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 set a password on the fly and it works just fine.

So, with the explanation of the situation out of the way, here is Advice For Avoiding 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!

Dirty Words Design: Episode 6, Fixing ‘Edit Original’ in OS X

The Edit Original command is one of the best ways to quickly move between the Creative Suite applications from within InDesign, but it can misbehave under OS X. Here’s how to use it, and how to fix it if it stops working as expected!

Podcast: Download (Duration: 4:00 — 8.3MB)

Dirty Words Design: Episode 5, Intro to Acrobat Layers

Episode 5 of Dirty Words Design runs down the basics on why you would want to create a layered PDF, how to export one from InDesign, and a few tips for manipulating those layers in Acrobat.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 13:34 — 41.5MB)

Dirty Words Design is now iPhone & iPod touch Compatible

When I started Dirty Words Design, I thought “bigger is better, within reason.” Then I bought an iPod touch, and I thought “this really sucks that I can’t watch my own episodes on my iPod because they’re too large!”—so I’ve gone back and re-encoded the old episodes to fit on the modern iPods/iPhones. I also tried to adjust the volume to be louder, but it turns out that my equipment just wasn’t up to the task, even though my initial impressions of it were good. I’ll be shopping for new equipment soon, and probably releasing a few more episodes before it arrives.

Previous Episodes:

• Dirty Words Design: Episode 0, InDesign CS4 Smart Text Reflow
• Dirty Words Design: Episode 1, Introduction & File Cleanup Technique
• Dirty Words Design: Episode 2, More Packaging, and Converting All Text to Outlines
• Dirty Words Design: Episode 3, Default Preferences and Document Preferences
• Dirty Words Design: Episode 4, Fixing Paragraph Style Pairs

InDesign CS4 6.0.4 Released-Style Mappings Map Again!

Great news; version 6.0.4 of InDesign dropped today, and it fixes the awful CS4 bug where style mappings for imported word documents weren’t being saved. It has other bug fixes too, including all the fixes from previous versions; it’s a cumulative update: Adobe InDesign CS4 6.0.4 Update Read Me.

I haven’t had time to test this bug fix yet, but if the following bug describes some bad behaviour I’ve seen in previous CS4 versions, this bug fix may well be solid gold to me, too: PDF Export: Master page items fail to draw if they sit atop another page item that crosses master spread page boundaries. [2299929]*

You can grab the InDesign for Windows update here, and use Adobe Updater to get the OS X version — the standalone updater for OS X has yet to be posted.

After installing the update, it might be a good time to try out my Reclaim Disk Space After Creative Suite 4 Updates tip.