of $219.
Just when you thought you just bought (or just finished paying for) Adobe Creative Suite 3, get ready to take out another mortgage for Adobe CS4, which will be publicly unveiled on September 23. AppleInsider conjectures the software will drop in October.
A new tool for designers (or anyone who needs client input on proofs) is premiering today. 
As the economy makes with the poop, we can all use a little bit of extra help finding work. Whether it's side projects, or full-time employment, there are plenty of jobs available for system administrators, programmers, and creative people -- all who use a Mac.
TUAW's going 
Sketches
Love it or hate it (with the burning fire of a million angry suns), Quark yesterday released 
Sometimes I see the name of a new piece of software that someone tips us off to, and the name conjures up something completely different from what the reality is. 
If you're bored silly with the typical theme backgrounds in Keynote, pop on over to 
iPresentee
Ralf Herrmann recently 
Another product 
Side Effects is bringing 
