Archive for April, 2005

The Lutheran convention for teachers was here in Indy this year, so everyone kind of converged on our awesome city. That included a visit from Thomas and Andrea Czinder. We had a ton of fun, one drinking night with video games, and then a trip on Saturday to Long’s Donuts. I did put Thomas to work helping me take apart our swingset, so that wasn’t hardly fun for him, but he was really great about it.

But, it was a ton of fun to have them over and play games. We need more friends like that in our lives that like to have fun, drink, within a limited budget.

I found out more information on IE 7.0 beta which is coming out this summer.

Also, I posted some of the photos from Anne’s wedding and when Andrea and Thomas were down to visit.

Sections Updated: Photo Diary, Browsers

Yesterday went pretty fast.

The morning started out with me waiting for about 25 minutes at the exhibitor entrance to the convention center, as David tried to get a badge for me. As it ended up, somehow he got one of the convention team to escort me in to the exhibitor hall. Now, mind you, tickets are not cheap, and we were inside almost two hours earlier than general admission, and one hour before even the fan club was let in. It was awesome, to be able to walk around before anyone else and just take my time.

We tried a couple of times to go to some of the speaking events, but there were lines even for that stuff, which was ridiculous.

We saw so many interesting costumes, the most interesting of which would have to be, hands down, the Slave Leia’s that were walking around with barely any clothing on. I know that I couldn’t do it, no matter how much I loved any movie.

Our contact runs a T-Shirt booth, so for awhile we helped him out by folding shirts. He was selling shirts hand over fist, and had an overnight shipment that needed to get on his racks.

We ended up going to Hooters for lunch, that was cool. After lunch we saw the R2-D2 building club, where these guys would build realistic, lifesize R2-D2’s, some of which actually rolled around, and displayed the Leia’s distress message from Episode 4: A New Hope.

The end of the day, we were in line to meet the Episode III art department. I only got to see part of that because we ended up going out to dinner just inside the mall with Adam Hughes and Allison Sohn, at Azkaban’s. It was really good food, and Adam is so funny. I really like them, and David really is good friends with both of them, always keeping them in mind and their needs at cons. So, David is a good guy to be friend’s with, but he’s a hoot either way, and the fact that he is connected really isn’t that big of a deal.

After we got home, David took Christine and he girls and headed off into the rainy sunset for Pittsburgh. I got a message from Christine today telling me what a great time she is having, but they got no sleep, arriving in Penn. somewhere around 4 am.

Meanwhile, Sarah working last night, and then she went up to school and did some scrap booking stuff with a group up there. I was asleep on the couch when she finally got home, but when she called, she sounded really happy, so I think she had a lot of fun.

Today, I went in to work to finish up a layout that was a touch over due, and then we worked more on the office in preparation of the Stutz show at the end of the week. I hope we can pull it off, but the walls are finally looking good.

Sarah did some correspondence today, as well as some other things around the house. I finished trimming all of the vines off the fence, and decided to mow both the front and back lawns, so today has been productive already.

Tonight I posted two movies that I have seen in the past week.

Sections Updated: Movies A-B, Movies E-G

I really like Harrison Ford, and even though I realized I had already seen this movie after watching 10 minutes of it, I enjoyed it for the second time.

Starring Harrison Ford, Brian Dennehy, Raul Julia, and Bonnie Bedelia, this movie is basically about how lust can destroy a marriage.

Ford is a prosecutor who, from the very beginning, is thrown into a murder trial of one of his fellow attorneys. But this is not just any case, but appears to be the rape of the head prosecutor for abuse and other heinous crimes. Not to mention, it is a happened to be one of Ford’s love interests for awhile.

As we get deeper and deeper into the story, all signs point that Ford is guilty. But it also seems like a setup. Dennehy is looking for a public election, and had insisted Ford take the case. But all of a sudden, is turning on him out of jealousy and Ford becomes the scapegoat, sacrificed for everyone else.

A great movie, a little slow at times, but it builds to the finale. Warning : Spolier Ahead - The movie is great for at least one reason, we find out that his wife is the killer. Smart and well thought out, jealous over Ford’s lustful fling with this woman, she murders her in hopes of taking her out of the picture, and sets it up to look like Rape. She knows from what Ford has told her of previous cases.

This came out right after “The Last Crusade” so Ford is still brilliant in this movie, and you may want to see it just for that reason. If you like thrillers that you don’t know how they will end, (but now you do), see this one. But, don’t watch it late at night, you may doze off.

What a bombshell!

Somehow I managed to be suprised, to the point where I couldn’t explain why I felt sick, and my heart was racing.

Adobe buying Macromedia? But yet, we live in an industry where the shelf life of certain electronics has a maximum of ten years, and that is always shortening. Change is inevitable, I just never would have guess this. Not in a million years. But when I read the stats, I guess it made more sense.

Last year, I read that Macromedia made somewhere in the neighborhood of $370 million. Pretty darn good. But low. Adobe, who owns the print industry, I figured would be a little higher. But to the tune of $1.7 billion in revenue? Wow! That is quite a difference between two companies that I figured were on a level playing field.

When the merger was approved by both boards late Monday, they released statements that involve vague plans on what will be done when the moguls combine, like increasing support for development on a wireless environment and how stockholders came out of the deal. If you want, go and read Macromedia’s release or Adobe’s release. Either way, I was sick to go to Macromedia’s site and see the Flash banner there, which I posted above, about the two “joining” forces.

