At the beginning of May 2013, Adobe announced that it is retiring development on it’s Creative Suite of applications. CS6 will be the last of the boxed versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver and the rest of the apps that creatives use on a daily basis.

Adobe have been trialling their Creative Cloud Service for about a year now, offering access to their entire suite of products on a monthly subscription-basis. In practise, this is great for Companies with no concerns about paying whatever fees Adobe decide they want to charge. (Rest assured, once they have you over a barrel the price WILL continue to rise.) However, they have just announced that subscription-only will be the way forward and naturally, there has been a justifiable backlash from the design community.

There is an online petition against the Adobe’s Creative Cloud Subscription Model here, which is already at 15,000 supporters.

For me personally, moving over to a service which I pay for monthly seems pointless. I recently upgraded to CS6 only due to the massive overhaul Photoshop was given. I have the web and design premium edition and out of that I am using Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign on a daily basis. Fireworks has occasional outings, Dreamweaver less often, only for clients who use Contribute to administer their sites, but Flash has been opened ONCE in about 6 months. This means that I’m using half the products in the Suite, so paying for ALL of them every month makes no sense. Yes, they offer subscriptions for individual products, but then that costs more.

I mentioned the overhaul that Photoshop got in CS6, but that is unusual. The products are offering less must-have new features with each version and I use Espresso for building websites these days, and swapped After Effects for Apple’s Motion years ago.

As a self-employed designer, I like to buy my tools outright, so I have them available when I need them. Renting (that’s what subscription is) means that if my business takes a knock then I’m in trouble and can’t afford to pay to use my essential tools. (That is an unlikely extreme but some start-ups may face this situation when cashflow is an issue.) And, I believe that once the attractive JOIN NOW period is over, Adobe will hike up the prices, leaving subscribers in a position where they have little choice but to pay whatever Adobe want to charge.

I’m going to finish this rant on a positive; the benefit of NOT moving over to a subscription service is familiarity. That may well have the longer-term effect of designers getting to know their tools better (many a good tune played on an old fiddle) and developing their own ways of become more creative as they rely less on one-click filters or solutions.

I’ve spent enough on Adobe products over the years and will continue to use what I have every day. The Adobe Creative Cloud subscription model is not the best thing for individual designers, but it might just be the best thing for their creativity!

If you want to know how to use camera behaviors, keyframing or automatic keyframing to speed up and make animating easier, this basic 20 minute introduction might just help.

jQuery is a very popular language on the web these days. It’s fairly easy to learn and implement on your site and it can add a lot of functionality which makes your site more user-friendly and better looking! You can learn about it here on the jQuery website.

If you are using it (maybe to show elements hidden with your CSS) or have installed plugins that rely on it, there may be issues with multiple instances of it being loaded. You can get around this, by adding some code to your theme‘s functions.php file, to ‘enqueue’ jQuery:

// Load jQuery
if ( !is_admin() ) {
wp_deregister_script(‘jquery’);
wp_register_script(‘jquery’, (“//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js”), false);
wp_enqueue_script(‘jquery’);
}

Here, we first ‘deregister’ jQuery to ensure that multiple copies aren’t already firing, then we register or load it using the Google jQuery script library. This is a good idea because lots of other sites seem to use this method and your visitors may already have it in their browser’s cache. Finally, we add jQuery to our queue so it is ready when needed.

Two other points that are worth noting:

1. Keep your Google library version number as current as possible. This reduces possible problems as changes are made to any plugins you are using.
2. When using your own jQuery script in a WordPress site, make sure to use ‘jQuery’ in full rather than the abbreviated ‘$’. Again, this limits conflicts. For example:

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
});

Since my recent testing and use of Camtasia:mac, I’ve been trying out another product for screen capture on a Mac – Snagit, by the same company who make Camtasia. There’s a similar story to my testing process here; I’ve used the native OS X Grab app, Snapz Pro X and my long-term favourite, LittleSnapper. All of these have their plus points or little features that I like:

• OS X Grab – I often use it for a quick measurement, using the crosshair realtime pixel count to check styling on a website for example.
• Snapz Pro X – being able to resize the capture (with measurements) before taking it and the handy hex colour identifier.
• LittleSnapper – Really easy naming and tagging of images within the app.

But, Snagit seems to have a more complete feature set that has been designed to meet the needs of people wanting to make screen captures with simplicity in mind. It is available for both Mac and PC and you can download a trial version here on the TechSmith website.

