DTG &Else NEWS Archive: 2009

The listing of combined news resources for 2009 from August back to January, for shareware, software, news items about the industry, spam, security, new books, etc.

News Archives from 2009

  • Kill DTP problems before they start Have you ever worked for hours and hours only to have your Adobe, Quark or Microsoft file crap out due to some unknown bogyman? If you use Adobe CS4, QuarkXPress 8, and Microsoft Office, Insider Software’s Smasher will be a smart addition to your arsenal of DTP tools
  • Adobe Photoshop File Recovery The worst nightmare of the graphic artist and photographer is having a photo file or Photoshop file refuse to open — or the entire card refuses to open — or the card appears to be empty. It happens to a lot of people. Disk Doctors’ Photo Recovery software now has enhanced support for recovering Adobe Photoshop files.
  • Client Folder Maker Any business where computers are used in the production of client work must have competent tracking, and archiving of those client work work files. Here’s one of particular note for DTPers, movie production or web designers
  • Apple blocking Push Notifications? Careful: if you’re using a so-called “hacktivated” iPhone then many apps you purchase may not work. You call support, or inquire in forums, etc., but the fault may not be the app — but Apple’s ‘push’ servers actually blocking your querry. PoweryBase has tracking data …
  • Toys with AUGMENTED REALITY You knew it was coming — it was only a question of time. Mattel has demonstrated a new line of action figures based on the upcoming epic action-adventure film, “Avatar”, that will include virtual reality linked through immersive technologies.
  • Barcodes for QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign Chartbot Barcodes is the only Quark / InDesign barcode package that lets users generate 1D, 2D and postal barcodes directly within their favourite variable-data extended technology module without using barcode fonts.
  • iPhone Barcode Scanner (Free) There are so many uses for a barcode scanner in today’s world, if you’re an iPhone user, take a serious look at the Cyclops — simply click the scan button, take a picture of the barcode, and Cyclops does the rest.
  • Clipart for Pages and iWork Jumsoft has expanded its selection of Pages Clipart images designed to illustrate presentations, invitations, Web pages, posters, newsletters, and a variety of other documents.
  • Free Comics Keynote Theme For those Keynote users out there, here’s a free Keynote theme that will put your presentation in the Comics. While not necessarily recommended for all topics, this new theme sports numerous cool features, and will captivate your audience
  • WebShot Accurate Web Capture For years we’ve wanted a good, accurate means of capturing pages from the web. A screen grab gives us a single big-mapped graphic. Printing to PDF gives us some text and some graphics, but they are impossible to break apart. But that may all be changing.
  • Employee Monitoring for Mac In today’s economy, employers are becoming more and more sensitive to the productivity of their employees. To some, it seems like an invastion of privacy. But the bottom line of a business depends on making every minute count.
  • 4 Ways to Edit the Read-only PDF files China’s Gerry Jingrong provides some ideas for working with read-only Adobe Acrobat PDF files — what do you do when you need to edit or revise an un-editable PDF file?
  • Taking payment Online Do you sell anything on your web site? Sanjou Gokhool takes a brief look at options available for taking payment online – PayPal, Merchant, Accounts, credit card processing, Verisign and other ecommerce transactions
  • Give’er the Juicz You lifted off from Dulles three hours ago, you’re somewhere over Utah — your laptop is dead, and your presentation is not done yet. Sound familiar? Do you travel with your MacBook? Do you dread snooping around for a power outlet — then digging out the cables and charger? Don’t you wish you didn’t have to be tethered to a wall outlet and had another five hours? Well, here’ya go …
  • EOS Digital Rebel Companion Learn how to take pro-quality shots with your Canon EOS Digital Rebel T1i/500 and get your digital photography questions answered — it’s the Canon EOS Digital Rebel T1i/500D field guide with expert author Ben Long
  • Architectural Photography Adrian Schulz shows you the finer points of Architectural Photography — Composition, Capture, and Digital Image Processing and how architects are discovering exciting new opportunities to present and market their work.
  • MacBook Air External Battery/Charger Remember the days when we had all kinds of schemes to get from one coast to the other on a single laptop battery charge? Then, with more powerful Laptops, we resorted to taking along an extra battery. QuickerTek’s extended life battery changes all that for the MacBook Air
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  • Copyright Fees Changing If you’re a publisher, writer, author, artist or other creative who uses copyright in your pursuits then you’ll want to take notice of new upcoming U.S. Copyright Office changes. New fees are scheduled to take effect on Aug. 1, 2009.
