You might recall Adobe introduced this great new functionality earlier this year with Flash CS5, allowing Flash developers to build  apps in Flash and then compile them quickly and easily to run on an iPhone or iPad as native apps.  Apple then issued an announcement on almost the same day as the launch that it was changing it’s T’s and C’s so that apps compiled with 3rd party tools (such as Flash) wouldn’t be accepted into the iTunes Store.  There was quite a bit of noise around this at the time as Apple had basically squashed the single biggest new features in Flash CS5 in one go.

Well the good news for Flash developers is that Apple has now reversed this decision having “listened to our developers and taken much of  their feedback to heart”.

It’s never easy doing an about turn and this was a fairly high profile and vocale debate at the time, so the change of direction is great news for Flash developers and will make their life a lot easier (and in my opinion good for Apple, who will have even more people developing iPhone apps now, albeit they had quite a few already).

Over the next month or so we will be finishing off a new one day course on “Developing Mobile Applications with Flash” which will make full use of this and other features.  If you can think of anything in particular you would like to see covered in this course then let us know, as we are very open to suggestions.

For those who haven’t heard of LinkedIn before it is a business networking site with over 70 million members of all levels, and can be a great place to network, find new opportunities and learn from the community (plus it’s free).

The groups which have just gone live are listed below:

- UK Photoshop Users Groups
- UK InDesign Users Groups
- UK Illustrator Users Groups
- UK DreamWeaver Users Groups
- UK PHP Users Groups
- UK Blender Users Groups

It costs nothing to join the groups and hopefully they will become a useful skills / career development tool as more members join.

It looks like not everybody agrees with this position though and John Harding, Engineering Manager at YouTube, has written an interesting post on why “Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube’s video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it”.  With Android now running Flash apps on mobile devices, and Chrome actively improving support for Flash it’s looks like plenty of people agree with John Harding on this, and whilst these examples are all Google based a quick search shows plenty more support from other companies as well.

Easy enough I thought I’ll just go into the control panel/default programs and reset the associations for that file type. When I did this however  .INDD was not even an option in the file types, hence I couldn’t set a default program for it, and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to add a file type to the list  (there may be one but 10 minutes on google didn’t find it).

Like I say this is an irritation more than anything as I can still open files by simply launching indesign and then opening the files from the InDesign menu, but it does mean I can’t just double click the file I want to open and have InDesign spring to life and open it for me.  So I wanted to try and fix it really.

I had a look around and found what seems to be a similar problem in a past version of InDesign (CS2) on a forum (can’t recall where sorry) and they recommended a tool called ccleaner from London based Piriform Ltd (www.piriform.com). I grabbed a copy of this and used it to check the registry and fix issues in it.  I then did  a restart and low and behold .INDD now shows up as an option in the file list under “Associate a file type or protocol with a program”. 2 seconds later with the default program set to InDesign CS5 and everything works fine again.

It maybe this is specific to my setup and a lot of people may not come across it, but hopefully this helps somebody out there save a bit of time.

I should probably add that CCleaner makes changes to the registry etc.. so while it worked great for me and seems like a good tool, you use it at your own risk and if you haven’t got a recent backup might want to make one.  And yes Alex I know if I had a Mac this wouldn’t have happened……

Apple has left Flash support off the iPhone for a long time, with comments about “security holes”  ”CPU Hog” and “old technology” being reported.  Adobe could have probably countered most if not all of these arguements, but instead it has made them irrelevant by including a Packager for iPhone in Flash CS5.

The iPhone packager lets you publish your Flash ActionScript 3 projects to run as native applications for the iPhone and iPad.  In short you can build an app in Flash CS5 and when your done in just a few minutes export it as a native iPhone app, allowing you to cover pretty much every device out there.  You don’t have to sit down and redevelop the same app for the iPhone, it’s done at the click of a button. There’s just one problem of course, Apple’s new clause prevents you from getting your app onto the app store which they control.

Like it or not Flash used properly can greatly improve the user experience on devices whether mobile, laptop or desktop, and in many respects it levels the playing field and limits a hardware manufacturers ability to differentiate.  Apple is famous for differentiating, the iPhone was way ahead of other mobile devices when it came out, and such differentiation allows companies to be able to charge a premium.

I suspect this is going to be dragging on for some months yet, but in the mean time the people who are being affected  by this are the users and the developers.  Adobe has created a really useful feature in the iPhone packager tool in Flash CS5, it helps developers immensely and improves the end user experience by giving them access to iPhone & iPad apps as an alternative to Flash apps that they couldn’t access previously.

