Lunchtime Links

Here’s a couple of tasty links to chew on while you’re downing that 16¢ cup of Ramen Noodles and pondering the future of publishing.

GalleyCat has some interesting numbers to illustrate why ebooks are so expensive in a some people’s opinion. Methinks the industry is going to have to recalibrate, or face a fate worse than the music industry.

Macworld has a review of CS4 Goodies for photographers.

David at InDesign Secrets posted a nifty trick for using Mixed Ink Groups on process colors in InDesign (with a comment by me).

Last but not least, here’s what happens when a Flash designer’s creations get tired of being pushed around the screen.

Click This Book

Now that the 800-pound gorilla of InDesign has left the room, let’s see what’s else is on the radar.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to devote more time to checking out Photoshop CS4, and other pieces of the Creative Suite, and reporting back what I find here.

And I have another book report coming up. New books are like candy to me and the library is the biggest candy store in town. If you want to read along, check out Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters by Bill Tancer.

I think of Tancer as Archaeologist 2.0. He examines our culture by sifting through massive databases of online records instead of sifting through the dirt under our feet.

I’m especially interested in a couple of the chapters that relate directly to comments made by Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen during the launch announcement of CS4. One is called “Web Who.0” and asserts that “surprisingly few internet users actively create consumer-generated media.” This flies in the face of some of Adobe’s grand assumptions, namely, that the world is exploding with new Photoshop and Flash users, spewing out content in every corner of the globe (for which they will need tons of Adobe products to create and view this content). I’m assuming Tancer has the numbers to back up everything he says, which might be bad news for Adobe.

The other chapter that I may cheat and skip ahead to is on “Data Rocks and the Television-Internet Connection.” In the CS4 video, Narayen proudly said that Flash has penetrated not only 98% of computers, but 800 million mobile devices. And he left no doubt that the next frontier for Adobe is the living room. Maybe soon I can use Premiere CS4 to lift the Terminator from the Sarah Connor Chronicles and pit him against Dwight from The Office. Or maybe I can remix the Olympics and have Phelps come in second.

Spoiler Sport

Coming Soon to a screen near you! InDesign/InCopy CS4: Rise of the App Frame. News of CS4 is all over the place, but you can’t buy the programs yet. However, you can read and download the entire Help files for InDesign and InCopy CS4. They are free and open to the public. Yeah, it’s a little like reading the script to a movie that hasn’t been released yet. But if you’re an InDesign/InCopy fanboy/grrrl, you probably can’t wait to see how conditional text works, or whether Smart Guides are really smart (actually, they’re freaking brilliant–you’ll never use a guide again).

So download the help files, print out all 995 pages, wallpaper your dwelling with them, and when CS4 actually arrives at your workplace, you can be that annoying person ruining all the surprises for the people around you.

“Oh! Oh! Dude! Check this out! This is the part where the Button tool gets killed! And then Preflight disappears from the File menu, and like, no one knows where it went, and then it shows up in Window > Output! Dude!”

Make sure you say all this with a mouthful of popcorn. Adds to the effect. Dude.