  • $90M Text Spam Suit In an unprecedented ruling, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has announced that publishing giant Simon & Schuster could be on the hook for as much as $90 million for sending unwanted text messages to tens of thousands of people.
  • Court Tests Fair Use When the recording industry launched more than 30,000 lawsuits against people accused of illegally downloading music, it turned into a public-relations nightmare. Columbia Law School Alumni examines cutting-edge copyright Issues that may affect you in the future.
  • The Dark Side of Social Networking When it comes to social networking, it’s not what you know, or even who you know, it’s who knows you. ZATZ Publishing, in partnership with FrontLine Security Magazine has released David Gewirtz’s latest Special Report, The Dark Side of Social Networking
  • Intelligent Touchwall Debuts The next generation of multi-touch surface computing was introduced by Schematic as the Information Hub of Cannes Lions International Ad Festival. This technology is awesome and offers a new world of high-definition, interactive information delivery. Schematic’s intelligent, multi-user “Touchwall” is one to watch!
  • New Version of Artlandia SymmetryWorks If you use Adobe Illustrator, and have a taste for patterns, the new SymmetryWorks 5 is for you — it significantly simplifies the creation of repeat patterns the popular pattern design plug-in for Adobe Illustrator
  • Illustrator 3D Folding Strata Enfold 3D CX allows users to create professional folded 3D designs within Adobe Illustrator. Users can utilise linked Photoshop graphics applied to 2D Illustrator artwork, define die-cut lines and folding scores, and then see it in 3D within Illustrator.
  • Shaderlight rendering plug-in When we saw some of the results of this new program we were impressed. ArtVPS Shaderlight 0.1, interactive Shaderlight rendering plug-in for 3ds Max, delivers significant productivity and creativity improvements over traditional ray-trace rendering engines
  • Sandvox Website Creator Updated There’s a new version of Sandvox, the award-winning web design software for Mac OS X. A showcase of website designs for Sandvox is available, featuring dozens of commercial and free designs available for installation over and above the fifty designs included in the program.
  • iPhone Development Opportunities As the world of iPhone plug-ins continues to expand, it represents viable and lucrative career opportunities for computer savvy developers. EDUmobile has launched an iPhone Online Course to meet the shortage of information resources and training. Candidates earn certification on completion and an option to co-publish their first app on the App Store and keep 80% of the revenues.
  • Password Fatigue IT Security professionals admit that they are suffering from password fatigue when it comes to using their mobile devices, which leaves their data exposed to personal and corporate identity theft if these devices were to fall into the wrong hands.
  • Nikon D700 Guide Learn your new camera RIGHT! Mastering the Nikon D700 provides a wealth of information and professional insights for owners of this powerful new camera. Each chapter explores the features and capabilities of the D700 in detail
  • Beautiful Security Beautiful Security, edited by Andy Oram and John Viega, today’s security experts describe bold and extraordinary methods used to secure computer systems in the face of ever-increasing threats.
  • Android Application Development Android Application Development – Programming with the Google SDK by Rick Rogers, John Lombardo, Zigurd Mednieks, and Blake Meike, introduces this programming environment — including the operating system and SDK
  • Even Faster Web Sites Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site’s performance — another important title for web publishers
  • Complete Web Monitoring Alistair Croll and Sean Power, demonstrate how to measure every aspect of your web presence. You’ll understand what it is and how to do it. Essential for web publishers
  • FontAgent now Bundles Open Type Fonts Insider Software and Bitstream have partnered to bring a bundle of professional OpenType fonts from Bitstream’s extensive professional Open Type font collection to purchasers of FontAgent Pro Plus for Macintosh and Windows. The collection contains well-defined kerning pairs, full Character Sets,and reliable metadata, and includes book and text fonts, creative and display fonts, script and handwriting fonts, mono-width fonts and symbol and dingbat fonts.
  • Top Level Domains – ICANN pushes forward ICANN and internet domain news and updates — The Second Interim Report of the Board Review Working Group has been presented and ICANN appears to be moving forward to offer huge range of new top level domains — allow almost any string of letters to be used for a global gTLD! This and other news from the world of internet DNS and Domains
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  • Shareware publishing power Do you market a shareware product? Ergonis Software has produced SharewarePublisher a new software submission tool and assistant for Mac OS X — makes submitting software applications to leading software listing sites and repositories incredibly easy. SharewarePublisher ships with almost 200 pre-configured shareware sites, with carefully hand-tuned ratings/priorities.