My own personal opinion is maybe it’s time to start looking for a new mobile.  I have had an iphone for some time now, and I like it a lot, it’s a great piece of kit.  My only gripe really was that some of my work apps were Flash based and they wouldn’t work on it.  I always figured this would get fixed eventually, and when I first saw the iPhone packager I could see an alternative, albeit I might not get access to the native flash apps.

Now though I just figure Apple are determined not to let me access these apps in any way shape or form.  In my eyes they have gone from being a very cool company with some stunning technology to being the bad guys that have no respect for their users and are standing between me and a better experience.  Sorry Apple but you really aren’t doing yourself any favours with this user.

Perspective drawing, variable-width strokes, a new brush that lets you control bristle characteristics, and innovative ways to quickly build shapes, are among the new features in the comprehensive vector environment of industry-leading Illustrator CS5.

New perspective tools add an exciting dimension to Illustrator, eliminating the need to create your own horizon lines and vanishing points when you wish to draw a scene or an object in perspective. With the Shape Builder tool, you no longer use the Pathfinder panel—you simply sweep your cursor across overlapping objects to merge and divide shapes. And you can even paint watercolor strokes that remain vectors, now with new edge softness and subtle control of transparency. These powerful new features make Illustrator CS5 a must-have, but along with the dramatic advances, you’ll find great improvement to familiar favorites. Strokes now have fully controllable width handles, and the Draw Inside mode creates masks automatically when you draw or when you place an image—no extra clicks.

With enhanced integration among Adobe products, you can move easily between Illustrator CS5 and products, such as Adobe Flash® Catalyst™ CS5 software, where you can add interaction to your designs. And new CS Live online services* provide effective collaboration, efficient reviews, and more.

Using Illustrator CS5, you can get the job done efficiently but beautifully, moving quickly from multiple ideas to multiple outputs with complete control, and delivering exactly what you had in mind.

Some of the new features available in Illustrator CS5 include:

Perspective drawing

Use perspective grids to draw shapes and scenes in accurate 1-, 2-, and 3-point linear perspectives. The new Perspective Grid tool allows you to turn on a grid that supports drawing directly on planes of true perspective. The new Perspective Selection tool allows objects to be moved, scaled, duplicated, and transformed dynamically in perspective. Easily move and duplicate objects from one plane to another.

You can also create objects in flat space and then apply them to a perspective plane, where they will correctly transform in shape. This works particularly well with symbols, in that you can place easily reapeatable instances onto the perspective grid and see the symbols “in back” recede to give you the look of realistic depth and distance. You can use the perspective grid to resize objects; you can even work with live text in perspective.

No longer do you need to construct your own perspective environment—no more creating your own horizon lines and vanishing points. You can even use the perspective grid to draw vector objects on top of a reference photograph or video still placed on your artboard. Consider adding a series of street lamps to a cityscape for a sequential lighting animation, for example. Or add fence posts to a reference landscape image to complete your billboard for a western wilderness camp.

Beautiful strokes

In Illustrator CS5, a number of new features have been introduced that make designing with strokes even more powerful and flexible. The core drawing tools within Illustrator merit attention every software release, and with Illustrator CS5 there are five significant updates that new and long-time users will appreciate. You can finely control stroke width, dashes, arrowheads, and how brushes stretch along a path. And improvements in corner handling mean that stroke shapes behave predictably in tight angles or around sharp points.

Variable-width strokes—Draw strokes with variable widths that you can quickly and smoothly adjust at any point, symmetrically or along either side. You can create custom width profiles that you can save and subsequently apply to any stroke.

Dashed line control—Control alignment of dashes on a stroke. Now enjoy symmetrical dashes around corners and at the ends of open paths, with lengths adjusted automatically to fit. Toggle between adjusted and preserved dashes and gaps.

Precise arrowheads—Work in a completely new way with arrowheads. Pick an arrowhead shape and control placement and scaling from within the Stroke panel. You can even choose whether to lock the tip or base of the arrowhead to the path endpoint.

Stretch control for brushes—Define how art and pattern brushes scale along a path. Choose areas of the brush graphic you wish to stretch and those you wish to keep in proportion. For example, you may need to elongate the middle of a banner graphic while keeping the detailed, curly ends of the banner from stretching.

Brushes with corner control—Apply art and pattern brushes to a path and get clean results, even at tight bends or corners. Where strokes of different widths join, or they form obtuse or acute angles, choose options to properly fill points where joins occur.

