Rufus Deuchler | Travelogue

Meet Erik Larson the visionary leader behind Acrobat.com. Erik will share how Acrobat.com provides a fundamentally different and better way to work through stories and real-world examples. Come hear about the future of Acrobat.com and the vision behind the product. This will be an interactive session; Bring your questions and thoughts.

Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2009, 12-1pm PDT
Meeting URL: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/comseminars
No registration is required. Just click on the URL above or enter it into your browser.

Make sure to also read my articles about Acrobat.com:

• Welcome to Acrobat.com Presentations
• Adobe Acrobat.com, much more than just PDF

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this sixth episode of CSInsider|Design, I show the new Live Preflight feature in Adobe InDesign CS4. The term Preflight originates from the pre-flight checklists used by pilots prior to take off. In a publishing workflow, preflight is the process of checking a document for integrity and completeness, before it can move on in the workflow. In the past we would preflight our InDesign documents before packaging them for hand off; or we would preflight PDFs before they would go to press, to make sure that all fonts are there, that images are the correct resolution, etc...
In InDesign CS4, preflight has become an integral part of document creation. Awesomeness!

Enjoy!

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this fifth episode of CSInsider|Design, I show how easy it has become to place multiple images in an InDesign document by using the place gun and the new Smart Guides. One of the cool "hidden" features is that you can also use the place gun to lay out multiple images in a grid in a single operation. Furthermore, you can then leverage the metadata (the data about the data, such as a description) added in Adobe Bridge to automatically create styled captions for the placed images.

Enjoy!

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was just a week ago when I blogged about Acrobat.com Presentations, an online service for creating presentations. And today, I am here to introduce a new online service named Adobe BrowserLab, which truly is a designer’s dream come true. At the various MAX 2008 events there was a lot of buzz about a project code named Meer Meer (article published last November), and here it is.

Adobe BrowserLab is an online hosted service that lets you test the pages of your web site across a variety of web browsers and operating systems. The service works by taking screen shots of your web pages in different browsers, and then displaying them in the BrowserLab application window. This is awesome, because this means that you don’t have to create the various set-ups locally to test your pages!

You can use BrowserLab as a standalone service, or integrated with Dreamweaver CS4. The standalone service lets you test pages that you've posted to a server within the context of a web browser. If you use BrowserLab as an integrated service with Dreamweaver, you can test your pages from within Dreamweaver without publishing your pages to a server.

Note: as I am writing this, Scott Fegette (Adobe Product Manager) wrote on his Twitter stream that "Wow- the response to BrowserLab has been incredible! We've reached our initial capacity limit already- amazing", and "Apologies if you didn't get into BrowserLab in this first round of the limited free preview- we'll be adding more folks soon, keep posted!" - Which basically means that if you cannot access the service now, be patient, as we are adding resources.

Continue reading "Welcome to Adobe BrowserLab" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This post is basically about the combination of two new features in Adobe InDesign CS4, and something of which I was not aware of:

Redesigned Hyperlinks panel – You can now use the redesigned Hyperlinks panel to create hyperlinks that navigate to external URLs, link to specific files, launch an e-mail client, or jump to a page or section of a page within the same or even a different document. Users can now also verify hyperlinks directly in InDesign CS4 with no need to export the document to a PDF or SWF file for testing.

Export to Flash (SWF) – You can create dynamic content without having to work in the authoring environment of Adobe Flash by simply exporting SWF files directly from within InDesign, complete with page transitions, interactive buttons, rollovers, and hyperlinks.

I have been exporting SWFs from InDesign, complete with all those cool features mentioned above, including hyperlinks since CS4 came out. But, guess what, I had never actually clicked on one of those hyperlinks I created, until Gerard told me that they had to think of a workaround, because those hyperlinks, according to him, did not work in the exported SWF file. So I checked, and guess what, my hyperlinks did not work either. So I had to agree with Gerard that this must have been a bug and that we’d patiently have to wait for a fix.

I was so wrong… And thanks to Michael Ninness (Adobe InDesign Product Manager) for clearing this up.

Continue reading "About Hyperlinks in SWFs exported from InDesign" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)