DesignAday

A Storm’s a Brewin’!

There are dark clouds on the horizon—Adobe’s Creative Cloud, to be specific. Many seem shocked at the news, but I saw it coming. Given Adobe’s behavior in recent years, it was a forgone conclusion that they would eventually move to a subscription-only model. I’ve been dreading it. They just dropped the bomb.

Shantanu Narayen can try to legitimize the move all he wants, but he will have a hard time convincing me that this is about anything other than Adobe making more money. Sure, I understand that if you buy the entire Creative Suite (CS) and upgrade it every year, the Creative Cloud (CC) subscription would be significantly cheaper. I don’t. I work for a company that is mostly made up of software engineers. As I understand it, their software cost per head is significantly less than mine. It has been a challenge at times to get my software upgraded. Given that the upgrades to Adobe’s products over the past several years have only provided minor improvements to the features that I use regularly, I don’t mind skipping versions. I generally upgrade every other major version. I use their Design Standard suite, made up of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro, and a few odds and ends. This has been my core set of tools since Adobe acquired Macromedia and did away with Freehand. I wouldn’t be able to justify $50 per month for my personal use.

However, their education pricing may be my saving grace. If I sign up by June 25th, I’ll get it for $20 per month—$240 for the year. That’s not a bad deal at all. I assume it will then go up to $360 for a year.

My biggest concern, of course, is what my company will do. We just upgraded to CS6, and we had to pay full price for it, due to Adobe’s change to their upgrade policies. Then there is the Mac Mini that I use on my company’s secure network. It never touches the internet. Narayen claims that CC will work on disconnected machines. I’m expecting to have to jump through hoops to get it to do so.

Causing even more of a kerfuffle in Interaction Design circles is their decision to kill off Fireworks. I never used it, as I was so proficient with the tools I had, switching never seemed worthwhile. I know, though, that many IxDers swear by it. I’m given to understand that it was a near-perfect tool for mocking up screens in multiple states, due to the timeline that was actually included for creation of web animations. If you are a Fireworks devotee, you have my deepest sympathies. I know what it’s like to have your favorite tool executed by Adobe.

The thing is, Adobe has a monopoly on design software. When they acquired Macromedia, they took out their only true rival. Yes, Corel is hanging in there, but they were never a serious threat. I never got the hang of QuarkXPress, and I rarely hear anyone mention it anymore. Newer startups like Acorn have a greater chance of winning over we jaded Adobe disciples.

Given the years of experience with the tools, not to mention the vast archive of files created with them, how am I to switch to other software without seriously impacting my productivity? If Adobe says jump, what choice do I have but to ask how high? But I already know the answer: to the clouds.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Scrubby Zoom

Photoshop CS5 changed the default behavior of the zoom tool, which of course I am now experiencing for the first time in CS6. It was quite a surprise the first time I tried to drag out a marquee around the area to which I wanted to zoom in. Instead, the image dynamically zoomed in on the spot I first clicked as I dragged the cursor across the screen. When you have been using a tool as long as I have, actions like this are deeply ingrained, and the change was a shock. Of course, I immediately disliked it. I continued to dislike it as I repeatedly forgot and tried to draw out my zoom marquee, thus zooming in on the wrong part of the image.

But, being an Interaction Designer, I know that they must have made the change believing it to be a good idea. I did some quick Googling and learned that the feature is called “scrubby zoom”. I learned that I can turn it off by selecting the zoom tool and unchecking the scrubby zoom checkbox in the tool options bar. I never actually select the zoom tool, instead using the command+spacebar and command+option+spacebar key commands to temporarily switch to it, so I’m not sure I would have discovered the setting on my own.

So, safe with the knowledge that I can always switch back to the way it used to be, I started playing with scrubby zoom. After all, I adapted to Apple’s reversal of the scroll direction easily enough. Scrubby zoom is actually quite elegant, even if its name is not, and if I can get my brain to remember to click in the center of the area I want to zoom in on, rather than the top-left corner, I think it’s going to be a more efficient method. The one oddity is that I am able to zoom out until my entire document is about two pixels wide. It seems to me they should limit that, as it makes more room for error than it does utility.