Bristle Brush

Paint with vectors that resemble real‐world brush strokes. The new Bristle Brush provides breakthrough control of painting. You can set bristle characteristics such as size, length, thickness, and stiffness. Set brush shape and bristle density. And set paint opacity, which uses transparency variations to simulate lifelike blending. When you have chosen the perfect characteristics for your Bristle Brush, you can save it for later use.

With the Bristle Brush you can achieve the expressiveness of natural media like watercolors and oils—but with the scalability and editability of
vectors. Get the most out of the Bristle Brush using a tablet with a Wacom 6D Art Pen, which responds automatically to pressure, bearing, and tilt,
plus provides 360-degree barrel rotation and an accurate brush preview.

Crisp graphics for web and mobile devices

Create vector objects precisely on the file’s pixel grid for delivering pixel-aligned artwork. When you’re designing artwork for Flash Catalyst, Adobe Flash Professional software, and Adobe Dreamweaver® software, it’s critical that raster images look sharp, especially standard web graphics at 72ppi resolution. Pixel alignment is also useful for video resolution rasterization control. And in Illustrator CS5, new web graphics tools include type enhancements. Choose one of four text anti-aliasing options for each of your Illustrator text frames.

Pixel grid alignment

Generate clean, sharp raster graphics by turning on Align To Pixel Grid. Objects are automatically nudged to the closest pixel edge when you create them or apply transformations. Now, a one-pixel stroke won’t straddle two pixels and get blurred or lost with anti-aliasing. Zoom in to see the grid and watch your objects align as you work. The alignment control is located in the Transform panel.

Text anti-aliasing

Create readable text for the web, mobile devices, handsets, gaming devices, or any destination where you need to generate raster images from your Illustrator artwork. Four anti-aliasing options now appear in the Illustrator CS5 Character panel. Choose among Sharp, Crisp, Strong, and Smooth, which match the text anti-aliasing rules in Adobe Photoshop® software. You can apply a different rule to each text frame in your artwork, and your specifications are saved with the file.

Multiple artboards enhancements

The multiple artboards feature introduced in Illustrator CS4 is now markedly better. Work on up to 100 artboards of varying sizes all in one document, organized and viewed the way you want. New and greatly expanded artboard options in Illustrator CS5 include a full Artboards panel, in which you can name and reorder artboards. Quickly add, delete, and duplicate them using panel controls or keyboard shortcuts.

Artboards are also easier to arrange, aligned to a grid if you wish, with rows and columns you define. New ruler behavior includes automatic top-left origin, and the options for saving your artwork now include saving one, all, or a range of individual artboards as individual AI files.

The advantage of multiple artboards is that you can work on a variety of related projects in a single file and share settings and content across designs. For different outputs, you can choose among a variety of preset ratios and guides, such as for print or web design. You can create artboards to mock up aspect ratios such as an HDTV screen, a movie theater screen, or the screen of a mobile device, exploring ways to adapt your composition for each of them.

You can also create an artboard inside an artboard to serve as a crop area so it’s easy to export just a piece of a composition. Save, export, and print artboards independently or together—as a series of files or as a single, multipage PDF file.

Shape Builder tool

Intuitively combine, edit, and fill shapes on your artboard. Drag the cursor across overlapping shapes and paths to create new objects and add color without accessing multiple tools and panels. Quickly unite, exclude, trim, and more.

If you have ever worked with the Pathfinder panel, you will appreciate the Shape Builder tool. It enables merging objects, breaking overlapping shapes into distinct objects, subtracting areas, and more. For example, you can draw a stroke across a the middle of a circle and quickly create two half-circles—no need to open a panel or choose another tool.

Coloring fills and strokes is easier now, too. The Shape Builder tool includes interactive color selection for quickly filling closed or partially closed areas of your artwork. Options include automatic gap detection and choosing whether or not to automatically fill new shapes.

Drawing enhancements

Work faster with everyday tools. Improvements to familiar drawing tools make using Illustrator CS5 efficient and productive. Instant masking using Draw Inside mode and joining paths with a keystroke are just two of the enhancements that speed up your routine tasks.

Draw behind and inside—Draw behind other objects without choosing layers or worrying about stacking order. Draw or place an image inside a shape, including live text. The draw inside feature automatically creates a clipping mask from the selected object.

Find Draw Behind and Draw Inside modes at the bottom of the toolbar. Select an object, choose a mode; then, when you draw, place an image, or create a shape, your new element is behind the selected object. With Draw Inside, the selected object will also become a mask.

