Adobe has announced, for the second time in its history, a free public beta of Photoshop. Photoshop CS6 will be available to try for the next few months as Adobe readies its Creative Suite of applications for launch alongside the brand new Creative Cloud online hub, targeted to creative pros. The Photoshop beta is available now on Adobe Labs. The new Photoshop version works only on 64-bit Mac systems, and no longer in 32-bit mode.

Various under-the-hood improvements promise to make life easier and protect long hours of labor intensive operations. The highest profile of these include Background Save and Auto Recovery, Preset Migration and Sharing, and the new Mercury Graphics Engine.

Simply selecting some program preferences lets Photoshop automatically save and recover your work in the event of a power interruption. When you upgraded from previous versions of Photoshop, you often lost painstakingly applied presets that automated many repetitive tasks. The new version lets you apply your presets, tools, and workspaces to the new upgrade. While the Mercury engine is familiar to users of Premiere Pro, Photoshop's new Mercury Graphics Engine is mostly a software-based implementation of multicore functionality.

The dark side

The changes in the new version of Photoshop are immediately apparent. The program has gone over to the dark side by default, opening to a sophisticated-looking dark gray interface. This is intended to complement themes of some of Adobe's other creative programs—specifically Lightroom 4, Premiere Pro, and After Effects.

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The buzz around Creative Cloud, which began last fall, has gained momentum as its designated launch time approaches—within the first half, and before the summer of 2012, at a date yet to be announced. Meantime, Adobe has also confirmed that a new upgrade of its massive Creative Suite will also be released at the same time.

With the launch of Creative Suite 6 now on the horizon, Adobe is tying its major product line into its overall cloud strategy. Not only will Adobe CS6 be released simultaneously with the new Creative Cloud, it will constitute the main component of Creative Cloud.

With Adobe is gearing up for a fresh Creative Suite extravaganza, there’s an open question for all creatives: Stick with Creative Suite or take a chance on Creative Cloud?

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Animated GIFs have been around for almost two decades, allowing users to create and share simple animations online. The file format has persevered despite its shortcomings (e.g., no sound), and in fact, it’s recently seen a resurgence in popularity. People have taken to converting short, often comical video clips into animated GIFs, which they then post to blogs and social networking sites.

There are a number of ways to create video GIFs using your Mac, including uploading a video clip to Gifninja.com or manually assembling an animation using Adobe Photoshop. However, the most efficient way to create a video GIF is with Patrick Roger’s GIFBrewery ($3, Mac App Store), which I'll use to demo the concept. Apps such as Total Video2Gif ($5, Mac App Store) can tackle the job as well, but with less finesse than GIFBrewery.

Step 1: Pick a video clip

Finding a video file to convert should be straightforward. You can choose an existing video file on your hard disk, or make a video yourself with your iPhone, iPad, or digital camera. Once you’ve chosen your video file, you’ll need to sift through it and find a short segment of video to convert to GIF. (There is no need to trim your video; in this step, you simply want to identify the clip that will be converted.)

A few recommendations:

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Clean, crisp artwork may sometimes be the artist's goal, but the pursuit of perfection can also lead to artwork that looks clinical, and perhaps even a bit corporate. Clients these days seem to favor a worn, even grungy look in which the art looks a bit roughed up, with subtle scratches, mottled patterns, or even paper fold lines. One way to produce is effect is by a process, known as distressing, which can add a surprising degree of character to your artwork.

Distressing can be done either with a textured image or by textured brushes, and I’ll show you how to do both using Adobe Photoshop CS5. (Note that the process is nearly identical with Photoshop CS4.)

Step 1: Prepare your file

Open an illustration or photo in Photoshop CS5. In order to prevent saving accidents and preserve your original file, choose File -> Save As and then save a new copy of the file somewhere convenient (such as the Desktop). Choose Window -> Layers to open the Layers panel, if it’s not already.