Designer’s Toolbelt: iMac

I’ve now had my new 27” iMac for a couple months, so I think it’s time to give a short review. The screen is absolutely gorgeous. It is, bar none, the best computer display I’ve eve seen. It’s bright, sharp, and the colors are brilliant. It makes the two older Apple LCDs that straddle it seem dim and muddy, and I’ve always considered them to be good displays. Of course, it’s huge, which is fantastic for both Photoshop and World of Warcraft.

The iMac is fast. I beefed up the RAM and the graphics card, and I got the top-of-the-line processor, so I would expect it to be, but I think the Fusion Drive is making a big difference. That’s the hybrid drive that intelligently combines solid state storage with a standard mechanical drive, automatically moving the most often used files and applications onto the solid state portion for optimized performance. System startup and application launching is noticeably speedy.

There is no DVD drive. So far, this has not been a problem. I still have an iMac in the house with a DVD drive, and it’s set up to share it, so the one or two times that I’ve had to mount removable media have been a very minor annoyance.

The biggest issue was the removal of the Firewire ports. My Drobo was connected to the Mac Pro via Firewire, but it is now connected to one of the iMac’s USB ports. I’ve definitely observed a decrease in its performance, especially when starting iPhoto or when the screensaver kicks in and accesses my photo library on it. I also had an external Firewire hard drive that I’m currently not able to use.

Eventually, I hope to make more use of Thunderbolt, but it only has two of those ports, which are currently occupied by two 20” Apple Cinema Displays. So far, I haven’t seen any good options for a Thunderbolt hub. I’m sure there will be such a thing eventually, but they’ll likely be expensive.

In conclusion, I’m very happy with my purchase. I consider it to be a professional-grade machine, and I expect it to serve me well for the next four years or so.

The Problem with Creative Cloud

Hello Adobe. I’m an Interaction Designer with a Graphic Design background. I’ve been using your software since 1992. I depend on Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign for my day-to-day work. These are my tools of choice, and I’ve had to fight the good fight at times to continue using them. You see, there are forces in industry that don’t always put my needs first. I occasionally have to convince them that my tools—your software—are the exact tools I need, that nothing else will do, and that, yes, they are worth that much money. It’s for this reason that I don’t try to upgrade every time you release a new version.

In the past, you provided upgrade pricing for two full versions back. I’m still using CS4, for various reasons, and I’m now trying to upgrade to CS6. I’ve just discovered that you no longer allow this, so my company will have to pay full-price. And it’s not just for me. My fellow designers are in the same boat, and we all need to maintain version parity so we can share files.

Of course, what you really want is for us to subscribe to Creative Cloud. For many people, I’m sure it’s a bargain, especially those that want access to the full suite of applications. But you see, I do a lot of work for the military. Much of it has security restrictions, so I have two computers I use to do my work. One of them is a MacBook Pro that connects to the internet. The other is a Mac Mini that is on a secure network. It does not have internet access. It is not allowed to touch the internet. Your Creative Cloud applications must phone home once a month to make sure the subscription is still in effect. That won’t work for my situation.

I just wanted you to know that there are very good reasons for not wanting to participate in your subscription model. Making things difficult for me will not convince me to switch to Creative Cloud. They will only cause me to consider alternatives, less capable though they may be.

Just sayin’.

Designer’s Toolbelt: Kaleidoscope

Black Pixel recently released the tool for diffing—that is, finding differences between two documents. I’ve made good use of TextWrangler, a free text editor from BareBones, in the past, and I’ve used the FileMerge tool that comes in Apple’s Xcode extensively. Versions, Black Pixel’s Subversion client, integrates FileMerge, which is quite handy. They are both good tools for finding differences, comparing them, and merging documents.

