Creative Community Bulletin 19 May 2010 Through 22 May 2010

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 19 May 2010 through 22 May 2010:

  • Video trib­ute to the Get a Mac ad cam­paign – Last month we report­ed that Justin Long, who plays Mac in the Get a Mac ads, hint­ed that the adver­tis­ing cam­paign had come to an end. Now it seems confirmed
  • Script Displays Style Overrides in InDesign CS4 (and CS5) – Marc Autret (IndiScripts) wrote anoth­er love­ly script. According to his own words… it’s the short­est script he’s ever writ­ten. The ShowHideLocalFormatting script!

    Once installed his script pro­vides a sim­ple on/off mech­a­nism to dis­play any local style over­rides that are applied to text. No need to look for that tiny lit­tle sym­bol in the Character/Paragraph Styles pan­el… instead a very clear red line marks all the over­rides. It even picks up things like hyphen­ation enabling/disabling, lack of style for­mat­ting etc, by plac­ing a red ver­ti­cal rule at the start of each line in the effect­ed paragraph.

  • Adobe, You Brought an Advertisement to a Gun Fight – On one hand, there’s an urge to feel bad for you. You real­ly are get­ting screwed here. On the oth­er hand, you real­ly did it to your­selves.

    When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, had there been a great, light­weight ver­sion of Flash for mobile devices, I bet that Apple would have almost been forced to use it. They offered it on their desk­top browsers after all, and this new device was sup­posed to be putting the Internet in your pock­et. It was no sure thing that this device would suc­ceed at the time, and giv­ing it every chance to (by includ­ing some­thing like Flash) would have made sense. But there was no ver­sion of Flash ready that would run on the device (pre­sum­ably with­out mas­sive performance/battery hits). In fact, only now, three full years lat­er, is a ver­sion of Flash run­ning on main­stream mobile devices being shown off.

  • Sayonara, iPhone: Why I’m Switching to Android – I was already fed up with my lousy AT
  • Doodle 4 Google – Kids Draw Google Logo, Winner Becomes Google Logo for a Day – Here is a dis­play of our top 40 Regional Finalists. Please vote for one favorite doo­dle in each grade group. You may only vote one time. Voting is open from May 18, 2010 6:00 a.m. Pacific Time (PT) to May 25, 2010 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time (PT). After May 25th, we will tal­ly up your votes and announce the four nation­al final­ists and nation­al win­ner on May 26, 2010 at an awards cer­e­mo­ny in New York. The nation­al win­ner’s doo­dle will appear on Google​.com on May 27, 2010. For a list of our State Finalists that are not a part of this online vot­ing round, please click here.
  • Free For All: A Thousand Free Textures – Textures. We’ve got tex­tures. Lots and lots of tex­tures. One thou­sand one hun­dred and twenty-three to be exact, from paper to ink, grunge to clean, con­crete to met­al, wood to grass, smoke to cof­fee stains. And they’re all 100% free for per­son­al and com­mer­cial use.
  • Pantone Opens a Hotel. This Is Not a Joke. – Pantone LLC, an X‑Rite com­pa­ny, and the glob­al author­i­ty on col­or, today announced the open­ing of the PANTONE HOTEL in Brussels. Centrally locat­ed just steps from Avenue Louise, a glam­orous shop­ping and busi­ness dis­trict named for a king’s daugh­ter and now a muse to modern-day design­ers, the bou­tique PANTONE HOTEL com­bines a chic, col­or­ful design aes­thet­ic with com­fort­able, well-appointed guest rooms. The lob­by and rooftop ter­races are des­ti­na­tions unto them­selves with­in a bustling city cen­ter famous for its artis­tic, culi­nary and polit­i­cal history.
  • Android Froyo Is a Slap in Apple’s Face – Google is, in fact, doing it right in a few areas where Apple is doing it wrong.
  • Adobe Tables (Beta) SaaS – Competing with Google Spreadsheets? – Acrobat​.com Tables Beta lets you work online with oth­ers on data and infor­ma­tion such as task lists, sched­ules, con­tacts, sales num­bers, etc.

    Tables has the famil­iar look and feel of a spread­sheet and it oper­ates inside a web brows­er so you and your team are always work­ing with the most accu­rate, up to date infor­ma­tion. Everyone works in the same data set simul­ta­ne­ous­ly so there is no need to send copies in e‑mail or check it out from a shared server.

  • Flash Dynamic Desktop Background – I was able to embed any site I cared to, includ­ing Flash apps, as my Windows back­ground. It worked so well that I pushed the idea a lit­tle fur­ther and made a Javascript-driven HTML page that any­one can down­load and eas­i­ly use to exper­i­ment with this little-known trick.