Now you’ll need to tidy up the file a bit:

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The June 2011 release of Apple’s new Final Cut Pro X set off a firestorm that reverberated across the globe—at least in video circles. The hotly anticipated new version of Apple's flagship video software was unexpectedly accompanied by the immediate removal of the previous version—Final Cut Pro 7—along with the company's Final Cut Server and Final Cut Express apps, from retail distribution. That alone had longtime users jumping ship from the only nonlinear video editor many of them had ever used.

But that wasn't the only bad news. The reviews of the new app were almost universally critical. To longtime videographers who had built careers around Final Cut workflows, the new FCP X lacked the pro-level power features they considered essential.

A new environment without connectivity to broadcast monitoring and networked storage, without the ability to assign audio outputs, and without the ability to open archives of previous FCP 7 projects, caused the industry to respond with shock and outrage. Apple’s competitors meanwhile, rejoiced in vitriolic glee at the prospect of gaining back years of market share they had lost as a result of the FCP’s dominance.

Then something astonishing happened: Cupertino backed down. Apple sent its product managers out into the editing community to reassure video pros that it and FCP X were indeed committed to supporting the product's working professional base, and that Apple would soon restore multicam editing, broadcast monitoring and output, the ability to assign audio tracks in a specific order, and the ability to import and export to and from their favorite third-party applications for audio, color correction, and finishing—as well as connect to Xsan or other networked storage volumes.

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iMovie for iOS is an amazing video editor for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Its ability to work with audio, however, is quite limited—but the limitations aren’t impossible to overcome, especially with a little creativity. Here are a trio of issues and workarounds to improve the audio in your mobile movie projects.

Problem: The song list in iMovie’s Audio pane is tedious to navigate.

Each built-in project theme has its own custom background music, but you may want to pick something from your own music library. If your collection is sizable, it can take a while to sort through the songs, especially since any tracks that still contain Apple’s FairPlay DRM appear in gray text with “(Unavailable)” appended.

Also, when I’m editing in iMovie ’11 on the Mac, I frequently like to sort the song list by time so, for example, I can easily find a song that’s two minutes long.

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DigiTech's iPB-10 is a programmable guitar effects pedalboard that uses your iPad or iPad 2 as an interface to select, arrange, edit, and configure 87 guitar effects pedals, 54 amps, and 26 speaker cabinets in innumerable ways.

The iPB-10 is not a toy and at $500, it’s not priced like one. It is sturdily built and weighs in at a hefty 11.5 pounds. Setting up the iPB-10 is easy, but there are a number of steps. First, you must download the free iPB-Nexus app to your iPad from the App Store. Next, check to see if the correct docking tray for your iPad is installed. The tray for the first generation iPad was in place when I opened my unit, but replacing it was simple. Push in two buttons that release the protective frame, lift it up, and remove two, easy-to-access, Phillips head screws. Swap in the new tray and replace the two screws. Then, plug the power supply to the iPB-10 into a wall outlet, connect the dock connector to the iPad, close the protective frame, and power up the pedalboard.

Using the app

After installing, powering up the iPB-10, and launching the iPB-Nexus app, a message popped up on the iPad's screen saying that I needed to install a firmware update. Updating requires connecting the iPB-10 to your Mac (or to a PC), downloading an updater program from the DigiTech website, and selecting your product. All available updates are then applied. The update took several minutes and I was warned that any custom presets and settings might be erased by the process. Since I hadn't started anything, I wasn't worried, but I could see how this could be a problem if you'd been working with the unit for a while.

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The holidays are a time for not only getting together with friends, expressing affection through cards and gifts, and ingesting far too many sweets, but also the time of year when the family camcorder gets the greatest work-out. To help ensure that the videos taken with your camcorder are as enjoyable as the events it captures, follow these tips.

Scout the location

If you have the opportunity, spend some time in the location where you’ll shoot before the big event takes place. While there, keep an eye out for good and bad light sources and take some test shots. Doing so allows you to dial in an appropriate white balance setting and take note of locations where you do and, particularly, don’t want to shoot—facing a bright window that will wash out the subject standing in front of it, for instance.

