I received the comment below on one of the blogs I administer:

Hi, I left you a DOFOLLOW backlink on my website. This isnt a spam message, i actually did leave you a backlink on my site. If you check the top of the page you will see “Sites we like” and there will be a link to this site. Would you be kind enough to leave me a backlink? If so my website is http://[SCREW YOU, SPAMMER].com please use the anchor text “[I AM A STUPID SPAMMER]” for the link and add it to a post or as a widget. Then please send me a email at backlink@[NOT A CHANCE].com – If you want me to change your links anchor text let me know. Thanks

Since I'm the curious type, I decided to visit the site. Imagine my surprise when the backlink is actually there!

Wow, really?!

Being that the top of the home page is an extremely unlikely place for a backlink, I entered the URL directly. As expected, the link disappeared.

So, it's checking the referrer, and displaying the link to one of the sites spammed when the correct referrer is found. Not a new trick, but pretty clever.

1. Close Adobe Extension Manager
2. Through the Windows programs menu, find Adobe Extension Manager and right-click it
3. Select "Run as Administrator"
4. Install your extension by double-clicking the .zxp file

In the past, this was managed via plugins such as "Page Links To" and "Exclude Pages." Now, this can all be managed within the WordPress admin console and in your theme, with a decent amount of customization.

In this tutorial, I'm assuming you know the basics of PHP (enough to create your own theme, at least).

To tell WordPress that this theme supports menus, add the following code to your theme's functions.php file:

To use a menu in your theme files, you will need to add a line similar to what's shown here. I added this in my header.php file for the top navigation, and added a similar line to footer.php:

There are many more options available for how your menu is displayed; see the WordPress Codex page for wp_nav_menu.

To create your new menus in WordPress, go to the admin console, click Appearances > Menus. This screen is fairly self-explanatory. I was able to replace three plugins and some custom header/footer code using only this method, in about 10 minutes (including research on wp_nav_menu).

For even more hardcore customization using custom walkers (a feature described in the Codex), check out Christian Budschedl's excellent post, Improve Your WordPress Navigation Output.

Happy blogging!

Note the "CS5.5" tag, because it's the exact same box as CS5.

Adobe has recently released version 5.5 of its Creative Suite packages. Having recently upgraded to CS5 from a mixed CS3/CS4 environment, I had to ask myself if it's worth both the trouble and expense to upgrade at this point.

The short answer is no. I'm not really sure why Adobe felt this was a necessary update that they felt was worthy of charging money for.

The long answer...well, I'm good at the long answer. Hold tight.

The Whole Enchilada: CS5.5

First off, this release is numbered a bit differently than previous releases. It's a point update (CS5.5), so it's not quite a full update warranting an entirely new version number (CS6). Previous Creative Suites have used whole numbers, with the applications themselves updating their revision numbers as patches have been released (Photoshop 10.01, for example).

This fact in itself makes me wonder: is this simply a bugfix release with a ton of marketing and an actual purchase price behind it? The list of updated applications would seem to indicate this is the case. There are numerous improvements across the board to a few of the applications, but others receive no update that I can see.

What Wasn't Updated

Photoshop, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, and Fireworks are still CS5. For most users, this means that there is no reason to upgrade. Adobe should continue to support these versions with patches (as long as they don't start charging for those too) until the next full release comes out.

I'm pretty disappointed in this, because there are still numerous issues with Photoshop alone that haven't been addressed (this problem is ongoing). Adding GPU acceleration is great, except that most artists I know end up turning it off. And we're still stuck with layers not able to be dragged between tabbed windows.

Acrobat

Acrobat X Pro adds improved integration with Microsoft products, including Office 2010 (meaning the icons look like they belong in Office 2010 now) and Sharepoint. It also adds online file sharing, which I'm sure won't be exploited any time soon, and a new fullscreen viewing mode. There's also a wizard for creating PDFs, and an improved toolbar.

InDesign

Admittedly, I don't use InDesign much (or at all), so I won't go into too much detail. It doesn't look like much to me, but feel free to check for yourself (warning: Adobe randomly changes their site around from time-to-time, so, sorry if the link is broken).

