CreativeTechs Tips

The acceptance of mainstream eBooks is just getting started, and publishers are very interested in the future of digital books. Apple’s new iPad will use the open EPUB format for selling and distributing electronic books (iBooks) on their new tablet.

If you work in the publishing industry, it’s time to learn what the EPUB format is all about. A good place to start is with a series of three new how-to guides from Adobe on producing and exporting EPUB eBooks from InDesign:

PDF: How to export EPUB eBooks from InDesign.

PDF: Working with images in InDesign for export to EPUB.

PDF: Common questions about exporting EPUB files from InDesign.

Link: Adobe How-To Guides: Producing EPUB eBooks from InDesign.

Source: This tip inspired by a post by Anne-Marie Concepcion on InDesign Secrets. Designer’s in Seattle may be interested in The InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference May 12–14, 2010.

Here is a great little treat.

Photoshop Product Manager, Bryan O’Neil Hughes, shared a glimpse of new selection technology that offers better edge detection and masking results in less time—even with the trickiest images, like hair.

Video: Photoshop Selections Sneak Peek.

The video is only about a minute long, but it reveals that Adobe has some powerful tools slated for future versions of Photoshop.

Source: We don’t know when CS5 will ship (or even if that’s what it will be called) — but rest assured that as soon as the new tools are unveiled, you can expect a slate of live worldwide classes exploring the latest features in our online classroom.

I love the solid feel of a clean grid-based layout. Get started with this handy collection of resources for working with the 960 pixel grid system many web designers use to streamline web development.

Link: 960 Gridder Overlay. (shown above)

Link: 960 Grid System – Resources and Links.

Link: The Grid System – Grid systems for designers (print & web).

Link: Typogridphy – Working the 960 grid with Type.

Source: I’d been thinking a lot about grids lately. This tip inspired by an upcoming website redesign for the CreativeTechs Training site.

This is an open letter to the MailChimp team:

Let me start off by saying that I LOVE the MailChimp service for handling email newsletters. We’ve been MailChimp clients for over years, and MailChimp has been my product of choice for most of the email marketing classes I’ve led over the years.

But the Interest Groups feature in MailChimp is broken. I’m hoping that by demonstrating our problems with the current Interest Groups implementation, those issues will be addressed, and I’ll be able to continue using MailChimp for many years to come. As it stands today, I’m seriously considering moving to another service for our training classes. And I’d really prefer to stay with MailChimp. Read the Full Tip »

Last week Steve Jobs unvieled the new Apple iPad. Happily, almost everything we’ve been learning about developing iPhone Web Apps looks like it’s going to work the same for Apple’s new tablet.

Here is a short video exceprt from the first week of Elisabeth Robson’s course, Learn to Build iPhone Web Apps, showing how to use a simple CSS Media Query to easily customize your website for visitors on mobile browsers.

Note: Although this was presented two weeks before the iPad announcement, the first question asked in Q&A was about Apple’s upcoming then-unconfirmed tablet device.

Source: We demonstrate a simple CSS Media Query for sample CreativeTechs Web App. Visit this page from an iPhone, and you see a sample App. Visit from a desktop broswer and the page is tucked into a simple iPhone preview:

http://creativetechs.com/iphone

One of the more controversial choices in the new Apple iPad is the lack of support for Flash-based content.

So, what does the web look like without Flash? If you are curious, there are a number of utilities and scripts that allow you to disable Flash on your desktop browser. Here are a couple plugins:

Safari (Mac): ClickToFlash

Firefox (both): Flashblocker

Flash elements are replaced with a simple box – which I find does speed up much of my web browsing. When you want to view the Flash, just click on it to play as normal (and option that won’t be available on the iPad).

Source: I was turned onto ClickToFlash by consultant Kyle Pauley who owns and leads the Mac Support side of CreativeTechs in Seattle.

Planning just the right time and location for landscape photography can be challenging. Landscape photographers typically want to plan their shoots around the times of sunrise/sunset or twilight.

That’s why photographer Stephen Trainor created the Photographer’s Ephemeris, an Adobe AIR application that provides a visual and simplified solution for finding vantage points for dusk and sunset photography. It integrates satellite and terrain maps from Google into a visually pleasing interface.

Link: The Photographer’s Ephemeris App

Read on for a couple video tutorials showing this tool in action. Read the Full Tip »

This free collection of 220 Photoshop Layer Styles let your quickly sort through glow, gradient, glass, gel, and other effects. Nothing too complex, but a helpful assortment of effects that you can explore and modify for some quick designs.

Link: DezinerFolio’s 220 Amazing Free Photoshop Layer Styles

Source: DezinerFolio.com keeps a slew of fun freebies on their web design & development site. A similar collection was mentioned in the January issue of Design Tools Monthly.

If you’ve ever spent too much time composing an email on your iPhone’s tiny keyboard you are going to LOVE this! Dragon Dictation is an amazing, free, dictation app for your iPhone.

Just launch the app, press the record button, and start talking. You can dictate anything from a short note to a longer soliloquy. Once the text is transcribed, you can send it as an email, text message, or copy to the clipboard. Clean up some missed words and add punctuation, and you are set!

Link: Dragon Dictation at App Store

I’ve been playing with this app over the last week, and I’m amazed at the accuracy of the speech-to-text conversion. There are typically a few errors, but they are easy to fix.

Tip: You can add punctuation to your text by saying ‘period’, ‘question mark’, or ‘exclamation mark’ as you talk. It’s a nice touch.

Source: I first ran across Dragon Dictation early last week on the always topical TUAW blog. Although I find myself wondering how long it will be before we have an app that combines this type of speech-to-text transcription with something like Google Translate.

Here is a question we get periodically from clients: How can I import videos from a DVD into a Keynote presentation? The answer is HandBrake, a wonderful free utility that easily converts video on a standard DVD into presentation-friendly QuickTime movies.

Link: HandBrake 0.9.4

HandBrake is a small freeware utility that lets you easily capture clips from DVDs as H.264 video files. The resulting files can be played using the QuickTime player, imported into the latest version of iMovie, or placed into a Keynote presentation.

Of course the most common use of HandBrake these days seems to be converting DVD movies into a format you can watch on your iPhone. But we’re sticking with business uses for today’s tip.