  • Invoicing on the Mac OS X Involer, the home and small business invoicing application has been updated and now offers many new features including a new ‘Reports’ feature, that allows users to create custom reports of their invoicing history, perfect for keeping track of company sales, and earnings. Praised for being one of the easiest to use invoicing applications, Involer is gradually transforming into one of the top players in the Mac invoicing field.
  • Keep Your Word upgraded Keep Your Word lets you build your own dictionary, classifying and grouping the terms exactly how you want to, while helping you to learn the longest list of words thanks to its different exercise modes. Keep Your Word supports all the character sets that your Mac supports, so you can write any word in the world.
  • 9,000 USBs at the Dry Cleaners 9,000 USBs at the Dry Cleaners — Data hung out to dry as 9,000 USBs left in Dry Cleaners — a survey released by Texas based data security experts Credant Technologies is a wake-up call to keep your eye on your stuff!
  • Photoshop CS4 Photographer’s Handbook Photoshop CS4 Photographer’s Handbook a clear and effective workflow for editing photographs in Photoshop CS4 by Stephen Laskevitch, Luminous Works and Adobe Certified Instructor
  • iMovie ’09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual It’s a real pain digging through Apple’s help screens. You get a tidbit here, then go elsewhere for the next tidbit — it’s help obviously written by an engineer who doesn’t actually use the programs. But the Missing Manual concept gives you both the tidbits, and essential task oriented, step by step tutorials that get you off and running in no time!
  • iWork ’09: The Missing Manual This book quickly guides you through everything you need to know about the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous. Unlike those guys, you’ve got real work to do — and you can’t rely on the help files. This is the manual you’ll need.
  • Keynote’s elegant new themes Who would have thought such elegance would come from Lithuania??? Keynote Zone has launched their new theme resource specifically for Apple’s Keynote. With a passion for new possibilities, KZ designers combined their creative energy to come up with a package of professionally designed ready-to-use themes for Apple’s Keynote application. Five new Keynote themes are now available for sale in standard or HD formats at brand new Keynote Zone site.
  • End Boring Presentations We’ve written about FotoMagico before. Now, FotoMagico 3 raises the bar for all storytelling software for digital photographers. FotoMagico 3 introduces many new features to create professional slideshows in pristine quality. FotoMagico 3 makes it easy to mix photos with HD movies as provided by many recent DSLRs. With support for multiple audio tracks and an integrated audio recorder, every show can be enhanced with soundtrack, audio effects and narration.
  • PDF into Web Site with new publishing platform Here’s a novel idea — PDF into Web Site with new publishing platform simple, self-service solution — PageTurnPro transforms PDFs into online publications in five minutes. Be sure to check out the demos, and turn the pages with your mouse!
  • Auto-serialization for InDesign Zevrix Solutions has updated their InPreflight Pro, the quality control, packaging automation and file info reporting solution for Adobe InDesign. InPreflight quickly gathers extensive information about document fonts, colors and links and lets users instantly locate potential problems according to preflight presets. The new version allows system administrators to automatically serialize InPreflight Pro for large-scale distribution.
  • New iWeb Themes iWebTemplate has added a bunch of new iWeb themes for anyone who uses Apple’s Website building application, iWeb. iWeb Themes 4.0 includes five new great themes: Blossoms, Couple, Eyes Fire, Garden and Theatre. Each iWeb theme has ten templates instead of the ordinary eight. The new release extends iWebTemplate’s iWeb themes collection up to eighty one themes. Each iWeb template incorporates a number of different graphic elements which can be easily removed, moved and changed.
  • Ultimate Theme for RapidWeaver If you use RapidWeaver, check out TW002 r4, a new Ultimate Theme for RapidWeaver 4. seyDoggy has transformed this once limited theme into a versatile RapidWeaver template capable of fitting the needs of just about any industry. TW002 is ExtraContent enabled, featuring width options, split navigation, comprehensive color control, custom headers, header effects, font control, and RWmultitool ready.
  • DATAform for InDesign CS4 and QuarkXPress 8 The DATAform module for both InDesign CS4 and QuarkXPress 8 now provides a bi-directional connection between a user’s database and the layout application. Any InDesign or QuarkXPress boxes and all of their properties can be defined within simple ASCII-text — awesome desktop publishing power!
  • Contact grabber Mac OS X WhoPaste is a contact grabber utility for Mac OS X that supports creating contacts in Google Contacts, Entourage, or the Mac OS X Address Book. Version 1.1 extends the power of WhoPaste to spreadsheets allowing the extraction of multiple contacts in a single keystroke.