Black Pixel has designed Kaleidoscope to be the single most useful file comparison tool available. It has three different layout modes for displaying differences in text documents with good search and navigation functions. It integrates with Versions, as well as SourceTree and Tower (both Git clients). This alone makes it a match for other tools, but they didn’t stop there.

Kaleidoscope can compare two different directories as well. In this mode, you can filter the content to find what’s important, clone files between them, and drill down into enclosed folders. Of course, you can double-click any pair of files to compare them.

But wait, there’s more! This tool isn’t just for those of us that can pound out code. Kaleidoscope can compare images. Four layouts allow you to view images one at a time, side-by-side, in a split view, or differenced. It supports PNGs, JPEGs, and Photoshop files.

Until the end of January, they are selling Kaleidoscope at half price: $34.99, and there is a 15 day trial if you want to try it out first.

Five monitors. Three, sir!

You can never have too much screen real estate. While I was a graduate student, back in 1997, I ordered a second video card for my PowerMac 9600. At the time, it was an expensive investment for me, but it allowed me to plug in both my 16” Sony Trinitron display, and the old 12” Apple display that I had left over from the LCII I had as a college freshman. It sounds like an insignificant thing now, but let me tell you, when working in Macromedia Director, the ability to put the score on the 16” and have the stage on the 12” was a big deal! Windows wasn’t even capable of extending its desktop to multiple monitors. From that point, there was no turning back. I eventually got a 17” Apple Studio Display and then a second. I used those two matching CRTs for years. Eventually, they wore out, and I replaced them with Apple’s 20” LCD Cinema Displays. I’ve been using them for many years now.

I got myself a 27” iMac for Christmas. It’s a beautiful thing. The display is absolutely gorgeous, and it’s enormous. And it just happens to have two Thunderbolt ports on the back. You might guess where this is going. I purchased two adapters, and I now have the two 20-inchers straddling the iMac. Perhaps it is a bit decadent, but I’m loving it. You can never have too much screen real estate.

The Perfect Storm: Part 2

As I said, I had checked everything out. So, I proceeded to delete everything off my old computer. I boxed it up and had it ready to ship off to Gazelle for a nice little chunk of change. My new iMac was already backed up to my TIme Machine, so I deleted the backup of my old machine to free up space. Then I made some unfortunate discoveries.

1. None of my application preferences were copied.
2. My keychain wasn’t copied.
3. iTunes said it moved my library, and some of the tracks played just fine, but over 6,000 tracks can’t be found. They are all right where they should be, but iTunes doesn’t recognize them and tries to find my old machine on the network when I try to play them.
4. While I was very careful about transferring all of my received email, I had forgotten about my sent messages. All of the email I sent from my primary email account on my home machine since about 2003 is gone.

Issues 1 and 2 are inconvenient, but not too big a deal. Every time I launch one of my apps for the first time on the new iMac, I have to enter my license key and then set up the application. All of my passwords are stored in 1Password, so losing my keychain only means that every website that I’ve told Safari to remember my credentials for has been forgotten.

Issue number 3 is more of a pain. I could point iTunes to each track individually to fix them all, but that would take forever. Since it tries to connect to a remote server each time, there is a long pause before I’m able to point it to the correct file. And while it should find all the other missing tracks in the same location, it for some reason refuses to recognize them. Luckily, I subscribed to iTunes Match, so I’m just having it redownload all of the missing tracks from iCloud. Then I’ll trash the duplicate files.

Issue number 4 is the real kicker. If I hadn’t been in such a rush to get my old machine off to Gazelle before their offer on it expired, I would have been able to recover the email messages from Time Machine. Then, of course, there was my Backblaze remote backup, from which I should have been able to restore anything. No luck. After the initial Migration Assistant transfer, the new iMac tried to back up to Backblaze identifying itself as my old machine. Soon after, I got a message from Backblaze stating that my backup was locked. Their recommended fix was to delete the existing backup, create a new backup account, transfer my license to the new account, and then back up everything from scratch. I had already started this process. So, while I typically have everything backed up in multiple places, in this particular instance, I had deleted all of my backups. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb!