Don’t rely on the backlight control

Speaking of backlight that washes out a subject, most of today’s full-sized camcorders (versus pocket camcorders) include a backlight control. Switch it on when your subject stands before a bright light—the sun, a window, or spotlight—and the background dims and the subject brightens. Regrettably, these controls can’t work miracles and while your subject will be brighter, the entire scene will likely be washed out. Far better that you take our previous advice to find a location with good light—use that same window to provide light to the side of your subject, for example—when first visiting the shooting location.

Stand back

Surrounded though we increasingly are by devices that capture still and motion images, people under the scrutiny of a camcorder routinely switch into “pose-mode” when they feel the camera’s eye upon them—mugging, stuttering, or simply clamming up. You can put people at their ease (and capture more natural actions) by stepping back and using the camera’s zoom to bring the camera closer to the action. Audio can suffer when you do this, however. If you want to capture clear sound as well as video and the on-camera microphone isn’t up to the task, consider getting a shotgun microphone and mounting it on the top of your camera.

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'Tis the season to be printing address labels, not to mention package labels and envelopes. There are several powerful and creative products available that will give you beautiful and festive results, ranging from free to $50.

At the free end of the spectrum is Avery Design & Print Online, a Web-based utility for printing and merging contacts onto Avery's huge variety of labels. It also offers a sizable collection of clip art or lets you upload your own images to decorate holiday labels. If your needs are fairly modest, Avery Design & Print Online may fill the bill for you.

If you don't mind investing $40 to $50 in an enjoyable tool that will take you much, much further, consider programs like Chronos SOHO Labels 5 or BeLight's Labels & Addresses (formerly Mail Factory).

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Designing your own holiday cards makes for fun, creative, and deeply personal messages to friends and family. Armed with your trusty Mac and a digital camera, the design possibilities are endless! Here are three ideas to get your creative juices flowing fast.

Document setup

No matter which software you use—I demo the techniques with Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop Elements 10, but you can use almost any image editor—start with a 5-by-7-inch document. With Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, set the resolution to 250 ppi (pixels per inch). Be sure to keep text and other important parts of the message at least a quarter inch away from the document’s edge to ensure they’re not cropped when printed.

Design 1: Vintage photo with red accent

Start this design by adding your favorite photo to your card document (a simple copy and paste operation works just fine), and then resize the photo so there’s an inch of free space on all sides. For a quick antique look, you can drain the photo’s color and add a sepia (brown) tint. This is easily done in Photoshop CS3 and later by choosing Image -> Adjustments -> Black & White. In the resulting dialog box, click the Tint checkbox and Photoshop bathes your photo in light brown. To add a dark red outline to the photo, open the fx menu at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Stroke (double-click to unlock the layer if you need to).

In the resulting dialog box, enter 8 pixels for size, click the color swatch to open the Color Picker and choose dark red, and then set the Location pop-up menu to inside. Pick your favorite holiday quote—or create your own—and place the text under the photo. Use a serif typeface (one that has little feet or slabs on the end of each letterform) in the same dark red color as your stroke.

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To us, a video shot with a camcorder and a video shot with a DSLR or compact camera are essentially the same thing: a video file stored on a memory card. But to iLife, they're different: iMovie was designed to import footage from devices that primarily shoot video, while iPhoto was designed to import images from still cameras.

By necessity, iPhoto can import video files shot by still cameras. Since iMovie can't import those files directly, it offers a bridge: In the Event Library, click the iPhoto Videos item to view movies stored in your iPhoto library. (You may be asked to let iMovie generate thumbnails of those movies to see them properly.)

However, this approach doesn't give you the advantage of organizing movies into iMovie Events. When you need more clips for a project, you have to keep returning to the large list of iPhoto Videos. One solution is to copy iPhoto videos to your existing iMovie Events—but then you end up with duplicate clips on your hard disk, taking up a lot of valuable space.

