Recently in Adobe Category

Well, it's no secret; BumpTop is out in the wild for Mac! For me at least, it has replaced Finder for the short term if not for the long run.

At first look, wow. BumpTop is great. And you'd be right. It completely replaces finder on your mac, and integrates all the functionality of it. you can still access all the features of finder; QuickLook, spaces, and any other features that you rely on. They all work. Opening a folder opens a Finder window on top of everything. Amazing. However, there are a few great features that I'd like to highlight for everyone.

The first of these features that makes BumpTop so much better than Finder is the ability to stack items on top of each other. You can select a whole pile of items, and turn them into a stack, just as you would on a regular desk.

In the Pro version, you can use the two-finger scrolling on your trackpad to flip through the stacks. If you don't have pro, you can double click the stacks and they will open in a grid view that looks very similar to the grid view in Mac OS when you open a dock stack. Soo much better than finder, for so many reasons.

Another great feature that I'd like to highlight is the ability to control the size of items on your desktop. you can click on an item, and grow or shrink it depending on its importance to you, just as bigger documents would be on a real desk. You can grow and shrink them to make them suit your needs.

The last thing that I'd like to highlight is the walls that you have to put things on. You can double click on any of the four walls to move the camera view to that wall, on which you can pin stuff, like a real wall. This gives you that extra bit of desktop real estate when ever you need it.

The one feature that I would love to see built in is the ability to span multiple monitors. It is not currently there, but I'm sure it will appear in the future. I highly recommend BumpTop for mac and windows, even with its $30 price tag.

All for Now!

As you all know, I was one of the many who went out on Snow Leopard day and installed the system upgrade. So far, there have been two updates, and I am relatively pleased. However, more recently, I discovered a problem that really puts a damper on my Snow Leopard enthusiasm.

After installing Snow Leopard, I installed Adobe Master Collection CS4. Up until now, I haven't really had a reason to use Media Encoder at all. However, when I needed it, it failed on me. On my laptop, Media encoder refuses to boot. I don't know why, but it works fine in Leopard. I've heard about similar problems, but never not starting. I have reported this bug to Adobe, however I am not expecting any updated before the release of the next Creative Suite. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to use Final Cut Express instead of Premiere for a while.

All for Now!

Snow Leopard,Media Encoder,Adobe Media Encoder,Problems,Bugs,Adobe Bugs

So, here was my problem. I was in school, and had to come up with a good way to take Two Column notes and somehow stay organized. In my yearly pledge to use next to no paper for creating documents, I turned to the digital world. I created a template for notes in InDesign, and saved it as a PDF. Thanks to OCR and Acrobat 9, I had myself a neat little form. However, creating a new file for notes every night seemed unweiledy, and I needed a way to keep it all organized. What was I to do?

Well, Acrobat came to the rescue! Once I had a form made up, I set up a form review cycle through Acrobat.com so that I could keep all of my responses in one file. I can reset the form, and only have to keep track of 3 files for my entire months worth of notes, each with it's own data. Gotta love Acrobat!

Adobe,Acrobat 9,InDesign

Quoted from http://www.jameslockman.com/jamesblog/2009/10/acrobatcom-browser-check-fails.html:

Finding a bug in a beta product has never been easier!

Adobe

From www.macrumors.com:

CNET reports that Apple, Google, and twenty other companies have been sued by Eolas Technologies for patent infringement related to the use of browser plug-ins and Ajax to offer interactive content in Web browsers. The move comes several years after the conclusion of a similar lawsuit brought against Microsoft that resulted in an initial $521 million judgment in favor of Eolas, although the suit was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
Eolas' suit is not to be taken lightly. Although the earlier Microsoft case took many years to resolve, and Eolas by no means won a complete victory, the patent involved did overall withstand heavy legal challenges despite many on the Web rallying to Microsoft's aid. Microsoft and Eolas won't describe terms of their 2007 settlement of the patent case, but Eolas did say it expected to pay its shareholders a 2007 dividend afterward.

The Microsoft suit, as well as the new one targeting Apple and others, focused on a patent held by Eolas stemming from work performed by Eolas founder Michael Doyle while at the University of California, San Francisco. The patent, which covers the use of such technologies as Flash and Java plug-ins, was the subject of intense scrutiny during the trial and was initially overturned by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office before being reinstated and serving as the basis of the judgment against Microsoft.

The new suit also includes the use of Ajax Web development techniques for which Eolas has recently received a second patent as an extension of the original. Defendants in the new suit include Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Staples, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube.

From my mind:

As far as I can tell, Adobe and Apple probably won't pay them for this, and the suit will just die out over the course of years. As far as Google goes, they might pay up, because they have enough money in the bank.

I heard about this patent a few months ago and quickly dismissed it as uninforcable. However, it is clearly attempting to be enforced, and we'll just have to see what happens later on.

Seriously, how do they expect to shut down all of Flash and all RIAs?

All for now!

Adobe,Apple,Flash,Flash Killer,RIA,Eolas Lawsiut,Eolas vs. World

At Adobe MAX today, it was announced that the new version of Flash Professional, which will enter public beta before the year is out, will now have an exporter for iPhone. Yes, that means that Flash applications will finally run on the iPhone. Here is a short video describing this new technology.

iPhone Development,Flash for iPhone,Adobe,Adobe MAX,Flash CS5

As you all know, I run my blog on the Movable Type blogging platform. Until recently, the only applications that could connect to this blog were Ecto, which I didn't want to pay for, and Qumana, which doesn't look that good. The only other oprion was Contribute CS4, ahich I already had a license for. Up until now, Contribute has never connected to my Movable Type blog. It always errored out and wouldn't connect.

Until now.

I have no idea what I have done to make it work, but it does. So, I'll show you how.

When you open Contribute for the first time, it gives you the option to add a blog connection. Click on that link. You should get a window that looks like this:

In this window, you want to select the option to hook to "Other Blog Servers". In the field in the bottom, enter the address of your blog.

In the next pane, enter the username that you use to login to your site. PAY ATTENTION TO THIS STEP! Go into your Movable Type Administration panel, and go toyr user settings. Scroll down, and retrieve your Web Services password. This is the password that you enter into the password field in this panel. For the access point, you have to enter the path on your server to the file mt-xmlrpc.cgi. This file is usually located in the same folder as your MT installation. for example: http://www.yoursite.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi.

Once these steps are done, click finish. It will take a few minutes to build all of the required templates in order to build you a blog entry. NOTE: It will pull templates for all of the blogs that you have set up under your user account. This is handy for installations with more than one blog.

You are now ready to use Contribute CS4 to edit your Movable Type Blog. Have fun Blogging!

Contribute CS4,Adobe,Tutorials,Movable Type