Unintended Hiatus and Future Plans

I didn’t intend to take a hiatus from Dirty Words Design, but it seems to have happened.

A few things conspired to create this situation: I took a 10-day vacation in March; I quit my job; I’m in the process of dealing with some fun legal negotiations as a company I co-own disentangles some IP from my former employer; I’ve been working on new freelance projects and spending time looking for new opportunities.

So I’ve been busy, and I’m honestly not quite sure when I’ll be back on the videocasting wagon. The remainder of April is shaping up to be busy, and in March I’ll be taking a week to visit Seattle and attend InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference from May 12th to 14th. I would be delighted to talk to anyone at the show who is a fan (or critic) of Dirty Words Design!

I do hope to release an episode before the Print and ePublishing Conference, and after that show, get back on the wagon of regular-ish releases.

Still using Creative Suite 1? Upgrade pricing won’t last much longer…

Over on his block, John Nack of Adobe points out that if you still own Creative Suite 1 and you want to upgrade to Creative Suite 4, you should do so soon, as Adobe has a “3 versions back” policy and you won’t be able to upgrade CS1 to CS5 for the upgrade price once CS5 is announced. There’s some talk in the comments of his post that if you upgrade to CS4 and CS5 is announced within 30 days of your upgrade, you’ll get a free upgrade to CS5—Nack hasn’t confirmed this.

Site Update for Mobile Browsers

I just installed a plugin that should give people on portable/small screen devices a much more efficient layout. Please post if you’re using a mobile device and encounter any issues!

Dirty Words Design: Episode 8, GREP Styles + Preflight Proofing

This episode of Dirty Words Design shows you how to harness the power of two InDesign CS4 features—GREP Styles and Live Preflight—together to automatically detect if your document contains specified placeholder text, such as the dreaded “page XX” reference or notes from editors to layout or vice-versa.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 5:54 — 16.3MB)

Adobe Removes Creative Suite Deactivation Limit!

Klaus Norby pointed out this fine news over on InDesignSecrets—Adobe is removing the deactivation limit for Creative Suite, for versions CS3 and CS4.

This is not a fullscale removal of the Activiation system—Adobe is not removing the need to deactivate before uninstalling but is simply not penalizing people who deactivate and reinstall frequently. You are still limited to two concurrent installations of Creative Suite, however.

Eric Wilde says:

The deactivation limit has caused numerous problems and I’m very happy to see it go. As stated above, we should go live on the a new activation server implementation on January 15th that completely removes the deactivation limit. Although deactivation is still necessary (which causes some other problems), there should no longer be any limit to the number of deactivations.

In a comment on the 14th, Eric confirms that this change is now live.

Regardless of it being a half-step, I welcome each and every step towards removing activation and other paying-customer-punishing measures. Thank you, Adobe!

Acrobat 9.3 Update for OS X and Windows

Acrobat 9.3 Standard and Pro Updates are now available from Adobe:

• OS X Updater
• Windows Updater

These updates fix some security problems, plus the normal array of bug fixes. The full release notes go into all the fixes in detail. Nice to see the update arrive today, as I actually bumped into one of the described bugs yesterday, and today it’s fixed!

Adobe Reader has been updated as well.

Avoid Creative Suite Activation Issues

I recently bought a refurbished Mac Pro to replace my aging G5. It is fast, beautiful, very very sexy, and I would be having an affair with it but all my loved ones know how much I love it, so it’s totally above board.

Installing Creative Suite on a new machine is a chance for fun and games with activation, of course, and I bumped into two nice new (to me) flaws. I’m writing this from memory weeks after the install, but this is how they occurred to the best of my recollection:

I discovered that you must launch Acrobat for the first time before you launch Distiller for the first time. Acrobat has a slightly different activation/serial scheme than the rest of Creative Suite, because it’s not a “proper” part of the Creative Suite. I don’t use Distiller much, but I was curious to see the speed improvement in distilling a large file, so I fired it up … and activation broke. Now, whenever I launched Acrobat, I would get one of those infuriating “Licensing for this product has stopped working” errors.

So I went and downloaded the Licensing Service Update which is listed as a solution for various activation issues for both Creative Suite 3 and Creative Suite 4.

I try to run it, and the Licensing Service Update will not run if you do not have a password set on your OS X user account. I’m assuming this is a simple error in the Python script that launches the update, but this is just pure silliness! (For those of you who are saying “Why do you not have a password on your account?!”—when I am working on a new or freshly-installed machine, I don’t set a password until after I’ve installed all the major pieces of software/updates.)

I went into OS X’s Prefences and set a password for the account I was using, then tried running Licensing Service Update again this time, it worked.

So, with the explanation of the situation out of the way, here is Advice For Avoiding Creative Suite Activation Wasting Your Time:

1. Install Creative Suite.
2. Launch InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator. Then close it.
3. Launch Acrobat. Then close it.
4. Run the Licensing Service Update. Just in case.
5. Install all the relevant updates for Creative Suite.

It’s too much to hope for, but “No Product Activation” would be a welcome feature in Creative Suite 5; well worth paying for!

Dirty Words Design: Episode 7, Rorohiko’s Soxy

Rorohiko’s Soxy 1.0 for OS X has just been released, with a Windows version in beta. This episode of Dirty Words Design shows you how to use Soxy to easily manage multiple versions of InDesign at the same time — no accidentally opening old files in the newest version of InDesign or vice-versa! I also demonstrate how to assign a different application to open specific PDF versions.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 5:49 — 9.4MB)

Dirty Words Design Twitter Account: dirtywordstv

I’ve setup a distinct twitter account at dirtywordstv for podcast announcements, news, graphic design news, etc. My personal twitter account at adamjury is far more entertaining but far less businesslike — pick one or both and give them a follow!