There's a better way. Instead of taking a trip through iPhoto, it is possible to import movies created with still cameras directly into iMovie '11. Here's how:

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One of the hardest things to accomplish in vector illustration is a halftone, which is a way of reproducing a monochrome image using only dots of varying sizes. Halftones are especially important for graphic artists working with a limited number of colors (in poster or t-shirt designs, for example), because they give nuance to otherwise flat artwork. Moreover, vector halftones can be scaled to any size without showing pixelation.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a grayscale object and turn it into a vector halftone. These steps are written for Adobe Illustrator CS5, but the process is very similar for previous versions of Illustrator.

Step 1: Prepare your document

It’s important that your new document has a large canvas. Choose File -> New. Once the New Document window appears, enter an appropriate name (i.e. Halftone Object). Choose Web from the New Document Profile pop-up menu and then add in a width and height of 1800x1800 px. Now click OK to create the document.

You’ll need to tweak one more setting before you can begin, though. Choose Effect -> Document Raster Effects Settings. Under Resolution, click Other and enter 288 ppi. Illustrator uses the standard screen metric of 72 ppi, and by choosing a raster setting that is a multiple of 72, you’ll get better results when tracing. To continue, click OK.

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Quark has instituted a special upgrade program that allows customers using nearly any past version of QuarkXPress to upgrade to its most current version 9 for $299. From now until December 31, 2011, current and past users of versions 3 through 6 can upgrade for that standard price, which had, in the past, applied only to versions 7 and 8.

This is a good deal for those who have not upgraded in recent years, but who now wish to use Quark to publish iPad apps and create content for e-readers, smartphones, and other tablets.

QuarkXPress 9 lets designers add new functionality and boost productivity while enabling the creation of content for publication on mobile devices. QuarkXPress 9 lets users create and publish to iPad apps and create content for e-readers, smartphones, and other tablets without coding. New features in version 9—such as conditional styles, story editor, shape maker, and more— automate manual, time-consuming design tasks.

“We know there are QuarkXPress enthusiasts that are still working with older versions and we’d like to ease their transition to QuarkXPress 9 by offering a special offer on the cost of an upgrade,” said Gavin Drake, vice president of marketing for Quark. “If you’re using an older version of QuarkXPress, the new features added in recent years are going to transform your design experience and capabilities as well as enable you to go beyond print to Web, Flash, and now eBook and iPad design.”

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The most difficult objects to mask are those with soft, undefined edges. This is a common issue in photos snapped using a wide aperture (or too close to the object), resulting in an increasingly soft focus as the object extends out of the lens' focal range. Accommodating this variance in focus can be a challenge. To help get your masks just right, I’ll show you two advanced masking techniques for Adobe Photoshop CS4 and CS5.

Prepare your mask

You’ll need to do a bit of prep work before executing the steps below. Open a photo and create a mask using the techniques outlined in an Introduction to Masking Parts and Advanced Masking: Vector Masks. In areas where the object veers out of focus, make sure the mask’s edge runs comfortably inside the object’s blurry edge.

Once you’ve completed the basic mask, you’ll have to arrange the document’s layers so that you can correctly follow the steps. The topmost layer should contain the object photo and the initial mask, and below it, a color fill layer that will help you see the mask. You must convert any vector masks to raster masks before continuing. Control-click the mask thumbnail and choose Rasterize Mask from the contextual menu.

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Adobe Creative Cloud, announced this week at the Adobe Max 2011 annual conference, is a cloud-based software initiative designed to redefine the process of content creation, storage, and sharing, and as a major component of the company's transformation. Creative Cloud is further evidence—in case any more was needed—of Adobe’s recognition that the mobile marketplace is the current and future cornerstone of art and design and is the company’s future.

What is Creative Cloud?

There are three parts to the structure of the Creative Cloud—applications, services, and community. Applications will include the tablet-centric Touch apps announced Monday alongside the desktop Creative Suite and Adobe's newest offerings from the lab, Edge and Muse. Services will include Digital Publishing Suite technologies, a portion of Business Catalyst, and cloud-based fonts for Web design via Adobe's acquisition of Typekit, a cloud-based subscription font library. Community will facilitate presentation, sharing, and collaboration on creative projects.