Audition

I pay for this thing every time I upgrade, but after the first time, I'll likely never use it again unless I need to mix multichannel audio. Oh yeah, 5.5 adds native multichannel 5.1 support. There is also project exchange with other NLEs. I still think this application falls far short of Cool Edit and Sound Forge, but at least it will visually match your other Creative Suite applications. Dark grey for the win!

Dreamweaver

Now, it's been quite some time since I used Dreamweaver (back when it was a Macromedia product, actually), but it's an application I know pretty well that works in a field I know very well.

In version 5.5, Dreamweaver adds CSS3/HTML5 support, which is interesting since neither of those specs are finalized yet. I'm guessing further patches will make corrections to these specs as they evolve. There is also a multiscreen preview so that you can view your output on multiple devices at once.

Dreamweaver looks like it's as suited for modern web design as it's always been. It's not the way I prefer to do my web work, but if you like Dreamweaver you'll probably be happy with the upgrade overall.

After Effects

It really looks like After Effects got the lion's share of changes this time around. Stereoscopic 3D is far improved for this version, and it looks like anaglyph rendering is no sweat, either. The cameras actually have a true bokeh blurring filter now, so no more multi-layer nightmares for depth-of-field. This pleases me.

The Warp Stabilizer tool is worth its own paragraph, for sure. This thing takes most of the work out of stabilizing footage. It will analyze your scene and automatically smooth out the motion, and can crop and scale the edges to fit your composition to the smallest necessary (or largest possible. if you've done footage stabilization, you know what I'm talking about). It looks like Adobe has put the seam carving (aka content-aware scaling) algorithm to good use here, as After Effects can fill in the now-missing border data from adjacent frames. Pretty impressive stuff (seriously, go check out the videos).

Given the improvements to cameras and lighting, as well as 3D stereoscopy and camera tracking, I'd say After Effects 5.5 is a definite improvement.

Flash Professional

Flash Professional 5.5 shows mostly incremental improvements over CS5. Most changes appear geared toward mobile content development. I have opinions on this, but those are outside the scope of this already lengthy post.

Remember when this was the cutting edge of Flash? Yyyeah...

The Flash team has always been very involved with the user community, and there are improvements on this front as well. There are TLF (Text Layout Framework) control improvements, streamlined publish window (THANK you, that thing was really starting to show its age), as well as...(drum roll)...autosave. Whooo.

Flash development cycles generally seem to alternate between tools for developers and tools for designers. In CS5 (v10.1), we first received the TLF. In CS4 (v10), we were blessed with rudimentary 3D support (aka flying cards in space).

Of course, I see absolutely no mention of Molehill on the CS5.5 page, so I guess that's a wash for this version. Stick to FlashDevelop or FDT.

Conclusion

Yes, finally, the conclusion. So, is it worth the upgrade? I'd say it depends. This upgrade is probably worth it to you if you:

• Absolutely must have all the latest versions of all your software (usually thieves care more about this than people who spend money on it, but whatever. I'm not judging)
• Have dumptrucks full of cash you must spend
• Need the Twitter cred

So, other than these very limited (and totally plausible!) situations, I'd say CS5.5 is a cash-grab for Adobe, since most of this crap could have been released in a patch (and should have). Alright, with the exception of After Effects, Audition, and Dreamweaver. If you use any of these three regularly, they might be worth the individual upgrade, but certainly not worth upgrading the entire suite.

So, sorry Adobe, all this is doing is making you look greedy.

At work, I'm using a 27" 1080p monitor/television as my secondary monitor. We use a model that has a similar color profile for presentations, so using this screen as a preview screen is essential. Otherwise, we'd have to keep our presentation displays unpacked and hooked up to a computer, transfer files, and so on. I won't get into (more) details, but suffice to say it would be a royal pain.

You can stretch to the edges, but there's still a border.

Even with this setup, I've been rendering drafts to an mp4 file and running a video player fullscreen on the HDTV (which matches the production environment). This is still a step I'd rather not have to do, so finally today I did some searching.

Lo, and behold! There is a way.

According to Adobe documentation, Ctrl-backslash (Command-backslash on Mac) does the following:

Resize application window or floating window to fit screen. (Press again to resize window so that contents fill the screen.)

Since my composition window is on the second monitor already, I pressed Ctrl-backslash (that's this one --> \) twice.

Ah, fullscreen goodness.