Symbols—New 9-slice scaling in Illustrator and registration point control make symbols more powerful than ever. Scaling an object with 9-slice control enables proportion maintenance in exactly the places you want it, now available in Illustrator and not just for export. Repeat extremely complex symbols and maintain ultimate control while you scale and transform them in Illustrator.

Artboard ruler origin and coordinates—No longer think twice about your coordinates. Artboard ruler origins and coordinate systems are now oriented from the upper left. If you have scripts that use a previous coordinate system, they will still work correctly. You can also choose to work with a
global ruler that provides coordinates across all your artboards, or you can work with local, artboard-specific rulers.

Path join—Join open paths in a single keystroke with objects selected. You no longer need to select endpoints, and you can join more than one path at a time. Simply select two or more open paths and press Command+J (Mac) or Ctrl+J (Windows) to see your paths join into one open path.

Select behind—Use a keyboard shortcut to easily select an individual object located behind other objects. Press Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) when you select the object that’s in the back.

Roundtrip editing with Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5

Use Illustrator CS5 for interaction design, now enabled by new Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5, available in Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection. Develop your ideas and design your interface in Illustrator, creating screen layouts and individual elements such as logos and button graphics. Then open your artwork in Flash Catalyst and add actions and interactive components there—without writing code.

Resolution-independent effects

See raster effects such as drop shadows, blurs, and textures maintain a consistent appearance across media. Have you ever found that your artwork mysteriously loses its smooth, high-quality look when you publish? You can now create work for different types of output and know that popular raster effects maintain an ideal appearance no matter how your resolution settings change—from print to web to video. You can even go up to a higher resolution. Work quickly and efficiently with low-resolution artwork and then scale up when you’re ready to go to a finished output such as high-quality print.

Integration with Adobe CS Review

Illustrator CS5 integrates with Adobe CS Review, one of several new CS Live online services*. With Adobe CS Review, you can create and share online reviews for clients and colleagues down the hall or around the world. From within Illustrator CS5, publish a review of your work to the web. Multiple
reviewers can then access your review from a browser without any additional software and make comments right in their browser window with easy-to-use annotation tools.

Illustrator CS5 Training

Our instructors have been working on beta versions of CS5 since the middle of last year and we will be launching our Illustrator CS5 curriculum along with public scheduled dates over the coming week.  In addition we will continue offering CS4 courses through to the end of the year for those not yet upgrading.

A powerful new text engine, expanded support for mobile and consumer devices, and enhanced coding tools are among the new features in Adobe Flash Professional CS5 software, the industry-leading interactive authoring tool. Flash Professional CS5 offers unrivaled integration with Adobe Photoshop®,

Illustrator®, InDesign®, and After Effects® software, creating a design workflow that extends the potential of your interactive content across media formats. Integrated support of Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR®, and mobile authoring allows you to easily and consistently deliver interactive content, advertising, and video virtually anywhere.

Flash Professional is the flagship product for designing and developing content for the Adobe Flash Platform, and is an integral part of Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection software. Combined with the numerous benefits of these Creative Suite 5 editions, the features in Flash Professional provide a comprehensive toolset for design, web, mobile, and video workflows.

New text engine

Flash Professional CS5 adds support for the new Text Layout Framework built into Flash Player 10, enabling you to use print-quality typographic  functionality and take the experiences you create to new heights. Support for the Text Layout Framework provides rich, multilingual typographic control that previously was not available in Flash Professional, as well as a comprehensive set of APIs to manipulate text content, layout, and markup. The new text engine in Flash Professional CS5 also maintains layout and text formatting with greater fidelity when importing content from Adobe InDesign software and other Adobe products.

Print-quality typographic control

Designers have come to expect rich typographic control in applications like InDesign and Illustrator. However, it’s been extremely difficult or even impossible to set professional-level typography on the web—until now. With the Text Layout Framework support in Flash Professional CS5, designers can take advantage of rich typographical controls, including:

• Advanced text styling such as kerning, ligatures, tracking, leading, superscript, subscript, discretionary hyphens, margins, hypertext, baseline shift, typographic case, digit case (oldstyle/lining figures), and digit width (proportional/tabular figures).
• Advanced text-layout controls including threaded text blocks; the selection, editing and flowing of text across multiple columns; linked images; text wrap; and inline images (supporting PNG, JPG, SWF, or any Flash Player DisplayObject). Tab stops and CSS anti-aliasing are also supported.

Global language support

The Text Layout Framework brings advanced multilingual typographic and layout features to Flash Professional CS5. This support includes the ability to display and edit not only right-to-left scripts, but also top-to-bottom scripts, and those that often use a mixture of left-to-right and right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.