From Adobe's perspective, Creative Cloud—including its 20GB of online storage—will evolve into a hub for creative professionals to view, share, and sync content created with Touch apps and Creative Suite programs (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro, and After Effects). The company intends for Creative Cloud to develop into a service that allows access to those flagship applications and services, and act as an all-around resource for creatives, all at an attractive price.

Cloud membership will be available in early 2012. However, Adobe has not announced which features will be offered for that debut. More details are expected in early November.

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In conjunction with its new Creative Cloud initiative, Adobe has announced six mobile apps designed to make it easier for artists and designers to create and share their work. Files created with the apps—Photoshop Touch, Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler, and Proto—can be shared, viewed across devices, and transferred into Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5 for further refinement.

The apps are devoted to several areas of the creative process such as image editing, ideation, sketching, mood boards, website and mobile app prototyping, and presentation.

Not coincidentally, this announcement comes some six months after the debut of the Photoshop Touch SDK which, paired with a new scripting engine in Photoshop CS5, was designed to pave the way for iOS apps and other platform apps to drive and interact with Photoshop on the desktop.

According to Adobe, with the introduction of the new Photoshop Touch app, the existing Eazel, Nav, and Color Lava, as well as other apps that interact with Photoshop CS5 software using the Adobe Photoshop Touch SDK, are now called companion apps rather than Photoshop Touch apps. And the Photoshop Touch SDK has been rolled into the Photoshop SDK as a connection API.

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Adobe is planning to launch a series of Internet-hosted services, called Creative Cloud, designed for creators of digital content, the company said Monday.

Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch announced the new offerings at the Adobe Max conference, being held this week in Los Angeles. The services will be available early in 2012, according to the company.

Initially, the company will offer three services. One will provide fonts for websites. Another will help manage the process of digital publishing. The third, based on the Adobe Business Catalyst, will be for creating and managing websites. The company plans to introduce more services in the future, incorporating such Adobe products as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro, and After Effects.

The cloud service will allow content creators to save their work to Adobe’s cloud and access it from a wide variety of mobile and desktop platforms. Adobe will offer a base 20GB of storage, and provide a forum for creators to collaborate.

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While you may not have the artistic dedication (or bankroll) to warrant picking up one of Wacom’s Cintiq or Intuos tablets, you don’t have to feel left out: The company’s freshly updated Bamboo line offers three different affordable tablets for hobbyists, photo enthusiasts, and beginning artists.

With these new tablets, Wacom has simplified its consumer-level offerings—formerly five tablets under the Bamboo name with varying price points and features—into just three devices, the Bamboo Connect, Capture, and Create. For this revision, the company has attempted to target a specific swath of the tablet market for each model, rather than promote them by features alone.

The $80 Bamboo Connect, Wacom’s entry-level tablet, is designed for business illustration and simple doodles. Clad in black with a bright green accent, the device features a 5.8-inch-by-3.6-inch work area and 1024 levels of pressure awareness using one of the company’s signature pens with programmable side-buttons. Users can connect the tablet to their laptop or desktop via USB, and have the option of working with it using included software like Autodesk’s Sketchbook Express, digital inking functionality within Microsoft Office, or any other installed illustration application.

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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.

Intensity Extreme can capture directly from an HD camera's image sensor, bypassing the video compression chip for true uncompressed video quality. It can be connected to any big screen television or video projector for edit monitoring.

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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.

Using iPhoto ’11

Printing from iPhoto is a snap. Just select the photo(s) you want to print and choose File -> Print (or press Command + P). iPhoto’s Print Settings pane appears wherein you can choose a theme from the list on the left. Standard produces a plain photo with optional captions (under the Layout button) and white, gray, or black margins. Simple Border is much the same, though Simple Mat and Double Mat get interesting—both options let you add a cardboard frame around the photo that prints right on the page (a great way to add more impact to your image).