  • Voice-To-Text for iPhone QuickVoice PRO Recorder 1.1 is a popular recorder featuring high tech Voice-to-Text emailing. QuickVoice’s Voice-to-Text technology is powered by SpinVox, the world’s largest commercial speech platform. QuickVoice Pro users will be able to use their iPhones to record short voice messages, which are automatically converted to perfectly formatted text emails by SpinVox and sent to the email inbox of the user’s choice.
  • PopChar Reverse Searching for Fonts Thousands of Mac users have for years used PopChar for finding and inserting special characters. PopChar now allows reverse searching, i.e., searching for fonts that contain a particular character — even jump directly to the marked character in a favored font.
  • Get Framed for iPhone and iPod Touch here comes another great app for iPhone and iPod Touch where you crop, scale, enhance, and frame any photo in your Photo Gallery. You get 96 themed frames in twelve categories designed specifically to spice up your iPhone experience — so Get Framed
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  • Hip Effects for Final Cut Pro CrumplePop’s Freemeo is a stylish new HD title effects package for Final Cut Pro. With Freemeo, you can instantly create trendy pink, yellow, blue, and white titles and lower thirds without leaving Final Cut Pro. Freemeo is a suite of Final Cut Pro Master Templates, and works with most standard HD resolutions, including 1920×1080 and 1280×720. Freemeo can be downloaded for free on the CrumplePop web site.
  • Flash on Tap Flash on Tap, May 28-30 in Boston, will hold a private screening of Oscar-nominated, and Golden Globe award-winning Flash animated documentary feature, Waltz with Bashir. Director of Animation, Yoni Goodman to present the film and discuss the unique Flash-cutout animation technique created for the feature.
  • MacSnapper Creates Tutorials MacSnapper was developed specifically for creating step-by-step tutorials, manuals, kiosks, user guides or even personal notes. MacSnapper will organize everything necessary to describe a project. Screenshots may be taken directly from the application, or images may be easily imported.
  • Vector Drawing for OS X Chromatic Bytes, LLC today announces the immediate availability of ZeusDraw 1.3.3, an update to its Mac OS X vector drawing program. ZeusDraw sports a fluid, graceful interface, great brushes and a host of other features.
  • High-Speed scanning for Mac ExactScan 2 for Mac OS X adds an OCR engine and barcode recognition to create searchable PDF documents on-the-fly.
  • Scanning with a digital camera If you can take a picture of something with your camera, you don’t need to buy a scanner. Prizmo corrects lens distortion and perspective, it can scan documents of all sizes, including custom portrait and landscape documents indoor and outdoor photographs. This is a handy application — especially for iPhone users
  • The Page Director Ad Layout System The Page Director Ad Layout System is an automated page-planning solution, optimized for compatibility with Adobe Creative Suite 4, and QuarkXPress 8.0. It now includes a convenient new print designer, which allows users to design and print custom ad dummies, resulting in printouts that conform to each publication’s specific requirements.
  • Graphic Designer Toolbox Targeted at professional web designers and artists, GraphicDesignerToolbox is a unique and powerful graphics editor for generating textures, composing logos, photo manipulation, text effects and web graphics. It features adjustable building blocks which allow for extensive tweaking and re-use, of modular visual components.
  • GraphicConverter Upgraded We’ve enjoyed the benefits of owning GraphicConverter for over a decade. This famous and popular image editing and conversion utility for Mac OS X has now been enhanced and upgraded with support for bio-formats
  • Recover lost photos and tunes When you lose your photos because of a fouled memory stick or card, you feel like you’ve lost part of your life. Actually, you have — chances are, you’ll never get that moment back to take those shots again. If this disaster happens to you, hopefully you’ll remember this alert about Advanced Photo Recovery for Mac OS X.
  • Review: iWork 09 The Missing Manual User group editor Hartley Jackson reviews a new Missing Manual book — iWork 09 The Missing Manual — Hartley says: “Josh Clark has written this book to show us how to do what we want to do in iWork.”
  • Master SQL Fundamentals Updated for the latest database management systems — including MySQL 6.0, Oracle 11g, and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 — Beaulieu’s guide will get you up and running with SQL quickly.
  • InPreflight Pro and Studio Zevrix Solutions is back with powerful applications for Adobe InDesign. This time they present InPreflight, its quality control, packaging automation and preflight reporting solution for Adobe InDesign.
  • PhotographyTips for iPhone We often say now “we’ve seen it all” with some of these iPhone plug-ins and apps, but this just about takes the cake. Cheese cake, that is. PhotographyTips has released the first guide for posing female models for iPhone users. What will they think of next!!!
