At the IBC show in Amsterdam, Blackmagic Design has announced Intensity Extreme, a new low-cost video capture and playback device that features HDMI and analog video I/O, and connects to recent Mac models using the new Thunderbolt connection. It is priced at €209.
Blackmagic says that Intensity Extreme is completely powered from the Thunderbolt connection on the computer, making it the perfect solution for adding video to laptop computers as it powers from the laptop battery. It features a chassis machined out of a solid block of aircraft grade aluminum.
Over the last several months we’ve covered numerous tips for producing better prints, and it’s a lot of information to remember. This article presents a handy recap as well as a guided tour through the Print dialog boxes of popular software such as iPhoto, Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS5—including tips for borderless printing.
Printing recap
The first step to ensuring great prints is to understand that your images are made from pixels and how to control pixel size using resolution, as discussed in Image resolution—the key to excellent prints. The next step is to download printer- and paper-specific profiles for better color accuracy. You can get the skinny on profiles and where to find them by visiting How to use printer profiles for color fidelity. If you enjoy maximum control over your prints, and you’re using Photoshop Elements or Photoshop CS5, you can crop, resize your photo, and adjust its resolution manually as discussed in both How to resize digital images for print and How to resize small images for print. That said, let's turn our attention to using the print dialog boxes of popular software to produce amazing prints—without the hassle of resizing them first. While the screenshots and examples below are from Snow Leopard, the concepts and processes work the same way in Lion.
I've been re-reading Simon Garfield's Just My Type after it was sent to us by its appropriately titled American publisher Gotham Books. This is its first edition in the US*, and it's bound to be as popular in the creative community there as it has been in the UK (American designers—be prepared to get a least three copies for Christmas).
An easily accessible tome for anyone with a passing interest in design—the typographical equivalent of Freakonomics, if you like, Just My Type is frequently funny, not shy on details, and most-of-all celebratory of the beauty of letterforms without being all-out nerdish.
Just My Type also gives brief insights into the personal lives of the great typographers from John Baskerville to Matthew Carter.
Quark has launched QuarkXPress 9.1, a free update to QuarkXPress 9, which features its hotly anticipated App Studio.
App Studio's integrated toolset lets designers create branded iPad apps, distribute those apps via Apple's App Store, and design and publish content for purchase and download from within the apps.
“The proliferation of digital devices has created significant challenges for designers and publishers who not only need to get to the iPad, but who want to offer their readers an innovative, cutting-edge experience,” said Gavin Drake, vice president of marketing for Quark. “With App Studio we eliminate the biggest hurdles by offering a solution that designers can manage without requiring programming and that is affordable.”
When it comes to illustration on the computer, artists have had few choices: Scanning, which requires touch-up work (and, if necessary, vector traces); drawing with a mouse or trackpad; or, the most-appealing so far, working on a tablet or pressure-sensitive display. Wacom’s Inkling, announced Tuesday, hopes to eliminate these intermediary steps and bring artists back to their roots: drawing on pen and paper.
Like Livescribe’s Echo Smartpen, the Inkling is a digital sketch pen and receiver; sketch, and your lines will be translated into an illustration on your computer. Unlike the Smartpen, however, you don’t need special paper to record your drawings; you can attach the Inkling’s receiver to any paper surface and scribble away. The receiver will record all pen movements made on an A4 paper area (8.27-by-11.69 inches), though you can mount it to a larger piece of paper. Wacom’s pen has the company’s signature 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity built-in, so that all your line widths transfer accordingly.
Adam Berenstain is a freelance writer in upstate New York and a longtime Macworld contributor. More by Adam Berenstain
Many applications let you create websites with little or no coding, but Adobe is betting print professionals are ready for one more. Adobe’s new Web design program, code-named Muse, lets users take advantage of their familiarity with InDesign to build entire sites as easily as they might create brochures. But while Muse transports the page-layout paradigm to the Web intact, it offers features that establish it as an exciting new tool for making sophisticated, interactive sites.
Plan and design your site
Plan View: Muse’s Plan view is a sitemap that lets you easily add or delete pages, drag and drop to rearrange and nest them, and create master pages that can be applied by dropping them onto other pages in your site. Here you can also customize properties like page size, the number of columns in each page, and page metadata. Double-clicking pages opens them for editing.
Autodesk has released a trio of new software applications and upgrades for the Mac: AutoCAD 2012 for Mac, AutoCAD LT 2012 for Mac, and AutoCAD WS for Mac. All are compatible with Lion and Snow Leopard. All feature multi-touch capability for intuitive pan and zoom and cover flow for graphical browsing of design files. AutoCAD LT and AutoCAD WS are available only from the Mac App Store.
With their support for creating and editing files within the DWG file format, AutoCAD 2012 and AutoCAD LT 2012 give users an easy, cross-platform way to collaborate with suppliers, customers, clients, and partners. Files created in previous versions of AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT are compatible with the current Mac versions of the products.
While AutoCAD returned to the Mac with great fanfare in 2010 after a 16-year absence from the platform, this is the first time Autodesk has offered Mac desktop versions of its AutoCAD LT drafting tool and AutoCAD WS, the review and collaboration application. AutoCAD WS has been available as a mobile app since last year, but the new version offers desktop functionality on the Mac for the first time, enabling people who don't own AutoCAD to read and edit files created by the program.