The new text engine offers additional features for East Asian typography, including an East Asian justifier, vertical text support, and Tate-Chu-Yoko, or blocks of horizontal text embedded into vertical runs of text.

Advanced inline text editing

Working with text inside of Flash Professional is now a far more efficient and productive experience. In addition to cut, copy, paste, find, replace, and spell-check functionality and standard keyboard and mouse gestures for editing (Ctrl/Command, Home/End, double-click), a new Selection mode allows text to be treated as read-only, read-select, or read-write.

Advanced rendering support

While offering advanced typographic control to designers is important, you want to know that what you see on your screen matches your viewers’ experience as well. The Text Layout Framework builds on the history of consistent high-quality playback and display across multiple devices in Flash Player by adding support for transparency and for device and embedded fonts (including anti-aliasing of embedded fonts). A new embedded font format (DefineFont4) provides improved typography features, international support, and reduced file sizes.

Ability to distribute content virtually anywhere

Deliver consistently across screens of virtually any size and use Adobe Device Central for enhanced device testing. The Distribution service available separately through Adobe Flash Platform Services* offers free and paid methods for distributing applications to social networks, mobile devices, and desktops. It also enables developers and businesses to track the distribution of and user engagement with their applications, and enables monetization of applications through ad hosting.

• Deliver to mobile and consumer devices. Deliver content that plays back on millions of devices worldwide. Packager for iPhone preview, included with Flash Professional CS5, compiles ActionScript bytecode into native iPhone application code. (The preview is also included in the Adobe AIR® SDK.) iPhone applications are distributed as iPhone application installer (IPA) files, via the iTunes store.
• Deliver to desktop computers. Take advantage of the ubiquity of Flash Player within browsers and Adobe AIR for extended support on the desktop. Content displays with a consistent look and feel across operating systems and browsers.

XML-based FLA source files

Flash Professional CS5 uses an XML-based implementation of the FLA file format called XFL, offering improved cross-product integration and workflow productivity. This compact and efficient file format both accurately maintains data in a Flash document and makes the individual elements easier to manage and use.

For example, an image that is currently used in a Flash project could be checked out of a source control system, updated, and checked back in. The next time you open the FLA project file, you would instantly see the updated image without having to manually import it into the project.

With better support for multiuser environments and cross-product compatibility, the XML-based format in Flash Professional offers the following benefits:

• The uncompressed format allows several users on a team to work on the same project simultaneously—no more having to split the project into multiple FLA files.
• Integration with source control systems is now possible because each team member can work on separate assets in the XFL package, eliminating the need to resolve differences.
• Mobile developers can work on the same files as other developers. (In the past, mobile content could not load other SWF files.)

Using XML-based FLA source files, Flash Professional CS5 provides a richer environment in which to exchange data with other key Adobe Creative Suite tools, including After Effects, InDesign, Illustrator, Adobe Encore®, and Flash Catalyst.

Code Snippets panel

Flash Professional CS5 provides a new way to quickly include code for things like timeline navigation, actions, animation, audio and video, and event handlers with the Code Snippets panel. By injecting prebuilt code into projects, you can work faster, freeing up more time for creativity.

For example, the sample code snippets allow you to create interactive buttons without extensive code experience. Code snippets also contain helpful comments and clear instructions right in the code and can greatly reduce the ActionScript 3.0 learning curve by helping new users learn how the ActionScript language works. In addition, because the panel is extensible, you can create and share snippets with others, helping to reduce overall production time.

Enhanced ActionScript editor

Increase development speed with an improved ActionScript editor, including custom class code hinting and code completion, and reference your own code or external code libraries more efficiently. Novice developers can start projects and have code hinting assist them as they try to grasp the fundamentals of the ActionScript language. Flash Professional CS5 can automatically write the import statement for libraries, and more experienced and advanced developers can more quickly reference their own code or any external code libraries they are using.

Improved Creative Suite integration

Flash Professional is an integral part of all Creative Suite 5 Premium editions. Flash Professional CS5 adds more ways to work directly with other Creative Suite 5 components for a more efficient workflow, including:

• Edit bitmaps in Photoshop using the new Edit With Photoshop CS5 command
• Export complex graphics via the FXG format, which you can open in Illustrator
• Place finished SWF files into Flash Catalyst projects
• Use Flash Builder as your ActionScript code-authoring environment
• Open content from InDesign with greater text fidelity
• Import FXG files from Fireworks
• Open content from After Effects and retain editing flexibility

Flash Builder integration

Adobe Flash Builder (formerly Adobe Flex® Builder™) is a professional Eclipse-based developer tool that enables intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of the user interface and behavior for Flex applications. Rather than having to choose between one integrated development environment (IDE) and another, you can now write your ActionScript code in Flash Builder and then test, debug, and publish your content in Flash Professional.