Getting Started With Snagit

The first time you launch Snagit after installing, you are greeted with a prompt that appears at the right-hand edge of your screen. This is the Capture Window, and it hides itself neatly away when not in use. You can drag it up and down the edge of your screen, move it over to the left, undock it or hide it altogether. Already, I’m hiding it and using the icon that appears in the menu bar, but it is good to have the choice!

Snagit will let you capture pictures and video and you use the keyboard shortcuts ctrl + shift + c for pictures, or ctrl + shift + v for video. Simple enough to remember and you can customise them if you prefer. There are additional shortcuts to quickly capture windows and menus. (There is an option to capture from a webcam too, but on a Mac with Photo Booth built-in, that is a bit of a redundant option. Still, it’s there if you want it.)

Once you opt for a screen capture, orange guides appear and intelligently snap around your windows to make selections easier. Like Snapz, there is a magnified Loupé which gives you a readout of the dimensions. (If only it had the hex picker too, then I wouldn’t need the ColorZilla browser extension!)

In the Safari browser, Snagit is able to select icons, address bars, tabs and graphic elements automatically – what a treat!

In a browser window, you have the option to capture the whole page as scrolling down, left/right can be included in the capture.

Editing Your Captures

You can set Snagit to open your captures immediately in the built-in editor. This is the real powerhouse behind the software and the options here will bring a big smile to your face!

The screen shot or capture appears in the middle, with tools/effects and properties to the right and the tray where your captures and media (you can open other images to add to your file) are collected at the bottom. Selected items in the tray display their measurements but they can be cropped and the surrounding canvas expanded. This is really useful if you want to add background or floating elements. The tray can be tucked away too if you are on a smaller screen. My only issue with the tray (and indeed Snagit itself (!) involves the renaming of captures. You have to right-click on a Mac and Reveal In Finder to get at the file name. The other option is when you drag a file out on to the Desktop and can rename it there. It’s a little thing and tied in to the way that the files are considered to be project files until you export or drag them out.

Edge effects can be applied to your captured images – rough torn edges, smooth waves, or sawtooth zig-zags and you can control which edges the effect is applied to, along with the size of the effect and how much it eats into your picture. Some of the effects like perspective, reflection and colour filters seem a bit cosmetic, but maybe for some they will be very welcome and much-used.

One option I find really useful is the ability to make and remove or reposition sections of a page.

This is extended in the Tools with cursor option; if you have chosen to include it in your capture you can reposition it and scale it – genius!

There are plenty of tools which make this a fully-fledged editor, with the ability to change colours, stroke widths and add shadows to your elements:

• Selections
• Annotations
• Arrows/Lines/Freehand scribbles/highlighter pens
• Blur/eraser
• Fill colours
• Callout boxes

This is way more than those found in LittleSnapper, and as a bonus, the arrows have a control anchor in the middle of the line so you can bend them to shape! There are also a ton of stamps, with everything from interface elements, keyboard keys to mouse-click icons and drawn symbols. More are available here on the TechSmith website and you can always open your own files if you want to add custom elements.

Video Capture

I’m going to gloss over this part really quickly, because Snagit is an excellent utility if you don’t have anything else. One handy feature is the ability to turn a frame into a capture. Beyond that, if you want any effects, tools or editing options you are advised to use Camtasia. Read my review of that on this page.

Exporting And Sharing Your Captures

Snagit offers plenty of options for sharing your files and the available options change to suit your capture. You can customise the main buttons, dragging icons into your preferred order.

The + symbol allows you to export to Microsoft Office products. I’m not sure if these work as I don’t use use them, but it would be good to have a Pages or OpenOffice option included.

You can also set in the preferences which file format your captures are saved as when you drag them out of the tray on to your Desktop. Options are png, jpg, bmp, tiff and gif. The tiff option is good if you are taking captures to use in a DTP app such as InDesign and I wonder if psd could be added?

Overall, this is a very good app and with only limited use, I can already say I believe this is the perfect screen capture tool for anyone who needs to share screen shots with clients, family or friends.

You can either buy Snagit here through the Mac App Store for £34.99 or directly through the TechSmith website for £36.95 inc VAT. (Both links are to the GBP-priced versions.)

May 3 2013: Cult of Mac are offering a bundle that includes Camtasia:Mac for $49.99. See this page for the offer, expires 11 May 2013.