  • A Light Panel In Your Pocket Here’s a novel idea for the photographers and cinematographers of the world — using your iPhone as a photo light! It’s a natural! LightSource is the first iPhone and iPod Touch application that transforms the device into a light panel with user selectable light temperatures and types.
  • Hand-Drawn HD Effects for Final Cut Pro Here’s a pretty cool idea for creatives — CrumplePop, a set of high-quality, hand-made, pen-and-ink elements that can be easily dropped directly onto the Final Cut Pro timeline. With CrumplePop, you can easily drag and drop high-quality hand-drawn elements into any HD or SD project. Whether you are producing for film, broadcast, or video podcasts, CrumplePop gives gives you access to the highly sought-after hand-drawn visual style.
  • PhotoUpLink 1.2 for iPhoto Developer Mark Morris has announced PhotoUpLink 1.2 for iPhoto. This iPhoto plugin enables S/FTP, ODBC, and Office export, and now includes the ability to export over WiFi to any iPhone or iPod Touch running PhotoUpLink.
  • Interactive charts for Mac friedEgg Touch is an interactive data analysis tool for Mac OS X with interactive features to simplify the analysis of tables of potentially complicated data. Charts can easily be created and changed by just dragging data columns to the chart dimensions. Then you interact with data by directly manipulating the chart.
  • Money accounting gets better for Mac Leopard You may recall our reviews of Money personal and small-business accounting application some time ago — we liked its looks and works. Well, Jumsoft has updated Money again, adding some new and user friendly options along with language localizations, and the invoice creation tool, Invoice Templates Editor.
  • Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference A tough economy can be a great opportunity to increase skill sets and make valuable contacts — like the 3rd annual Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference, to be held April 27-30, 2009, at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco.
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  • Cell Phone: At Risk 80% of phone users store information on their phones that could easily be used to steal their identities … 4.2 million are believed to be vulnerable to ID Theft in UK — a warning from Credant that mobile phone users are loading the device that could blow their world apart
  • Online image editors the top ten online image editors Phoenix Image Editor, Adobe Photoshop Express, LunaPic, Obamanize — good stuff! We’ll even show you some of our favorite samples.
  • PhotoFreebies plug-ins for Photoshop The Plugin Site has upgraded to Version 2.0 of PhotoFreebies for Windows. PhotoFreebies 2 is a collection of 12 Photoshop-compatible plugins for performing simple but useful photo adjustments and effects. They can be used with more than 60 different image editing applications e.g. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Photo-Paint, PhotoImpact and many others.
  • The Droplet Song Deke McClelland Is Singing in the Droplets — The Droplet Song–The Next Hilarious Music Video is now on dekePod – Deke is the author of over 80 books and a popular lecturer on Adobe Photoshop and the larger realm of computer graphics and design
  • Search Engine Optimization for Flash For years the major misconception is that Flash-based applications are SEO-unfriendly and can’t be indexed by search engines. And that’s the myth Flash expert Todd Perkins dispels in this highly anticipated new Adobe Developer Library book
  • Your Book as Your Business Card What is 6″ by 9,” usually weighs roughly one pound, and is giving an increasing number of business leaders an advantage over the competition? A book. ‘The book as a business card’ has added a new and powerful tool for marketing
  • The Nikon D90 Companion Here’s a full-on photography class that covers everything including technical matters and exposure theory, composition theory, and how to find images and expand your visual sense. However, unlike a regular photography class, this book is built specifically around the D90, which means every concept is written about in terms of the D90’s controls and features.
  • Power Printing with iPrint You remember Steve Becker? Well, now he’s rolled out the latest release of iPrint, adding powerful new features to OS X – it enables users to instantly print just the data they select in any program by using a simple keyboard shortcut. IPrint both boosts users productivity and saves them a significant amount of money by reducing the amount of ink, toner, and paper that’s used.
  • Graphic Inspector finds graphic problems Graphic Inspector 1.5.6, is a quality control solution which checks entire folders of graphic files for potential problems. The software lets graphic professionals of any trade instantly get crucial info on multiple graphic files instead of checking them manually.
  • Freeware TeXShop, iPlace and Minimamente Mac Free Freeware reviews continue — now we look at TeXShop a great Tex previewer, iPlace web image browsing manager, and a collection of great desktop icons, called Minimamente, to dress up your OS. This is page two of a three part series.
  • iPhoto Buddy, Burn data, Barbie Adventures Mac Free Freeware reviews continue — now we look at iPhoto Buddy – a great iPhoto add-on, Burn that data for CD/DVD burning, and an off-the-wall little freeware game called Barbie Seahorse Adventures. This is page three of a three part series.