• Test Movie and Debug Movie. When invoked, these commands bring up Flash Professional CS5, open the FLA file that has been set in the properties of the current project, and test or debug the movie. Once the SWF window is closed (or the debug session is ended, in the case of Debug Movie), focus is returned to Flash Builder (and the FLA file remains open). You can also set breakpoints in Flash Builder that work in the Flash Professional debugger.
• Publish Movie. When invoked, this command brings up Flash Professional CS5 and publishes the target FLA file. Once the export is complete, if compiler errors were found, Flash Professional is brought to the front with its Compiler Errors panel open and the errors listed. If no errors were found, a dialog box in Flash Builder indicates that the Publish request was successful.

Spring for Bones

With Flash Professional CS5, Adobe integrates the power of a dynamic physics engine into the Inverse Kinematics (IK) system. This engine allows new users to create lifelike animation with ease, and gives expert users powerful functionality that is supported for both runtime and authortime. Spring gives IK animation movement that is 100% configurable, so you can now get realistic multi-object interactions that don’t look robotic and rigid.

Spring, a property of an IK Bone element, consists of two attributes: Strength and Damping.

• Strength sets the amount of spring. When the value is greater than zero, the bone reacts with a physical movement that is proportional to the Strength value and the overall movement.
• Damping adds resistance to the Strength value. This affects the rate of decay of the spring, which in turn determines the duration between the initial movement and the time when the IK Bone returns to its rest position.

Video improvements

With integrated support for content created with Adobe Premiere® Pro or Adobe After Effects software, it’s easy to work with video content directly in Flash Professional CS5.

Streamline embedding and encoding processes with on-stage video scrubbing and the ability to define cue points directly in the Properties panel. Now, when you have an FLV playback component on the stage, you can see the video on the stage, whereas previously you had to test the movie. Flash Professional CS5 also includes Adobe Media Encoder, enabling you to convert just about any file format to FLV or F4V.

New Deco drawing tools

Flash Professional CS5 extends the functionality of the dynamic Deco brush tools, enabling you to easily draw shapes and add advanced animation effects. These new brushes include:

• Particle System. Quickly create movement for particle phenomena like clouds or rain.
• 3D, Decorated, and new Grid brushes. Draw stylized lines or create patterns with multiple objects at once.
• Tree, Flame, Lightning, and Building brushes. Use specialized tools to add and customize these stylized shapes.

Flash CS5 Training

Our instructors have been actively using Creative Suite 5 since the middle of last year and have plenty of experience with all the new features. As a result we will be publishing dates and overviews for our new Flash CS5 curriculum over the next week, with courses are expected to commence in May / June. We will also continue to offer CS4 versions of courses through to the end of the year.

Adobe InDesign CS5 software lets you focus on your layout, with the flexibility to publish your pages to a wide range of media. Whether you’re creating print or digital documents, you can save time with online services* that integrate with and are directly accessible from InDesign, as well as other substantial productivity enhancements. Whether you need to reposition an image within a frame or change the radius of a rounded corner, InDesign CS5 helps you work more efficiently. A robust set of new tools let designers create interactive documents that capture readers’ attention both online and offline.

Now you can include complex interactivity, animation, FLV video (a popular online video format), and MP3 audio files within InDesign documents. InDesign CS5 makes it easier to export documents in SWF format, hand off layouts to Adobe Flash® Professional CS5 software, and produce EPUB documents for use with popular eBook readers and devices. InDesign CS5 has everything you need to lay out memorable and engaging pages in print or digital format.

Here are some of the top new features in InDesign CS5:

Interactive documents and presentations

Engage and inform readers and clients with documents and presentations that integrate interactivity, animation, sound, and video. Help reduce costs by creating interactivity directly in InDesign. New intuitive panels help you add rich media to page layouts:

Animation panel.

Apply the same motion presets included in Flash Professional CS5, or add your own custom presets to InDesign to instantly animate objects on the page without writing code. Options in the Animation panel let you specify duration, speed, rotation, scale, and opacity. Quickly edit a motion path using the Pen tool, and convert any path—even one you import from Illustrator—into a custom motion path with the click of a button.

Object States panel.

