Adobe to Release PDF for Industry Standardization
“Today’s announcement is the next logical step in the evolution of PDF from de facto standard to a formal, de jure standard,” said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe. “By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness. As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years.”
Windows Vista RTM Software Compatibility List
There are 3 major categories (Works, Somewhat works, & Heavy problem\doesnt work).
Review: Toast 8 Titanium
Introduction and History
Toast 8 Titanium is the latest version of the venerable CD/DVD-burning software for Mac. Toast’s history goes back more than a decade; it was originally developed by Dr. Markus Fest and distributed by Astarte as an expensive, high-end application before CD burners were common devices. In 1997 Astarte sold Toast to Adaptec, which continued development and brought it to Mac OS X with version 5.1 in 2001. It was then transferred to Adaptec’s software division, Roxio, which continues selling it to this day.
After leading the market, creating cross-platform hybrid discs and supporting esoteric formats, such as CD-i, Toast 6’s only notable features were mediocre DVD authoring and CD burner sharing over the network. Emerging competition in the market appeared to spur Roxio to radically enhance Toast 7, adding support for Divx, Music DVDs and more. (We reviewed Toast 7 in late 2005.)
After successfully launching Toast 7, Roxio’s developers were clearly not content to rest on their well-deserved laurels, and they have completely overhauled Toast 8, which features a streamlined user interface and tons of new and enhanced functionality.
Toast 8 also includes Deja Vu backup software, CD Spin Doctor, Disc Cover, and Motion Pictures HD. DiscCatalogMaker is a welcome new addition to the Toast family. All are Universal binaries running natively on Intel Macs, except for Motion Pictures HD, which is unchanged, except for a 0.0.1 version increment,and runs under Rosetta on Intel Macs.
Penguin.SWF: Flash Player 9 For Linux (x86)
This is it. This is the officially blessed version of the Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux (x86). Not a beta version; the final version. It’s released. Today.
Go get it.
FastTrack Schedule is a full-featured cross-platform project management and scheduling application – no other project management product we know of approaches its feature set. Its primary rival is PC-only Microsoft Project.
FastTrack Schedule 9 review from Mac|Life
3D World’s question of the month – “How can I create an animated book like the one in Shrek 2?”
Did you know that Shrek 2 took 10 million computer hours to generate its 92 minutes of CGI? Oh, you did. But did you know that a single frame of the city crowd scene took 35 hours to render? You knew that, too. Ah, but do you know – without sneaking a peek at the Factfile – how long it will take to animate the pages of a book magically turning over by themselves, in a manner similar to the opening sequence of the movie? Ah, you looked! That’s cheating.
Okay, take a sneak peek at step one; we won’t mind. Do you notice anything peculiar about it? That’s right. In the past, we’ve given you a project file to load in, but this time you’ve got nothing. Zilch. A big fat zero. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, in order to create a convincing page-turn, you need to create the book, too. Secondly, and more to the point, if we just told you how to create a page-turn, it wouldn’t be much of a Q&A, would it? Page-turns can be simple, a blendShape here, a nonlinear deformer there, but opening a book and having the pages seem to fall comfortably into place is another kettle of fish entirely. That’s why a page-turn really begins with the book.In this Q&A, the book is going to be a combination of polygons and NURBS. The book cover needs to be bound to a skeleton so you can animate the spine bending. To keep the rigging to a minimum, we’ll use a polygon Smooth Proxy. This is useful, because you can also create clean UV maps for texturing. However, because you want smooth page-turns, the pages will be made from NURBS planes set above a fake block of pages. That way, you can increase their tessellation at render time. So all of these elements animate collectively, we’ll also create a single node to drive everything.
The final step is to create a double-sided shader so that each page can accept shading on either side. The support download contains a finished scene with a weathered leather book cover. Something that wouldn’t actually look out of place in a land far, far away.
“How can I create an animated book like the one in Shrek 2?” (tutorial and source files included)
Alain Bielik peers into Luc Besson’s world of Arthur and the Invisibles to see how the live-action director handled the film’s animated fantasy world.
Arthur and the Invisibles: Luc Besson’s Animated World
Macworld Best of Show for Premiere Pro
Well, Macworld was a blast–Premiere Pro and Photoshop both won best of show! It was a lot of fun to be at the show with our Mac plans out in the public. Every time we showed the Production Studio running on a Mac we had a crowd that was standing room only, back to the back wall, and the response was overwhelming. We also had a great time showing Soundbooth on one of the demo stations all day. We got some great feedback and some even better suggestions. Good times!
Russell Brown to show CS3 Tues. night at Adobe
Fresh off his jam-packed presentations at Macworld last week, Adobe’s own Russell Brown will be presenting the Photoshop CS3 beta tomorrow night, Jan. 16, at Adobe (map). As usual with these Photoshop User Group meetings, Pizza and drinks kick off at 6:30pm, and the presentation is due to start at 7pm.
If you plan to attend, please shoot an RSVP mail to Dan Clark (dan at weinberg-clark com) so that we can order the right amount of chow. To park underneath the Adobe building, use the Almaden Avenue entrance, under the East Tower. If the security guard at the parking entrance asks for an Adobe contact, use my name. Hope to see you there!
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