So there you have it: the perfect storm. I’ll take my lesson from this, and in the future, I won’t be so confident in cutting my lifelines. I hope you, dear reader, can benefit from the warning of my mistakes.

The Perfect Storm: Part 1

I took an extra-long Christmas break from DesignAday this year. I had been quite busy leading up to the holidays, and I just decided to give myself that extra bit of time. I had planned on kicking off the new year last week with a post on the first of the year, but I found myself performing a brain transplant. That is, I was moving from my 4-year-old Mac Pro to my new, 27” iMac.

In the past, I’ve used Apple’s Migration Assistant to move to a new machine, and it has always performed very well for me. Leave the two machines alone with a conjugal ethernet connection for several hours and shazaam! I was able to pick up using the new Mac right where I left off with the retired one. One conciliatory pat, and my faithful, old mare was ready to be put out to pasture. So, when I finally received my iMac between visits to relatives, I was content to hook it up and leave it running for a few days as we trekked off to party with my extended family over New Year’s Eve.

When I returned home, I found that the transfer was done, but it was not complete. All of the applications had been copied over, but none of my settings were, nor was my email. I tried running Migration Assistant again, and while it did run for a few hours, it didn’t seem to accomplish anything. So, I began the meticulous task of manually setting up my system. After spending several evenings working on it, I was satisfied with my thoroughness. I had tested critical applications, made sure that my iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie libraries were intact, and copied over all of my email. I was all set.

I was wrong. 

Designer’s Toolbelt: Type Connection

I’ve found that one of the trickier typographical concepts to teach is the proper selection of multiple typefaces for use within a design. That’s where Aura Seltzer’s Type Connection comes in.

Type Connection is a game that helps you learn how to pair typefaces.

Start by choosing a typeface to pair. Like a conventional dating website, Type Connection presents you with potential “dates” for each main character—without the misleading profile photos and commitment-phobes. The game features well-known, workhorse typefaces and portrays each as a character searching for love. You are the matchmaker. You decide what kind of match to look for by choosing among several strategies for combining typefaces. Along the way, you explore typographic terminology, type history, and more. By playing Type Connection, you deepen your own connection with type.

Type Connection is Aura’s MFA thesis project. Exquisitely designed and crafted, the site is a great example of education through gaming. And if your are really interested in type, make sure you check out her resources page.

This is great work. I’d say she deserves to graduate.

Another Shoebox

I have a number of software tools that I use for collection of digital information. I’ve been using Yojimbo to catalog articles that I want to keep, especially for use in my classes. NoteBook is my preferred tool for organized note taking. NetNewsWire automatically pulls down all of my RSS subscriptions, and iTunes does the same for podcasts. I’m still using Ta-da List to keep track of DesignAday topics, while Wunderlist is my to-do list. And, of course, Delicious holds links that I share with my students. To paraphrase Herb Simon, I’m not lacking information; I’m lacking time to attend to information.

I have come to love the relatively new Reading List feature in Safari. I don’t have to decide immediately whether or not I want to save an article in Yojimbo where I may never actually get around to reading it. It has also become a solution for getting things from my iPhone into Yojimbo. Whereas before I would mail URLs to myself, I now just add them to my reading list. With iCloud, the reading list gets synched between my iPhone, my work laptop, and my home desktop. I do wish the “Add to Reading List” option was available from within NetNewsWire—as it is, I must first tell it to open the page in my browser.

The one problem is that, just like my other collections, the reading list is collecting items to be read faster than I am reading them. I can’t keep up with it. I throw an article in their with the secure knowledge that I won’t lose it, but just like shoeboxes of old photographs, they sit in my internet attic collecting dust. I just purged a number of items from it, and it’s still 57 items long. What I really need is some kind of feature that encourages me to read the items in the list.