  • Easy timers and counters Having problems keeping track of time — or timing events or schedules? This app provides unique features such as tilt and shake control, timer linking, and customized pictures and text. It comes complete with unique tilt and shake control, timer linking, and provision for customized pictures and text.
  • InPreflight for Adobe InDesign Problem? Getting InDesign files to the printer. Solution: InPreflight the quality control, packaging automation and reporting solution for Adobe InDesign that quickly gathers extensive information about document fonts, colors and links and lets users instantly locate potential problems according to preflight presets — even fonts in all EPS files.
  • ResizeMe again ResizeMe 2 is the latest and greatest batch image and photo editor for Mac OS X Leopard. The new version extends ResizeMe’s image operations to drop shadows, reflections, text watermarks and image format conversions. The new version also offers a completely new user interface featuring a live preview window for users to see all edits before they commit them.
  • Funtastic Photos We wrote about Funtastic before — now it’s been upgraded with 37 modifications and 7 all new features! Funtastic Photos is a user friendly photo editor for the Mac for non-permanent and easily reversible photo effects, and over 50 simple to use 1-Click Styles
  • Screen Graphics Editing Tools for Designers Opacity streamlines the image creation workflow by combining a great vector editor and pixel editor with native support for all screen graphics formats. Version 1.3 adds an improved Pen Tool, improved Text editing, and several other new features that makes Opacity even better for designers.
  • Posterino gets new features Easy editor creates photo collages, frames, postcards, greeting cards and contact sheets from digital images — supports auto-placement of photos, export of posters or postcards, custom template creation, and various image manipulation routines such as cropping and rotation.
  • Color Efex Pro for Lightroom Color Efex Pro is now compatible with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom — photographic filters for retouching and creative enhancements. The update is free to current owners of Color Efex Pro 3.0. (Site features some really helpful video training!)
  • TAGA’s 61st Annual Technical Conference The Technical Association of the Graphic Arts (TAGA) has announced the keynote speakers for its 61st Annual Technical Conference taking place on March 15 – 18 in New Orleans

  • Nikon Creative Lighting Nothing can ruin a good photograph faster than a rude flash exposure. Flash photography has become an art in itself and should be mastered by all aspiring photographers. Nikon owners, and those with cameras that can use the Nikon lighting components should get this book, study it, and improve your photography 100%
  • Scanning Negatives and Slides Scanning Negatives and Slides you will learn how to achieve the best possible digital image from a negative or slide, and how to build a workflow to make this process efficient, repeatable, and reliable.
  • Photographic Multishot Techniques Photographic Multishot Techniques — the potential of high dynamic range imaging (HDRI). Now, the newest techniques based on a bracketed series of exposures make it possible to go beyond HDRI: photographers can increase resolution for ultra-sharp, detailed images, and they can extend the depth of field
  • Easy invoicing for business For the small business or consulting firm, Involer is a simple, easy to use invoicing application for Mac OS X where you can create, print, export and track the status of your invoices within a single, easy to use interface. With Involer, you can be up and running with your company in just a few seconds, and sending invoices in minutes.
  • Free iMedia Browser for Macs Karelia Software has released version 1.1.3 of the Karelia iMedia Browser, a free utility that adds the familiar “media browser” experience to just about any Mac application. Version 1.1.3 enhances searching, now including searches of keywords and comments in iPhoto libraries, and fixes an issue with redundant search results from iTunes. Version 1.1.3 also supports much larger iPhoto libraries.
  • Adobe InDesign Font Catalog One of the dreads of InDesign users is getting to their fonts. Chris Paveglio has possibly solved at least some of the woes with his new InDesign Font Catalog. InDesign users should check this out.
  • Adobe InDesign Auto pricing AutoPrice for Adobe InDesign CS4 and QuarkXPress on both the Macintosh and PC platforms is a powerful yet easy-to-use plug-in module that streamlines the updating of prices and similar information in InDesign and Quark documents.
  • Adobe InDesign LinkOptimizer LinkOptimizer is a workflow automation solution to optimize link size and resolution for Adobe InDesign. LinkOptimizer allows to reduce the size of InDesign jobs and increase the processing speed by eliminating excessive image data.
  • Layered Screen Captures Layers 1.0 is a unique screen capturing utility for Mac OS X — screenshots captured in Layers are Adobe PhotoShop compatible
  • Download and Create Web Photo Galleries Just point HyperImage to any website, and watch as thousands of pictures stream down to your computer.
