Adobe CS4 - The best of......

As Adobe recently announced CS4 so I asked my friend Chad Chelius, and AGI trainer, who has been working with CS4 for several months and is co-authoring the CS4 Digital Classroom series of books to give us the overview of the new features, here is:

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I'm sure this isn't the first post of it's nature and it certainly wont be the last. But my good friend Brenda over at ineedchocolate.com asked me if I would compile my top ten new features of  CS4. I've also received several requests from clients to do the same. I'll start with InDesign and follow up with posts on the other applications. This is by no means a comprehensive list, it's just some of my favorite features at a glance so here goes.

InDesign
GREP styles - Everyone knows by this point how much of a GREP freak I am and now in CS4 you can actually apply GREP commands within a style. For instance I can tell every instance of a word or words that appear within parentheses to format as italic automatically! This is beyond nested styes, this is something that people have been asking about for several versions now. A huge benefit to anyone working with longer documents.

New Zoom Feature - I've always kind of liked the Navigator panel in previous versions of InDesign, but I have to admit, I rarely used it. InDesign CS4 in some ways integrates the navigator into the InDesign interface. If you have the hand tool selected, you can click-and-hold for a second and it zooms out so you can see your entire document and you get a red rectangle like in the old Navigator panel that allows you to move to a different part of your document and then when you release the mouse button, it zooms back in on that area. I like this implementation and think I'll be using it a lot!

Smart Guides - This features applies to both InDesign and Illustrator actually, but the new smart guides feature in both programs has been significantly improved. Their actually smart now! They aren't as obtrusive as smart guides in previous versions of illustrator and they actually work very well. You can position items on your page and it shows you spacing details, sizing details (if you're scaling), and of course positioning details relative to other objects on your page. This will eliminate several trips to the Align panel in both programs.

Application Frame - This applies to all CS4 programs and only really affects Mac users. They've added the application frame that puts a solid gray background behind your documents so you don't see your desktop while you are working. It's completely optional so don't worry! I rarely like features that mimic the Windows version of anything however it always annoyed me that my cluttered desktop was always looming in the background of documents that I was working on. I find this a welcome addition.

Dynamic Preflighting - While working on an InDesign document you now get an active preflight status in the lower-left corner of the screen, making you aware of any potential issues that appear within your document. In addition, you can now create preflight profiles that control what InDesign looks for and considers a problem. The preflighting is much more robust than it was in previous versions. Still not a full-featured preflight program, but significantly improved!

Rotate Spread View - You can now rotate the view of individual spreads in a document to make it easier to work on. For instance, when you have that brochure that has a tear-off panel and the content is rotated. You can simply rotate that page to make it easier to work on!

Nested Line Styles - This one is really cool! You can now apply formatting to text in the nested styles section to lines of text within a paragraph. For instance, maybe you wanted the first two lines of a paragraph to appear in small caps. You can now do that in CS4!

Flash Export - Adobe continued it's push to integrate all of the applications in CS4. You can now export your documents to a flash .swf file that includes page transitions. This is a great way to get your feet wet with flash!
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Chad Chelius
Adobe Certified Instructor, Adobe Certified Expert, AGI Training
Blog: The Chad and Rob Show

I'll take mine "on the rocks"

I have been more and more drawn to things which are natural and simple. So why not apply those same principles to beverages. Stone have long been a source of residual heating, but why not cooling as well?

These ice cubes are made from Swedish pollution free base rock, and just need to be cooled in the freezer for an hour before using, and once finished, rinse and back in the freezer! No more watered down drinks. And while these look great, why stop there? What about keeping a bag of pebbles in the freezer for that instant cold pack, so much better than peas, and the weight is likely to hold it in place more efficiently. And honestly, who really wants to eat peas that were once semi-thawed by your sprained ankle? Not even if I actually liked peas. 

How about your lunch pack, we spend hundreds of dollars on those ice blue cold packs for your lunch, would a bag of rocks have the same impact on keeping your lunch cold?

Sure, it might ad a pound or two to your lunch bag, but think of it as weight lifting, calories burned, calories consumed.

Next time you serve a cold dip, why not place your bowl in a larger bowl full of frozen rocks, or perhaps just a stone dip bowl?

Check them out at: http://www.mocha.uk.com/shop/index.cgi?command=moreinfo&search=TT05

Simple, natural, green, brilliant!

Political junkie fix

If you are one of those individuals who just can't get enough of a political fix, here is an interesting site http://www.perspctv.com. Touting 58 days until the election, here is one site that collects information from other sites and lumps all together in interesting ways. Pulling information from Electoral-Vote.com, Twitter, and Hubdud.com and creating visual maps and charts to reflect the information. Including News, Blogosphere and twitter mentions, with CNN's Polls of Polls, website daily reach and google search volume, I think this site helps make this election the most intimately followed in history. As they are being added, you can witness the most recent tweets, blog posts and news.

Had enough yet?

The most curious here is the map of Twitter users, All democrat, that seems a little strange? With the exception of SD, there seems to be some type of Obama Titterfever out there. Why is that?

So, whatever side you are on, if you are looking for your political news fix, check it out.