Adobe Creative Suite 5 now shipping

Adobe announced last night that CS5, announced on April 12, is now shipping. Also, for the first time, you can download a free trial of the entire CS5 Master Collection (18 programs!) as a single 5+ gigabyte download.

Spotlight sees PSD layer names, Adobe Bridge doesn't

Did you know that the Mac OS X Spotlight feature has the ability to "see" the layer names in Photoshop .psd files? If you have a layer named "timbuktu" in a Photoshop .psd image, and you do a spotlight search for "timbuktu" that image will be found. This could be useful if you misplace a file and for some strange reason you can't recall the filename but you do remember the name of one of the layers. Or, if you need to display all the files in a particular folder to which you've applied a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

You can also quickly view the layer names in a .psd file by selecting the file in the Macintosh Finder and choosing File > Get Info.

As an alternative to Spotlight, check out EasyFind. I use this free utility frequently and love it.

Alas, Adobe Bridge, with all of its metadata wonderfulness, can't search for or display Photoshop layer names.

Typography on the iPad

Stephen Coles wrote a great piece on the FontFeed blog about typography (or lack thereof) on Apple's new iPad, and also covers some points about the iPhone and Mac OS X.

Justified type without hyphenation in iBooks?

iBooks don't recognize embedded fonts?

No widow-orphan control?

Ouch.

See also Liz Castro's great posts about the iPad, the ePub standard, and InDesign.

Add new capabilities to InDesign & InCopy

I've been doing a lot of writing lately. I usually start a writing project in Word or NeoOffice, so that I can use an outliner to quickly organize and rearrange my thoughts. I also rely on the thesaurus in those programs.

But sometimes for various reasons I do my writing in InDesign. But InDesign doesn't have a Thesaurus, and I miss that. But thanks to Mac OS X "Services", I can access a thesaurus from within InDesign. Just select a word, and choose InDesign > Services > Look Up in Dictionary. The Apple Dictionary application will be launched, and the selected word will be looked up in the dictionary. From there, I can click on Thesaurus to explore alternate words, or Wikipedia to learn more about the word.

Other services that I've sometimes used in InDesign or InCopy include Show Address in Google Maps, Search With Google and Open URL.

These options in the Services section of theInDesign menu (aka the Application menu) are provided by OS X, and work in many Macintosh applications (but not Illustrator, Photoshop or Flash unfortunately). So this is a Macintosh-only feature. I don't know of a similar technology available on Windows.

In OS X 10.6, you may need to choose InDesign > Services > Services Preferences to turn on some of the services mentioned above. Only services that have a check mark next to them will show up in your Services menu.

I've also installed WordService and CalcService from DEVONtechnologies. These free downloads add a bunch of text and number processing features to the Services menu. Particularly handy is the ability to quickly insert the current date and time into your text, and the ability to do math in InDesign.

If you frequently need to shorten URLs in your text, check out this solution for Bit.ly, This is really slick. You just select a long URL in InDesign, choose InDesign > Services > Shorten URL with Bit.ly, and Bit.ly is contacted, the URL is shortened, and your long URL is replaced with the short URL. Click here for solutions for TinyURL and various other URL shorteners.

Warning, I encountered one serious bug while messing around with this. If I have a cell or any other portion of a table selected, and I choose InDesign > Services, InDesign crashes immediately. I'm running InDesign CS4 6.0.4 on Mac OS X 10.6.3.

Check out InDesignSecrets!

My friends David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion over at the popular InDesignSecrets blog and podcast have asked me to become a regular contributor to their blog...and I've agreed. I'm certainly not going to curtail, or even reduce, my postings here. Writing for InDesignSecrets will be in addition to what I do here. A couple of weeks ago I put up a post about a cool Styles panel trick, and today I put up a post about importing spreadsheets into InDesign.

If you're not familiar with David and Anne-Marie, you need to give the InDesignSecrets podcast a listen. Somehow, they make listening to a dialog about the Separations Preview panel or find/change minutae fun and entertaining. A great way to pick up InDesign tips while you're running, walking, driving or whatever else you can do while listening to audio.