 Why I’m Looking For New Video Screen Capture Software

Up until this moment, my screencasts or video tutorials have been made with initially, Snapz Pro X and more recently, Screenium. Snapz Pro X is like the free QuickTime screen recorder on steroids, but I moved to Screenium when I needed a more sophisticated tool, that allowed me to use callouts, text and zoom in or highlight/obscure items on my screen. However, it always feels kind of clunky and missing some key features plus the files seem way bigger than they should be. It does however, have some great features that are NOT in either of my two test apps, such as the ability to save presets for mouse-clicks, zoom to focus window, align and distribute options plus a cut tool right above the timeline, which is useful!

What follows is not an in-depth look at their features – you can find that on their websites. This is about me as a potential customer looking at these two products and finding out which I may prefer.

Camtasia:mac

This is based on the trial version 2.3.0 which lets you use it fully for 30 days, without a watermark.

This is a huge plus as the ScreenFlow demo carries a watermark and I have not been lured into using it for any purpose beyond trialling. If I had been able to use it for my work, I think it might have been more easy to decide which I prefer, so plus one to TechSmith and Camtasia!

Download the demo here where there are both Mac and PC versions: www.techsmith.com

Launching Camtasia, you get a panel where you choose to record your full screen, a custom region or one of several preset sizes, plus a few recent sizes you have used. There is an option to use a built-in iSight camera or other connected camera plus various microphone and system audio settings, which requires installing a TechSmith Audio Capture Component. Press the big red button and you are off, until you pause or stop recording. Once you stop, the edit suite opens, with a panel offering tutorials – another helpful feature.

I’m not going to spend too much time on the interface, only to say it is very intuitive and the dark colours make it easy to focus on the content.

On the left there is a section for adding media, effects, annotations (including Sketch Motion or animated elements), transistions etc and clicking on each title reveals the contents or options available. You simply drag these on to your recording in the main central window and whatever you have added will appear where your playhead is at in the timeline below. An indicator appears at the bottom of the callout/effect and opening this up lets you change the duration of whatever you just added. Multiple items appear stacked above eachother and the hide-away feature keeps the timeline clean and manageable. Animations can be retimed by dragging the start and end of the arrow that appears on the object in the timeline.

The right-hand side has a context-senitive settings panel which lets you save presets for some of your callouts and text. This is a very useful feature and it will enable you to save a house-style for your movies.

The timeline allows multiple audio and video tracks, with audio and video from a Camtasia recording in a single track. You can spilt these to their own tracks if you want. It would be nice if there was a visibility/toggle on-off for hiding tracks on the timeline. There are options for caption and marker tracks to help manage your editing.

Edit-wise, there are plenty of useful cursor, video and audio effects and there is a SmartFocus animation for setting up basic zooms and pans. (I find this isn’t as smart as I would like and don’t use it.) The timeline also has visual cues for the mouse-clicks, which is again, useful. One great feature is the Interactive Hotspot effect. This means you can embed clickable URLs and pause buttons in your movies – excellent!

Camtasia is also capturing keystrokes during recording. To show them in your screencast,  drag a Keystroke Video FX on to your video and chose one of the available styles. You can also add them manually as Annotations if you prefer.

When it comes to sharing your movies, there are plenty of options including YouTube upload, iTunes, building a web page with a Flash movie and Screencast.com (free account needed) for when you know the target will not be able to play Flash on their device. There are also standalone QuickTime movie options and captions and markers can be exported too.

Overall, this is a great application, easy to use with plenty of customisation and sharing options.

I’m rating it 10/10 (since Shane at TechSmith showed me how to display keystrokes!)

 ScreenFlow

I’m using the demo of ScreenFlow 4.0.3. This exports watermarked videos (see my note at the top of the page) and can be downloaded here: www.telestream.net

Starting a recording with ScreenFlow, you get a panel like this:

You record your whole screen and decide during the edit what you show.

When you finish your recording, the edit window opens, looking very much like iMovie. It’s powerful and although I found it to be not as intuitive as Camtasia, I dare say that for some this may provide the solution for editing more than just your screen recordings. With plenty of video and audio filters, transitions and features like adding space before video on the timeline, freeze frames and the like, this is a well-rounded video editor. (All of these features are in iMovie so I guess this will be down to individual preference.)

There are no presets for canvas size, you pick your own and the editing begins. All of the properties (text, video, annotations, mouse) are housed in a single tabbed side panel. The whole interface is very lean and on a 27″ monitor, unless you learn the many keyboard shortcuts, there is a lot of mousing over to the edge of the screen. It just feels like they need some commonly-used options within easier reach, on the transport bar perhaps.