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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).

Just My Type also gives brief insights into the personal lives of the great typographers from John Baskerville to Matthew Carter.

And then there's Eric Gill. Creator of beautiful, truly innovative fonts, including Perpetua and Joanna, and Gill Sans, one of the best fonts ever hewn. He was always known to be an eccentric character, but his 1989 biography by Fiona McCarty exposed him as having molested his own children and dog—an issue Garfield skirts around by calling it "outrageous outré meanderings". We shouldn't hold back in our language in this way. The man was not a practitioner of "scandalous and ceaseless sexual experimentation," another of Garfield's mealy mouthed phrases. He was a rapist.

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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.”

How it works

The App Studio layout space in QuarkXPress 9.1 allows designers to simultaneously create vertical and horizontal orientations with content that can be automatically synchronized between orientations. Designers can add images, slideshows, audio, and video with tablet-oriented scrollable layouts.

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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.

If that weren’t enough, you can create multiple “layers” while you sketch by tapping the Layer button on the receiver; when you import your sketches, these will translate into layered files in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. If you forget to add a layer during the drawing process, you can use Wacom’s Sketch Manager software to scrub to a certain point in your drawing and separate that section. Once you’ve imported your drawing, you can also play back any drawing you’ve made, stroke-by-stroke (perhaps cribbing a move from one of my favorite iPad sketching apps, Brushes).

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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.

Design View: Pages are crafted in Design view, where you can switch among open pages––even multiple sites––in Photoshop-like tabs. Six tools are available: Selection, Crop, Text, Zoom, Hand, and Rectangle. A control panel below the toolbar updates depending on your selection, giving you quick access to Web-safe fill and stroke colors, fonts and text-styling options, a hyperlink style editor, and more.

Arbitrary HTML: Even though Muse is strictly WYSIWYG, you can easily add custom HTML from sites like Google Maps, YouTube, and Facebook. On the original site, just customize the code you want to export, then copy and paste it anywhere on your page. The HTML object will appear ready to be repositioned to your liking, and you can even edit its code.

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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.

AutoCAD 2012

AutoCAD 2012 features familiar AutoCAD capabilities, such as 2D and 3D design tools, and now includes 3D free-form modeling, 3D visualization and rendering, menu customization, and support for LISP and ObjectARX and ObjectDBX applications.

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Apple touts its GarageBand for iPad application as a great way to play and record music without the need to learn scales or time signatures. Musical newbies aren’t the only ones interested in using the $5 app, however. GarageBand for iPad appeals to seasoned musicians, too. And those with significant investments in recording equipment may be wondering which, if any, of their existing gear will work with the portable version of GarageBand. I decided to grab my trusty iPad, my iPad camera connection kit, and powered USB hub and plug in whatever I had around to see what would work.

The iPad Camera Connection Kit includes two adapters that plug into the iPad’s Dock connector. One of the adapters has an SD card slot that allows you to transfer photos and videos from a camera card into iMovie or iPhoto for iPad. The second adapter has a USB 2.0 input that allows you to connect a camera, or other USB peripheral to your iPad–I used one to connect a Flip camcorder.

Whether peripherals work with the iPad or not depends on a number of factors. USB Class Devices (those that don’t require driver installation) and devices requiring little power are the most likely to work. For peripherals needing more juice, like the aforementioned Flash camcorder, a powered USB hub may be necessary to work with the iPad.

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The software, which employs Web standards such as HTML 5, CSS3, and JavaScript, is being released as a public beta under the code name, Muse. The program will be available from Adobe's website as a free preview until the first quarter of 2012.

Muse is a freeform tool targeted to graphic designers and artists whose work has thus far appeared only in print, but who want to create interactive websites without having to deal with code.

Adobe envisions the Muse designer as someone who spends most of their time working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Creative pros will be able to use their current skills to combine images, graphics, and text in a process that is similar to working with InDesign.

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