Upcoming speaking engagements

It’s that time of year…conference season. I’m excited to be speaking at these upcoming events in the next couple of months:

May 14: AAF-CM InDesign seminar (St. Cloud, MN)

The American Advertising Federation of Central Minnesota runs a seminar series, and on May 14 I’ll be doing a half-day session on InDesign Tips and Tricks.

May 15: MMPA Summit & Expo (Minneapolis, MN)

I’ll be presenting 4 sessions at the annual Minnesota Magazine & Publishing Association annual Summit & Expo. My sessions are titled Creative Cloud paradise!, Troubleshooting - what to do when things go wrong, A Colorful Cloud, InDesign in Workgroups-sharing and syncing.

June 1-4: PePcon: The Print + ePublishing Conference (Philadelphia, PA)

PePcon is my absolute favorite conference every year. It is a total “love-fest” for designers creating digital OR print work. Conference hosts David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion work hard to foster a sense of community at this event, and the results are spectacular. It is so much fun to talk with attendees and other speakers between sessions and over meals. I’m presenting 3 sessions at PePcon: A Jargon-Free Guide to Compressing and Editing Video, Must-Know Interactive Effects for Tablet Apps (with Bob Levine), and Publishing Interactive Apps for Tablets. I can’t recommend PePcon enough. Use code SPK73W when registering for a $50 discount on your registration.

Creative Cloud Mac OS X requirements

If you are a Macintosh Adobe Creative Cloud user, you need to know this: Adobe has been trying to get the word out that the “next major release” of Creative Cloud will require Max OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) or higher. As of this writing, the latest version of OS X is 10.10 (Yosemite). 

Mac OS X updates are free, so for some people this is no big deal. But for users with old computers, or who are prevented from updating their operating system for other reasons, this could present difficulty.

This does not mean that if you don’t upgrade you won’t be able to use Creative Cloud. Users running older versions of OS X will still be able to install and run the versions of Creative Cloud applications they are using today, and the Creative Cloud Desktop app will still be compatible with OS X 10.7 and above. If you don’t upgrade to OS X 10.9 or newer, you just won’t be able to install the next versions of InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. when they are released.

Like it or not, I think this is the new reality. Now that Apple has been offering OS X upgrades free, and development cycles are being shortened, we will all need to keep our operating systems more up-to-date than we perhaps have in the past.