Each property is added by clicking a button at the bottom of the panel and current settings can be saved as defaults, although there are no custom preset options. This is something I like and use in both Screenium and Camtasia, along with the mouse-click options. Here, you get to show them as red radar rings or inverted. Those are your options. If you a demoing a screen item with a red colour scheme, the mouse won’t be as visible as the radar rings should make it. Saving and customising presets is a big deal for creating personalised movies. I would love to see them included in ScreenFlow.

The timeline allows for plenty of tracks and double-clicking shows a floating dialog clip inspector panel, where clip speed can be adjusted. This is handy and I would love this to be extended to allow for fast editing of callouts etc.

Did I mention I’d like more choice for callouts? Saving a default thickness for your strokes isn’t flexible enough to cover the needs of ellipse/box, line and arrows. This means extra work. One default I do like is for transitions, and these can be applied to the beginning and ending of a selected clip with a single keyboard shortcut.

When it comes to sharing your movies, there are a number of Presets which are customisable and you can also add some of your own. There is also YouTube & Vimeo upload, plus a Flash option which generates a directory containing an HTML5 page with an embedded .fv4 file and a skin which you choose for your movie.

I really do like ScreenFlow and want to use it, but I’m just finding there are so many things I want added or improved. It feels smoother and more ‘grown up’ than Camtasia, and the support from Telestream is excellent.

At the moment, I’m rating it as 8/10.

Both products are the same price ($99) and I’ve already seen one ScreenFlow update since I began my testing. In summary, if ScreenFlow could include my wishlist (below) then this is the product I would use. Based on the current versions of both apps, Camtasia is my preference, and I have used it for several client training videos already, but I haven’t parted with any money yet!

Telestream – I would be delighted to give ScreenFlow 10/10 if the next round of updates included:

* I do want to finish on a plus for ScreenFlow, so back to point 1 above; unlike Camtasia, ScreenFlow supports the ProRes QuickTime codec with alpha transparency. Although this format creates much bigger files than the Apple Animation codec, the quality is far superior, and in the case of the animated elements I mentioned having created in Motion, the difference is noticeably and significantly better.

When it comes to straightening a photo that is off-kilter, many people go for a variation of image or canvas rotation. The picture is put on a separate layer and the rotate tool or transform tool may be used with a fair bit of personal discretion and taste. However, there are a couple of methods that will give you more reliable results.

Use The Rotate Method

The first way I use to correct my image rotation involves the use of image rotation. Make sure your rulers are showing (Cmd/Ctrl +R) and drag a new guide down to a point in your image where there is a visual clue to what should be straight.

I have marked with crosses where the straight line should be. In many cases, you will use the actual horizon in the photo for best results but I will show another method  and want to give you a comparison to work with!

Go to your toolbar and select the Measure Tool. It is hidden under the eye dropper and you can repeatedly use Shift + I to access it. Drag from the corner point (on the guide you just created) to where you want the level to be, basically, the crosses above.

Tip: You can hold down the Cmd/Ctrl key to position the measure more accurately. Go to the Image Menu and choose Image Rotation > Rotate Arbitrary. A panel appears showing you the angle that has been calculated:

Click OK and you will see your picture rotated with the background colour filling in the gaps in the canvas:

Straighten a Picture Using Perspective Crop

In Photoshop CS6, there is a new Perspective Crop Tool which can also be used to straighten images. It’s found on the Crop Tool flyout palette:

Earlier versions of Photoshop had a Perspective option for the Crop Tool, but I find this one is easier to use, thanks to the overlay grid. Select the tool and drag out a grid, then reposition your corner handles, checking both horizon and other useful horizontal lines:

I find this method gives a better and more reliable result across the image as a whole.

Incidentally, if you are on a Mac, both iPhoto and Aperture give you a temporary overlay grid that appears when you rotate your images. I’m sure Lightroom does too, which is also available for Windows. You could always switch your grid on in Photoshop to use as a guide, but personally, I prefer the two methods above.

First of all, what follows is based on a self-hosted WordPress website. You will need to be able to edit your theme files and create new ones.

Setting Up New Sidebars For Your WordPress Site

Most WordPress site themes come with at least one sidebar file. It is usually called sidebar.php and somewhere in the code, it contains a line like this:

<?php if (function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(‘Sidebar Widgets’)) : else : ?>

This basically tells the file to load your chosen widgets into the sidebar, or do whatever follows the line of code. If you want to have different widgets or different content on different pages, you are going to need to have more than one sidebar to load into the page.