Create multi-state objects that indicate which button is selected, display images in a slide show, or show versions of text in different languages. Multi-state objects are page items that have multiple appearances. Object states can be images, text frames, or any other objects or groups you want to display when someone clicks or rolls over an interactive button while viewing an interactive document. For example, you might create a multi-state object that consists of multiple images to create a click-through slide show; when the viewer clicks a button, the next image appears.

Timing panel.

Control animation timing and playback without having to use a timeline to add keyframes or create motion tweens. Use the Timing panel to determine when objects such as bullet points in a presentation or images on a page should animate in the interactive document. For example, animations can be triggered to play when the page loads, when the page is clicked, or when a button is clicked. Loop the animation or play it a specific number of times. Link objects to animate simultaneously, with the same or different durations.

Media panel.

Preview and scrub through placed video files without leaving InDesign. You can select a frame from the video sequence to represent the video in your InDesign document before the video plays, and even create navigation points that determine which parts of the video play when you click a button or otherwise trigger an action.

Preview panel.

Take animations, buttons, and other interactive elements for a test drive without leaving InDesign. You no longer have to re-export your content every time you make a change to any rich media element—interactivity, animation, video, or sound—just to see how the change affects the document. Instead, preview and test a selection, the page, or the entire document before you export your final SWF file.

Simplified object selection and editing

Perform repetitive layout tasks efficiently in InDesign CS5. Numerous improvements can help make tasks such as aligning and distributing objects or customizing frame corners faster and easier.

Multiple transformations with a single tool.

You can use one tool to select, align, distribute, rotate, resize, reposition, crop, and scale frames and frame content. InDesign CS5 dynamically switches to the right tool for the job, so you never need to lift your mouse from the layout. The new Content Grabber lets you quickly reposition content within a frame, just by clicking and dragging. A real-time crop preview helps you position the content precisely where you want it.

Gap tool.

Adjust the white space between objects to dynamically reposition page items while maintaining design relationships. Shift the white space up or down, left or right, without having to crop or resize each object on the page individually. You can even expand or contract the white space, dynamically resizing or cropping adjacent objects accordingly. The new Auto Fit feature keeps the relationship between the object and its frame consistent as you resize the frame.

Live Corner Effects.

Drag the corners of a frame to dynamically change the radius and shape of the frame directly in the layout. Modify one corner at a time or all four simultaneously.

Easy grid placement.

Take the tedium out of placing images in a grid, as in a directory or catalog. Simply press arrow keys to add columns and rows for images or threaded text frames.

Integration with Adobe CS Review

Streamline reviews and accelerate your design workflow with CS Review, a new Adobe CS Live online service* that integrates with InDesign CS5. Using CS Review, you can create and share documents for online review within InDesign. Colleagues and clients can view your document online and add comments with easy-to-use annotation tools directly in their browsers. All comments are automatically displayed in InDesign CS5, within the context of your page layout. Clicking a comment shows you the content it references, so you can easily match comments to the appropriate areas of page design. Simple sharing, easy access to reviews, and centralized comments speed up the review process to help you finish your project on time and within budget. CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time.

Multiple page sizes

Simplify file management by creating pages of different sizes in a single document. Whether you’re designing marketing collateral, brand identity deliverables, or a magazine layout with complex folds, keeping all of a project’s assets in the same file shortens design and production time.

The new Page Selection tool makes it easy to select individual pages, which you can resize using options in the Control panel. You can easily share design assets by applying the same master pages to pages of varying sizes. With the Page Selection tool, you can even reposition the master page content for different layouts: select the page, select Show Master Page Overlay in the Control panel, and then drag the edge of the master page to position it over the page.

Track text changes

Get to final copy faster now that you can track text changes directly in your InDesign document. You can write, edit, and mark up text in InDesign with no need to import separate text files and remap styles every time there are copy changes.

With Track Changes enabled, InDesign keeps track of additions, revisions, and deletions in the document. The page layout remains uncluttered; to see the changes, simply open the Story Editor. There, you can accept or reject changes using options similar to those in popular word-processing applications. InDesign automatically assigns a different color for changes made by each user, so you can easily see who’s made the edits.

Paragraphs that span and split columns

Quickly format headlines, subheads, or any text to span multiple columns in a single text frame. In previous versions of InDesign, all text in a frame conformed to the column width. To span a headline across multiple columns, you had to cut the headline out of the story and paste it into a separate text frame. Now you can apply settings to a paragraph, specifying whether the text should span some or all columns, or split columns, so that InDesign automatically reflows what was one column into two or more columns.

All-new Layers panel

The Layers panel has been completely rebuilt. If you’re familiar with the Layers panel in Illustrator and Photoshop, you’ll feel right at home in InDesign. You can now view not only layers but the individual objects they contain.

