The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Do your iPod-toting friends make fun of your off-brand MP3 player? Cower in portable digital audio sham no longer, friend!

Just use this Photoshop tutorial in the (Unofficial) Photoshop Weblog’s How-To’s Day:  Photoshop Edition to build your own iPod in Photoshop. Printed out on good cardstock from an inkjet or color laser printer, the 2D faux iPod can be slipped into your MP3 player case to create the illusion that you’re cool.

Note:  It has been suggested that this tutorial may also be useful to the minority of people who might actually want to gain some creative utility from having an image of an iPod—for example:  advertising, signage, POS display, web design, and other such frivolous uses.

Quark VS InDesign .com accuses Macworld of bias against Adobe, maker of Photoshop, InDesign, and several other industry-standard creative applications, by ignoring Adobe’s products in the recently announced 20th Annual Editors’ Choice Awards.

After giving InDesign CS rave reviews all year, including a statement in a February 2004 article that “InDesign CS is the program that will relegate QuarkXPress to PageMaker’s status of a decade ago,” and, in the same article, “XPress’s unique strengths have dwindled to a few little-used functions,” Macworld editors still named QuarkXPress 6.5 the Most Improved Page-Layout Program.

Similarly, despite winning in several categories last year, Adobe’s Photoshop and After Effects, best-of-class standards among numerous professional creative industries, were passed over for Eddy Awards this time out.

Macworld’s editors “went back over the products they’d seen and reviewed over the past year—those released between November 1, 2003, and November 1, 2004—and they nominated their favorites.” The Quark VS InDesign .com article intimates that the editors’ favorites may have been motivated more by Apple’s recent aggressive competition to Adobe in certain markets than by the merits of the programs being judged.

”I think Macworld was actually honest, if you read carefully,” says Mark W. in a response to the Quark VS InDesign.com article. “In the 2003 Eddys Macworld ‘looked at nearly every new Mac product on the market between Nov. 1, 2002 to Nov. 1, 2003, evaluating their overall quality as well as their utility, innovation, and elegance.’ This time they just ‘nominated their favorites.’”

Now, that the iPod Mini can go underwater, allow me to suggest other extreme environments in which iPod/iPod Mini marketing is still an untapped opportunity: Tuff-Stuff, The Ultra Tuff, The Fire-Eater, The Glade iPod, and The Galileo iPod.

Tuff-Stuff

High-impact housings and extra-durable shielding for the earbud cord for industrial environments. A beefy black and construction yellow housing in anti-slip high-impact plastic would certainly help ground and low-height construction workers who want to listen to music while driving 500 ton mega-haulers. One side of the case would have a magnetic strip for convenient placement of nails, screws, or Skol cans.

Read more →

In Before & After magazine’s quiz of the week you’re asked the semi-musical question:  Can you identify the iPod typeface?

Today Adobe announced Acrobat 7.0, and Weblogs, Inc’s own The Design Weblog is right on top of it with a detailed report on the feature-rich, more mature business critical application.

Acrobat 7 is not the complete overhaul that was Acrobat 6, but it builds upon the steady three-legged foundation poured by Acrobat 6. With critical press and prepress features for creative pros, streamlined business features, and by opening the door to the enterprise’s total adoption of electronic documents with the new power given to the ubiquitous and free Adobe Reader, Acrobat 7 kicks over the last stubborn hurdles to total epaper conversion for every document-based workflow. Acrobat is all grown up.

Last week Macromedia settled with Forgent over JPEG patent infringement issue. Today Forgent creates “enhanced intellectual property” site to provide “information on Forgent’s intellectual property program and the litigation.” Tomorrow, Forgent may go after TiVo and MP3 players.

On 23 April 2004 The Design Weblog first reported on Austin, Texas-based Forgent Networks, Inc.’s claim of infringement on its  U.S. Patent #4698672, which covers the compression algorithm in JPEG images, and the lawsuit filed by Forgent against software makers whose products read or wrote JPEG files.

Among those named in the suit were: Adobe Systems Inc., Agfa Corp., Axis Communications Inc., Canon USA, Concord Camera Corp., Creative Labs Inc., Dell Inc., Eastman Kodak Co., Fuji Photo Film Co. U.S.A., Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Gateway Inc., HP, IBM, JASC Software, JVC Americas Corp., Kyocera Wireless Corp., Macromedia Inc., Matsushita Electric Corp. of America, Oce’ North America Inc., Onkyo Corp., PalmOne Inc., Panasonic Communications Corp. of America, Panasonic Mobile Communications Development Corp. of USA, Ricoh Corp., Riverdeep Inc., Savin Corp., Thomson S.A., Toshiba Corp. and Xerox Corp.

In the intervening time, several companies have settled with Forgent and been removed from that list. Most notable are Adobe Systems, Inc., who settled for an undisclosed amount in early July, and now Macromedia, Inc. Last week San Francisco-based Macromedia, maker of web mainstay, JPEG-making products, Freehand, Flash, and Fireworks, settled out of court with Forgent for an unspecified amount.

Read more →

Elevated by news of strong revenue growth, product development and financial management, Microsoft Corp. was rated as having the best reputation among the largest U.S. companies for the second quarter of 2004, by the Delahaye Index, a quarterly assessment of how news media coverage affects corporate reputation.

Read more →

Sep 7, 2004 (financialwire.net via COMTEX) — (FinancialWire) “I guess Steve’s kids just listen to Bach and Mozart,” McGraw-Hill’s (NYSE: MHP) Businessweek quotes Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bill Gates when asked why his company is making handheld gadgets that play video as well as music, while Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) has so far spurned the idea to stick with its music iPods.

”We don’t think people have a burning desire to watch video on tiny little screens,” Apple’s Steve Jobs, a longtime Gates nemesis, was quoted as saying earlier. Gates retorted that his kids “want to watch Finding Nemo,” which of course was made by Jobs’ [Pixar] Animation Studios (NASDAQ: PIXR).

”I don’t know who made that, but it’s a really neat movie,” Gates was said to have quipped.

The asides were made in conjunction with Microsoft’s launch of the company’s new portable video players, made for it by Samsung and others. The device will also allow its users to purchase and manage music with its Windows Media Player.

Read more →

Press Release

QuarkDispatch Server Certified to Run on Xserve G5

PARIS—(THE DESIGN WEBLOG)—Aug. 31, 2004—Quark Inc. today announced the release of Quark Publishing System 3 Classic Edition (QPS Classic 3), the next step in the development of the industry-leading software for professional publishing and editorial workflows. QPS Classic 3 provides full support for QuarkXPress 6 and Mac OS X, along with other performance enhancements. Used by more than 50,000 people at publishing sites worldwide, QPS Classic is one of the leading publishing systems in the industry.

Read more →

From the About.com Graphics Software discussion forum: ”There IS no Apple vs PC or Adobe vs Corel rivalry. It’s all computers and software that do the job and do it well… Forget computers for a moment. Did artists insult one another because one used Koohinoor pens and another settled for Rapidographs? ...Apple vs PC arguments exist only because some people feel superior they know one software, and because they have more time on their hands to rant and rave.”