To start off, most of the page files (page.php, single.php etc) usually call on the sidebar.php file, and load it in to the page with this code:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

If you want to load a different sidebar, you would change it to something like this:

<?php get_sidebar(‘ads’); ?>

In this case, we are loading a sidebar file that is in our theme called sidebar-ads.php, so we need to create this file. The easy way to do this is to duplicate your existing sidebar.php file and rename it to sidebar-ads.php. Change the function_exists code above so it reads:

<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’)
|| !dynamic_sidebar(‘Ads sidebar’) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Now you have a new sidebar file and it is set to dynamically load whatever widgets you put into it. But, if you want unique widgets or content, you now need to create a new widget zone for the new page.

Creating New Widget Zones

In your theme folder, you need to open up the functions.php file. In between the php tags you need to ‘register’ your sidebars. You can add code like this:

// Declare sidebar widget zone
if (function_exists(‘register_sidebar’)) {
register_sidebar(array(‘name’ => ‘Ads sidebar’,
‘id’   => ‘ads-sidebar’,
‘description’   => ‘This is the sidebar for all pages that show ads.’,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div id=”%1$s”>’,
‘after_widget’  => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’  => ‘<h2>’,
‘after_title’   => ‘</h2>’
));
}

Here, we tell our theme to add a new widget zone named ‘Ads sidebar’, the same as in our newly-created sidebar-ads.php file. We give it an id for styling with CSS, wrap the content in a div and set the titles in our widgets to level 2 headings.

That’s all there is to it. If you want to create multiple sidebars, just repeat the process above, and for multiple widget zones, add to the code block above like this:

// Declare sidebar widget zone
if (function_exists(‘register_sidebar’)) {
register_sidebar(array(‘name’ => ‘Ads sidebar’,
‘id’ => ‘ads-sidebar’,
‘description’ => ‘This is the sidebar for all pages that show ads.’,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div id=”%1$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h2>’
));
register_sidebar(array(‘name’ => ‘News sidebar’,
‘id’ => ‘news-sidebar’,
‘description’ => ‘This is the sidebar for all pages that show news stories.’,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div id=”%1$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h2>’
));
}

A Note About Widgets

Whilst I have been talking about widgets in sidebars, they can also go in headers and footers. Many themes have widget-ready zones in these locations and you can do the same thing in your themes.

Custom Headers and Footers

There may be times when you have a page or two on your site that needs something different in the header or footer, such as a block of text, an image or a widget-zone. You have already seen above how to create multiple and unique sidebar pages, by appending to the file name. Well, you can do the same thing to create unique header.php or footer.php files, such as header-ads.php or footer-news.php etc. When you want to load them in to a page or template, simply do this:

<?php get_header(‘ads’); ?>

Told you it was easy!

If you are developing your WordPress site and don’t want it showing up in search engine results, the WordPress team thoughtfully added a setting for site privacy. You get to decide this when you first install your self-hosted site, but you can change the setting after the fact. Prior to version 3.5, you would find this under the Settings menu on the left-hand side of your admin panel. It had it’s own place as a sub-menu item and clicking it took you to a page with this on it:

WordPress 3.5 has taken this menu item off and moved it over to the Settings > Reading page, where the wording and options have changed:

No longer are you ‘allowing’ search engines to index your site or not through a radio button selection, but rather ‘discouraging’ them with a checkbox. To site owners it means the same thing, but it does acknowledge the success of WordPress as a CMS platform, (WordPress sites seem to be very Google-friendly and the database structure is good for SEO) and also the pervasive abilities of the search engines. Nothing really has changed; the wording on the privacy options always made it clear it was up to the search engines to respect your choice. It is now simpler for site owners to make a decision – check the box or leave it!

Makes sense to me.

This issue has been around since at least version 11 on Mac OS X, but seems to be still there with the current version of Firefox 16.02. Clicking a link to view or download a PDF will take you to a blank page, where you wait… and wait…

There are a couple of solutions that I have found:

1. Disable an Adobe Acrobat plugin. It is the NPAPI plugin you are looking for. Go to the Tools > Add-ons > Plugins menu to find and disable it:

This should now launch the download panel again.

2. Open Firefox in 32-bit mode. This will allow you to view PDF files directly in the browser. Close Firefox and on Mac OS X, go to Applications > Firefox and ctrl/right-click to bring up the Get Info panel:

Check the 32-bit mode box and restart Firefox. You should now see the PDF in the browser.