Select, hide, name, lock, and change the stacking order of objects such as text frames, images, and shapes directly within the Layers panel.

Reconfiguring grouped objects is fast and easy. With a quick click, you can reveal the hierarchy of objects within a group, including any hidden objects. Then, simply drag objects from one group to another in the Layers panel—with no need to ungroup, select items, and regroup.

Production enhancements

InDesign CS5 includes several productivity advances designed to help you deliver print and digital documents faster. Improved integration with Adobe Bridge software and the new Adobe Mini Bridge panel in InDesign, document-installed fonts, and the ability to export PDF documents in the background all can help you meet deadlines with ease.

The new document-installed fonts feature helps avoid the inconvenience of missing fonts during production and printing. When you package a document, InDesign includes fonts used in that document. When that document is opened on another system, InDesign looks for a document fonts folder and automatically installs those fonts for use only in that document. It then uninstalls them when the document is closed. This timesaving feature can help avoid costly design and print errors. While InDesign takes the hassle out of installing the fonts required for printing a design project, the appropriate font licenses are still required for any party creating or printing the document.

Now you can preview individual pages in an InDesign document in Bridge without opening InDesign. You can also view thumbnail previews of the images placed in an InDesign document in Bridge without having to open the InDesign file first, making it easier to locate and reuse images.

In InDesign CS5, you can access much of the power of Bridge without leaving InDesign. Locate InDesign files, images, videos, and other assets using Mini Bridge, and drag them directly into position in your document.

Print to digital

Quickly and efficiently extend your page content to the web, onto mobile devices, or for playback in Adobe Flash Player.

Hand off InDesign CS5 pages to Flash Professional CS5 with greater fidelity. The new text engine in Flash Professional retains typography you created in InDesign, including threaded text frames, so you can easily make last-minute text edits in Flash Professional. Multi-state objects and placed video and audio files included in the InDesign CS5 layout are carried over into Flash Professional. Objects animated with motion presets in InDesign are added to the Flash Professional timeline as motion objects. The original layer structure of the InDesign document is re-created in the Flash Professional timeline, so the Flash developer can easily understand how pages were created.

Create compelling eBooks with enhanced support for the EPUB file format. Author eBooks that can be read on a variety of devices such as the Apple iPad, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble nook, mobile phones, or personal computers using Microsoft® Windows® or Mac OS. Include interactivity, animation, sound, and video to bring eBooks to life when read on a personal computer using Adobe Digital Editions, a desktop reading application. Enhanced export features include the ability to control content reading order based on document structure, support for prebuilt CSS to provide consistent styling, support for chapter breaks, improved table formatting, and font subsetting.

Get a head start building web pages with enhanced export features that let you repurpose InDesign text and image content using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 software. Using the Structure panel in InDesign, you can control the order in which page content is placed on the web page when imported into Dreamweaver. InDesign now generates CSS definitions that more closely match the text attributes you specify in InDesign to give you greater control over typography and reduce the need to rework text in Dreamweaver.

Live captions

Generate static or live captions for an image automatically from its metadata. Adding a caption such as the photographer’s name or copyright information directly from metadata stored with the image saves time and helps minimize the chance of error.

Live captions change as the metadata changes. Static captions use metadata when you generate them, but aren’t updated later. You can convert a live caption to a static caption at any time.

InDesign CS5 Training

We will be releasing information on our InDesign CS5 Training courses over the coming weeks including course overviews and dates for the rest of the year.  Our instructors have been beta testing CS5 since the middle of last year and have plenty to teach you on this great new release.  We will also be continuing to offer CS4 classes until the end of the year for those who don’t plan on upgrading just yet.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 software offers a comprehensive integrated environment in which to design, develop, test, and deploy websites and applications of all flavors—spanning the gamut from the simplest, static HTML page to complete sites built upon complex dynamic application frameworks. Dreamweaver CS5 streamlines both front-end and back-end development tasks with ease. With a set of integrated tools available directly in the authoring environment, Dreamweaver CS5 increases your productivity and virtually eliminates the need for external third-party browser-based tools.

Creative professionals can jump-start the design process with updated CSS starter layouts and leverage enhanced CSS features for increased control and creative flexibility. Developers benefit from interacting directly with their database-driven applications and Ajax interface elements, including testing individual states of a page or application throughout the development process. With many compelling new features, Dreamweaver once again raises the bar on productivity and efficiency for web designers and developers alike.

Some of the great new features available in DreamWeaver CS5 include: