A few months ago my friends at Coe-Truman Technologies (a bunch of database/XML publishing brainiacs) in Chicago invited me over to take a peek at a new InDesign plug-in they were about to offer to their customers. My jaw dropped, it was one of the coolest things ever ... and this from a company who is not really that into InDesign! They come at it from the other end. Coe-Truman helps clients's marketing departments create, manage, and publish their databases to the web and to print, instead of fighting with IT over it. That web-based software is called Catapult Manage:

Adobe released the latest iteration of their Creative Suite, CS4, last October, and back then, their "limited time upgrade offer deadline" of February 28, 2009 seemed so far off, didn't it?

And now ... the end is near ... and so we face ... the final daytosave200dollars .... (that was me imitating Frank Sinatra).

Here's the skinny: If you're upgrading from CS3 to CS4, there is no deadline to worry about. The upgrade price remains the same as it's always been, $499 for CS4 Standard and $599 for CS4 Premium.

Did you know that you can make your InDesign documents appear on an iPhone as though the user was reading your publication on an Amazon Kindle? For free? Today?

Okay, so since I had spent so much time learning the ins and outs of InDesign CS4 and InCopy CS4, why not do some new tutorial videos for lynda.com? I had nothing but time, right? So I did two titles, and each one took up about a solid month of my time (prepping sample files, outlines, testing, and then traveling to Lynda.com in Ventura, California to do the actual recording). But I'm really happy with how they came out.

Ever since I waved goodbye to my beloved XPress-to-HTML converter tool, BeyondPress XT (Extensis dropped it after QuarkXPress v5 was released) I've been searching for the equivalent plug-in or feature for Adobe InDesign. I needed a way to quickly export the text and images from my InDesign files to HTML, and I was constantly asked by my clients how to do the same.

The other day I was laying out a data-heavy table in InDesign. The bottom row was supposed to contain sum totals of the numbers in each column, but I didn't have those figures. All I had was the client's Microsoft Word file containing the original columnar data, and no sums there either.

My first Lynda.com video training title went live a couple weeks ago. Right now the lessons are only available online, but a DVD will be available for sale shortly:

InCopy CS3 + InDesign CS3 Integration
http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=323

Like a number of other Adobe CS3 users, I was initially aghast at the suite's new icons when they first showed them to the world late last year.

Adobe Systems -- the company with the legacy of some of the most creative icons in the history of interface design, from renditions of Venus de Milo to color-enhanced X-Ray photography of starfish and butterflies -- this same company was *seriously* considering icons that were colored squares and two-letter program name mnemonics? Were they kidding?

Back in November, Adobe asked me if I'd be interested in recording a bunch of video tutorials on InDesign CS3. Well, not Adobe itself; but a nice woman who *worked* for Adobe asked me.