  • High Rez backgrounds for Photographers Are you a photographer? Do you create previews for clients? Art Fotografic’s Album DS is the easiest, most feature-complete tool for professional photographers to produce panoramic albums. Now, they have introduced 125 beautiful, all new, high resolution backgrounds.
  • Build Web Sites Like a Pro Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS widely regarded as the definitive beginner’s guide to building web sites. This step-by-step guide takes you from scratch, through the basic tools, right on up to a fully functioning web site.
  • The Google Way The Google Way – how one company is changing the way we think about business – Google is already a household name, and the verb *google* has become a part of the international lexicon. But how do they do it, and will they continue to succeed?
  • Motionographer Announces 2009 F5 F5, an initiative of Motionographer, is a new festival exploring the intersection of art, design and entertainment.
  • iPhone ColorSplash Some popular graphic photo retouching techniques once available only to Photoshop users now comes to the iPhone! ColorSplash is a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets users give photos a dramatic look.
  • Get Yourself Connected Network Know-How is every computer user’s guide to designing, mapping, and maintaining a trouble-free network. Author and veteran networking consultant John Ross takes readers through the nuts and bolts of networks
  • Anti-theft for your Mac Here’s a unique new twist on protection of your Mac and your data.
  • InPreflight for InDesign Zevrix Solutions announces the release of InPreflight 2.6.3, a maintenance update to its quality control and packaging automation solution for Adobe InDesign.
  • Picturesque for Mac OS X If you haven’t seen Picturesque, then you should. The new 2.1 is a major update to the Apple Design Award winning image beautifying application. Picturesque makes images look gorgeous for the web, adding Web 2.0 style effects.

  • TypeTrax for Adobe InDesign TypeTrax is a new product for managing design projects created using Adobe Creative Suite. Developed jointly by Insider Software and Moksa, Inc., TypeTrax manages projects, and tracks, organizes and pre-flights project files, including fonts and digital assets.
  • Hydra HDR Imaging Hydra goes beyond the physical limitations of camera sensors. From a series of regular photographs of the same scene, Hydra creates an High Dynamic Range image which is much closer to what one can actually see.
  • Photographic Multishot Techniques Photographic Multishot Techniques — the potential of high dynamic range imaging (HDRI). Now, the newest techniques based on a bracketed series of exposures make it possible to go beyond HDRI: photographers can increase resolution for ultra-sharp, detailed images, and they can extend the depth of field
  • Mellel word processor for Mac OS X RedleX has released Mellel 2.6, a major update to the leading word processor for Mac OS X. Mellel does it differntly. And better.
  • Wikipedia on Wikipedia Wikipedia: The Missing Manual by John Broughton is available for free online for editing and updating just like any other Wikipedia entry. Book viewers will be able to do all the same things they do on any other wiki: view the document, edit it, add to it–in short, whatever they want.
  • Creating a Web Site Think you need an army of skilled programmers to build a website? Think again. With this book, in the true tradition of Missing Manual books, you’ll learn how to create Web pages using all of today’s important tools…
  • Head First Web Design Want to know how to make your pages look beautiful, communicate your message effectively, guide visitors through your website with ease?
  • BusyCal calendar sharing a new Mac OS X desktop calendar application designed for sharing calendars on a LAN and syncing with Google Calendar. BusyCal combines the calendar sharing and synchronization technology from its award winning BusySync, with a beautiful desktop calendar interface that is instantly recognizable to iCal users – all in one easy to use integrated application.
  • GPS Enabled Activity Tracking rubiTrack is a full-featured GPS enabled activity tracking software for the Mac. Utilizing latest Mac UI technologies, rubiTrack lets you display, analyze and organize your outdoor activities. rubiTrack is for runners, bikers, walkers, hikers, skiers and everyone else who logs GPS data. rubiTrack reads tracks from GPS enabled devices like the Garmin Forerunner, Garmin Edge, AMOD GPS Trackers and Nike+iPod and the iPhone 3G.
  • Grants for tech savvy Schools Canvastic continue their search for school districts that are technology leaders nationwide. Districts will be awarded licenses of Canvastic version 3.5 valued from $10K to $200K or more.
  • 2008 Mod Of The Year The Mod of the Year award for 2008 is given to the Mac-related modification that best captures the imagination of a panel of judges who must rate it based on creativity, difficulty, and functionality. This year the Mod of the Year is a pre-AGP Macintosh hacked to run Leopard.
  • Pick Zits on iPhone Just when you think you’ve seen everything, Candywriter pushes the boundaries of the novelty app a little further with its release of Zit Picker. With two fingers and an iPhone or iPod touch, Zit Picker allows players to keep the lovely Veronica’s face beautiful and her complexion clean. Players must pinch, pop, and pick Veronica’s zits before the stress becomes too much and makes her cry. As the game progresses, zits come faster.
  • Infrastructure: Local to Global Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth will be joined by ESRI, Autodesk, Adobe and other industry leaders at the GeoWeb 2009 — taking place July 27-31, 2009
  • An Event Apart An Event Apart has launched a newly designed and developed website to communicate 2009 speakers and locations. The site sports a redesign created by Jeffrey Zeldman and coded by Eric Meyer.
  • Ringtones to Help Children of Nepal iRingPro iPhone Ringtones to Help Children of Nepal a portion of every iPhone ringtone sale going forward will benefit Children of Nepal, an organization that provides education, meals and medical care, to impoverished Nepali children.
  • Performance Testing The Art of Application Performance Testing explains the complete life cycle of the testing process, and demonstrates best practices to help you plan, gain approval for, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications.

  • Lean Software Development Lean software development can dramatically increase productivity and quality. Lean principles are being applied successfully to product design, engineering, the supply chain, and now software development.
  • Mac Poster Machine I wrote about Posterino some time ago when it first came out. Now I’ve been using the latest update to make posters of ‘famous’ newspaper front pages announcing the Obama election win for holiday gifts to my democrat friends! Once oversized art is produced, just upload to your local Kinkos for output on the wide-format printer. Posterino is so cool, you at least should download the demo and see for yourself!
  • Free Graphics Software We’ve selected the best and most fun graphics add-on software you can get for the Mac … for FREE! Try some of these — we think you’ll like them
  • Create stunning image montage animations Create stunning image montage animations instantly in After Effects CS3, Final Cut Studio or Final Cut Express. Four awesome CoreMelt plugin packs into one package – Download the free trial and receive 8 free plugins plus Glass Slices, Slice Across, Random Crop Transition, and faster native field rendering.
  • ContrastMaster for MacOS X ContrastMaster is a plugin for effective contrast enhancement as well as creating dramatic contrast looks, photorealistic paintings and HDR-like effects. It can turn low-contrast photos into vivid and detailed images and transforms ordinary photos into interesting and dynamic shots.
  • The Leadership Vacuum What will we lose with the next generation? Nick Tasler, TalentSmart’s global research leader takes a look at the future’s work force and what exactly constitutes a high quality leader — but what he finds is a huge gap between Boomers and Millennials in self-management.
  • PowerPoint Tips: Keep Your Audience Awake Three articles from CIO present a collection of PowerPoint tips and presentation techniques you can learn to improve your presentations –
  • Run BASIC Run BASIC allows you to apply your desktop programming skills to create web applications without struggling with the overhead of typical web programming frameworks.
  • How fast is your internet? PCMag.com Best ISPs in America… To uncover the nation’s best ISPs, PCMag utilized the custom-designed SurfSpeed application (a utility that grabs pages from several popular Web sites to measure actual Internet surfing speed
  • To-do list to the next level TaskPaper is a simple yet surprisingly adept list maker. TaskPaper takes the humble to-do list to the next level with sophisticated presentation, data entry capabilities, and powerful retrieval. Yet, it retains the full power and interoperability of a plain text document.
  • Cyber Safety News Wrap As we wrap the year to an end, there are important issues to keep an eye on in the year to come. Cyber crime ranks high on that list, as does the ongoing fight against child safety on the net. Then, social networking, home and online video gaming, digital connectivity and cyber government will rank next.
  • Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces Have you seen Apple’s Front Row application and Cover Flow effects? Then you’ve seen Core Animation at work. It’s about making applications that give strong visual feedback through movement and morphing, rather than repainting panels. Now, create your own…
  • Using Drupal When reviewing CMS systems for new blogs, and web sites, I made the mistake of trying out Drupal and Joomla. Both programs are miserably complicated — to the point that clients didn’t want to use them. Developers and programmers are scarce and expensive. If you plan on using Drupal, you’re going to need help.
  • Designing Gestural Interfaces Tap is the New Click — An internationally known thought leader on design, Saffer covers kinesiology, sensors, ergonomics, physical computing, touchscreen technology, and new interface patterns–all you need to know
  • Coding4Fun Dan Fernandez and Bran Peek, help you tackle some cool software and hardware projects, using a range of free Microsoft software. You can code for fun with C#, VB, Lua, ASP.NET, WPF, XNA Game Studio, and Popfly… If you love to tinker but don’t have time to figure it all out, this book is for you

See 2008 &Else News Archives