Have you seen the new Adobe Creative Suite 3 icons? I wasn’t a fan of the previous set, but they didn’t drive me to Iconfactory. The new ones will.
(Via Chris Glass)
Category: Tools
If anyone's still at a loss as to what to get me
for Ramakwanzachanamas, let me just give you a hint: 12-inch, orange. The poor little guy needs to be reunited with his family!
(Via Awesome!)
On a more intellectual note (I like to keep the tone high around here, as you know), my friend Sarah G-P just redirected me to Eve Corbel’s Lesser-Known Editing and Proofreading Marks, which I’d seen before but forgotten.
Wouldn't you like to be a PODder, too?
Yay! I just received fellow DrawMonaut Elizabeth Perry‘s selected days: 2005,
and not only am I looking forward to poring over the content, but also I’m very glad to have satisfied my curiosity about the printing. Because selected days is printed by online POD outfit Lulu.com, and I was very interested in seeing what the quality would be like.
Continue reading “Wouldn't you like to be a PODder, too?”
CMS 15 CD-ROM NFG :(
As you may know, I was holding my breath for the release of the Chicago Manual of Style CD-ROM for something like two years. I had even written UChi Press a letter saying that I would gladly pay twice the price of the dead-tree edition for a searchable version that could live on my hard drive. So of course, I was very excited when I saw that the CD-ROM was finally shipping from Amazon.com—excited enough to bring fame, if not fortune, upon my ditzy little head—and zip! I ordered it. I was taking advantage of a free trial of Amazon.com’s “Prime” delivery service at the time, so the disk was in my hands almost immediately. And over the last several weeks, as I tried to get various freelance millstones off my neck, I’ve used it for nearly all my Chicago-look-upping needs (which, since I’m such an infrequent editorial freelancer nowadays, are vast).
So, you ask, was it worth the anticipation, and the sixty extra bucks? (They clearly took me at my word about the price.)
Weeeeeelllllll . . . if I were travelling, it would be better than nothing. But it’s slow in loading any item longer than a paragraph. I see a great deal of this:
In fact, I clocked it at one minute seventeen seconds to load the first few pages of chapter 5’s Glossary of Troublesome Expressions. It is therefore just as well, I suppose, that the rest of the pages in that section—everything after the word “or” in the entry for “censer; censor, n.; sensor”—is missing. Because it would take the better part of an hour for it to appear on the screen.
Mighty Stupid Mouse
I’m still not posting. I just wanted to point out that the Apple Mighty Mouse? Sucks. It’s too round and is always getting oriented just a little bit too far counterclockwise in my hand, so that I try to left-click and get a right-click instead. Also, the buttons on the side are impossibly placed. Looks pretty; lousy design.
My workaround, until I get pissed off enough to request a normal two-button mouse from GoG, has been to mark each vague-button-area of the mouse with one of those little doughnut-shaped stickers you use to reinforce the holes on looseleaf pages, so I can get my fingers in the right spots without looking. The mouse now looks like an owl:
The Other X-Acto and Wax Technique
The other day, Cathi told a tragic story about how
I remember right after my newspaper moved me to a brand new building and informed me I’d have to do layout with an exacto knife and waxer again because they had no Mac for me . . .
And while I’m in awe of Cathi’s skillz, I have to say, when I think “X-Acto and wax,” my associations are quite different.
<rant>
More than once—more than once, I say!—I have seen type spec’ed in the margin as something like 16pt Akzidenz Grotesk, and I look at this tiny type and think, “Sixteen points, my ass,” and then I click on the line and find that, yeah, it’s sixteen points, with the superior attribute applied to it, so it’s shrunk down. And the designer didn’t even notice that he or she had done it. Or worse, she did notice, but she left it like that saying, “Oh, let the compositor figure out what point size it is.”
And then the same designer will demonstrate to the comp how a blockquote should be formatted by creating a separate text box with a runaround and then dropping that into the middle of a regular paragraph. Apparently because the designer doesn’t know how to set indents. And god forbid she should know what a style sheet is, or a character style. I mean, really—knowing how to use your tools, that’s so . . . working-class. Designers are professionals. Continue reading “The Other X-Acto and Wax Technique”
CMS 15 CD-ROM OMG!!!
Dudes! The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition (CD-ROM) is in stock! This is huge!
I am a big fan of having all my reference books on the computer. It’s so much faster than thumbing through a big fat book, much as I enjoy looking at the big fat book in my leisure time.
Note also that CMS Online is about to launch, and you’ll get a free trial if you’re registered there already. This is not a useful format for me—I often cram in freelance work when I’m without an Internet connection, traveling or whatnot—but maybe it’s right for somebody out there.
What are your “desert island” layout tools?
On Tuesday I submitted the following modest list of software requests to IT:
-
Quicksilver (free)
Application launcher and much, much more! I know it still claims to be beta, but I’ve used almost every version since it was released, with no problems. -
TextWrangler (free)
Text editor -
PrintWindow Standard (free)
Prints Finder windows -
Badia FullMeasure XT ($79.99)
Multifunction Quark XTension that seems to do everything the constellation of tools [for Quark 4, mostly pirated] I used to have accomplished -
Editor’s Toolkit Plus ($69.95)
Word macro set for scrubbing manuscripts -
India Ink ($15)
Photoshop plugin for mucking with halftones -
MS Office 2004 ($?)
Not at all urgent, but for the record, the current version has much better style sheet handling than Word X. I’m probably one of two people in the building who uses style sheets in Word, but I’m just saying, is all. -
Firefox (free)
Current version (1.5; I’m still on 1.0.7)
Continue reading “What are your “desert island” layout tools?”
Tomorrow!
I get! The new! Disk! Image!
The job I started at the end of May is my first at a Large Corporation, so it’s my first time dealing with an IT department and a locked-down applications folder.
When I arrived here and saw my lush silver G5 tower and the slim 19-inch Apple Cinema monitor—not to mention the window and the door and the drafting table—I was thrilled. Jobs at places that have money can be good!
When I turned the computer on and discovered that it was loaded up with cutting-edge software such as OS 10.2.8 (Jaguar—that’s two cats ago, for those of you not using Macs), Quark XPress 6.1, Illustrator 10, Photoshop 7, and Acrobat 6.0.1, however, I was, let’s say, less thrilled.
Now, I love Mac OS X, but I love it in the current version, and I love it My Way—with a constantly adjusted array of little helper applications and custom settings. Call it a legacy of my years of power-using Windows, if you disapprove. So when I found that the application folder was locked so that I couldn’t install Quicksilver, which would have made up for the most annoying deficiencies of Jaguar’s primitive Finder, nor such useful tools as TextWrangler and PrintWindow, I was, mmm, pissed.
But I’ve watched The IT Crowd; I know you can’t just call the guys in the basement and say, “Fix my computer!” Because first they’ll let the phone ring forty-five times, then they’ll ask you to turn your computer off and on again, and then they’ll have madcap adventures—while still failing to fix your computer. These things have to be finessed.
Continue reading “Tomorrow!”