Bonus off-topic chatter: The slashes in a URL are just that, slashes. They are technically forward-slashes, but we just call them slashes. There are no backslashes in URLs.

Right: "http-colon-slash-slash-homestarrunner-dot-com-slash-404d"
Wrong: "goatse-dot-cx-backslash-mfw"

See also: xkcd

Situation #2: You copy an image to the clipboard from your browser, paste it into Photoshop, and all subsequent paste operations from your browser result in the same damn image.

Situation #3: You are working in Photoshop, and try to paste an image from any external program, and end up getting something you copied in Photoshop earlier.

What do these situations have in common (other than being annoying)? They're all instances of Photoshop's clipboard thinking it's smarter than you.

This problem is likely a legacy from when computers were slow and didn't have much memory (like artists flattening images to make file size smaller, but that's a discussion for another day). Contrary to any logical reason I could think of, Photoshop keeps its own clipboard data separate from the system clipboard, and monitors the system clipboard for changes. It then, for whatever reason, decides that the clipboard data hasn't changed, so why bother updating its own clipboard with redundant data?

Purging Photoshop's clipboard doesn't help; it only gives you a blank clipboard that still won't update. Of course, none of this stops Photoshop from sticking its own copied data into the system clipboard, which works 100% of the time. Sigh.

You can easily fix this by modifying the Windows registry. Past versions of Photoshop included a .reg file on the install disc that you could simply double-click. Looking on my installation media, I can't seem to find any .reg file. But, I'm lazy. For previous versions, look in
"Photoshop [Version]/Goodies/Optional Plug-Ins/Photoshop Only/Optional Extensions" for a file named "AlwaysImportClipbd_ON.reg"

I will outline the registry modifications below, and follow it up with .reg files for specific Photoshop versions. Once you have taken the appropriate actions, you should restart Photoshop if it's already open.

The usual warnings apply to editing the Windows registry: Make a backup, only do this if you know what you're doing, etc.

Registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Adobe/Photoshop/[PS Version] (Where PS Version corresponds to your installed version: 12.0 for CS5, 11.0 for CS4, 10.0 for CS3, and so on)

You will need to add a new DWORD value (on 64-bit OSes, this will be the 32-bit value) named "AlwaysImportClipboard" and set the value to 1.

Your new registry key should look like this.

Restart Photoshop, and that's it!

Note: I would be willing to recreate the appropriate .reg files if there is sufficient interest, or the steps above prove too complicated. Happy pasting!

Update: Never mind, this appears to do nothing at all. Photoshop still randomly stops using the clipboard, even with this registry value set.

Anyway, if for some reason you're using Photoshop CS in Windows 7, you might find your layer dragging going quite slowly, and things generally not working at full speed.

To fix this, go to your Photoshop shortcut and right-click it. Select Properties, then the Compatibility tab. Check the box marked "Disable desktop composition" and press OK. When you start Photoshop, Windows will go into "Basic" color mode, which looks like crap, but your Photoshop will now run smooth as silk.

Old-school.

On a side note, I also had to do this for 3ds max 9. I don't remember the exact issue, but it also required old-school access to the screen drawing.

His method uses a JSFL script to pre-slice bitmaps into separate MovieClips, which is great, because it's otherwise a complete pain. Mine works on a different principle, and is for runtime use.

My Slice9Bitmap script uses the pixel data from the Bitmap passed into the constructor, then transfers the appropriate pixel data to each slice, ensuring perfect stretching. Attempting to stretch the entire bitmap beforehand is...messy (also, why you can't do 9-slice scaling with pure CSS2/Javascript (outside of canvas)).

Currently, there is no boundary checking (other than for negative values), so it's up to you to implement this. Alternatively, you could wait until I add more features (which could be anywhere from weeks to months, honestly).

View Slice9Bitmap demo
Download Slice9Bitmap.as

Also, if you're not a hardcore Actionscript guy, Grant's method is quite ideal.

Michael: (after reading this iPad review) could you imagine walking into someone's house where they used their ipad as a $500 picture frame, all the time? I think I'd punch them in the face
Steve: I wouldn't - I would sell them a iPad stylus for $100 (it would be a standard #2 pencil)
Michael: LOL ...be sure to put shiny black plastic on it
Steve: $150 for for the "distressed" stylus (chewed up pencil)

iDistressed: Only $149.99!