The easiest way to share photos and videos with family, friends, and co-workers

Dropbox is essential to running my business. Its incredibly useful in so many ways. I like it so much that I authored a series of training videos called "Up and Running with Dropbox" for Lynda.com.

One of my favorite Dropbox features is the ability to share folders of images and video with any user, anywhere (they don't need a Dropbox account) with just a couple of clicks.

This is a fast, simple, low-overhead alternative to photo-sharing services such as Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug or Shutterfly. Watch the free excerpt from my Lynda.com course below to learn how.

2 free upcoming DPS Webinars

I’ll be doing two webinars for Adobe in the next few weeks.

1. Four Ways to Add Animation to Adobe DPS Apps on April 22

There are four ways to make things move on the screen in Adobe DPS apps: video clips, image sequences, animated slide shows, and HTML content from programs such as Adobe Edge Animate.

In this Webinar, you will see:

• The pros and cons of each approach
• When to use each method
• How to optimize animation for the best performance
• Examples of each method in use in the real world

… and more!

2. Working with Video Content in Adobe DPS Apps on May 20

Video content is one of the most desired features in many apps. Video content can be imported into Adobe InDesign CC, and then included in an Adobe DPS app. But there are many tips and techniques that can make this easier for you.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• How to prepare video for use in Adobe DPS
• When to embed video vs. stream video from a website
• How to use video for introduction screens
• When to set video to play full screen vs. playing "in place" in your layout

… and more!

These webinars are free! See more details and register here.

Once on Newsstand, always on Newsstand

If you are considering whether or not your app should go in the Newsstand category in the Apple App Store, take this into account: Once you’ve published an app in the Newsstand category, there is no going back. Apple documents this here. Specifically, they say "If a Newsstand-enabled app version has the the Ready for Sale status, you cannot disable Newsstand for any current or future versions of that app."

I have a customer that has an app on Newsstand, and now, for business- and marketing-related reasons, they want to remove it from Newsstand. When we discovered that this couldn’t be done in iTunesConnect, I called Apple to see if there was some way that they could override or make this change on their end. The answer was a clear “no”. So it looks like if you have an app on Newsstand, the only way to get the app out of Newsstand is to remove the app from the App Store, and publish an entirely new App. This is a poor solution, since there is no way to “update” users from one app to another.