But obviously my biggest concern, is what will happen with the software. Nothing. At least not for awhile. The merger should wrap up in the fall, like the press release claims.

Adobe does print. But they design their layout programs for web, like print is just like web. And it isn’t. It is all about drag and drop for Adobe, making this poorly coded websites, and it makes me nervous. Let’s run down each program.

Adobe Illustrator vs. Macromedia Freehand

I use Freehand heavily because you can trace something really quick, copy, and drop it into Fireworks, no problem. You can’t do that with Illustrator to Fireworks. But, I will say hands down, that Illustrator is a better program because it is broader and facilitates print better. I have had my problems trying to create complex documents in Freehand for print publications.

Verdict : Adobe WILL drop Freehand. It may incorporate some of it’s automated vector creation tools into Illustrator for the web, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Will I lament this change? Only briefly.

Adobe Photoshop vs. Macromedia Fireworks

This is not really a logical matchup. Photoshop is this amazing program that you can never learn enough about, it bounds are limitless. Fireworks, is geared specifically to making webpages, and it is an awesome program. Editable raster graphics, easy export options, everything you need to pump out something fast. Photoshop feels just like the situation it was in, an awesome program that had to go back and work in Web tools that just aren’t as easy, and don’t make as much sense.

You may be able to create more detailed masterpieces in Photoshop, so in that case, you should, and then bring them into Fireworks and incorporate them into your design. But these are seperate programs with only a handful of overlapping ideas. Both do their jobs in a great way, and are geared at seperate things.

Verdict : Adobe WILL do away with Fireworks. This is what I fear. They shoudn’t. They should just make it better for web prep, and take all the web crap out of Photoshop, or stop adding more to it. This will be a long change though. I fear they would piss more consumers off by completely ditching this product sooner than later than they would with Freehand. I just hope that if they incorporate it’s features into Photoshop, they make it just like Fireworks.

Adobe GoLive vs. Macromedia Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver has a stranglehold on the market, and this will be an interesting battle to say the least. How long do they develop for both? Do they make their decision swift and just piss everyone off now, or piss them off later?

I have seen GoLive’s capabilities in demostration on the CS Tour. I have even thought about switching (which may now, not be a choice) because of some of the neat features, like zooming in on a layout in development, and making a PDF of the layout in development. Having said that, they claim great support for CSS layout, but that is only if you use “layers” not write div tags from scratch. There is no GUI in GoLive to do that, nor Dreamweaver, but at least Dreamweaver claims display support, not a full CSS building machine. Golive also adds all this extra commented crap for those developers who embrace their drag and drop ideals.

From InDesign to Illustrator, you can drag your layouts into GoLive, and it will insert exterraneous commented code so that the two programs can communicate. Granted you can take that out, everytime you put it in, but then you can’t update the source file and have it make the changes automatically. So a double edged sword that has me asking, “What is the damn point.” Stop making a tool for hack print designers just to offer a crappy service and flood the internet with bloated page design.

Verdict : I just don’t know with this one. I hope they drop GoLive and add all of their good standards compliant type ideas to Dreamweaver. You have to hope that will happen, as the brains behind Macromedia are coming over to Adobe. But the idea of Adobe keeping Dreamweaver just doesn’t seem likely either, so this will be the matchup to watch.

However, not everything is bad and horrible.

Now, all doom and gloom aside, I am pretty pumped to see what they will be able to do with the new Adobe Flash (God that hurts to say that) integrated with the awesome capabilities, and platform independence of PDF’s. I have seen how you can incorporate Flash in PDF’s and I think it is amazing.

Plus, now that I have had time to set, I am a little excited to see what they can do for wireless development, as I see that as a highly technical market, and Adobe does have a way of making everything a little more graphical and user friendly when it comes to development.

Either way, a landmark in my career. I will probably always look back on this entry and laugh, and talk about this as one of my design “war” stories. But only time will tell what they future holds, and I will be right here, to comment on it when it does.

It’s Friday! And I have the day off. My bosses are so great, that they allowed me to take the day off, and switch with Saturday.

David Wray is in town, (Has been since Wednesday) and he knows people to get us into Celebration III for Star Wars. It is a huge convention downtown in the convention center, and Adam Hughes is here too. We are actually having breakfast with him, maybe. But it should either be a fun day, or maybe a long one.

No Drama. Major events in the circle that is my life.

On Monday, a merger between two of the biggest graphic software companies was announced…

Adobe + Macromedia

Read more on the design page.

Sections Updated: Design

This is the sequel to Get Shorty. I don’t know why it took 10 years for it to come out, but it did anyway.

This movie still has an enormous cast, including this time round, Christine Millan, Uma Thurman, The Rock, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, and Harvey Keitel. But just because it has a great cast, doesn’t mean it was a great movie. I may watch this movie again, but I doubt it.

This time round, John Travolta is trying to get out of the movie business. He is a successful producer and still has great presence, but it tired of the politics of film making. Through another weird series of events and contacts, he comes across a very hot young singer (Millan) and proceeds to take her to the top.

Uma is the gorgeous record producer that Travolta brings out of the brink of destruction to sign this hot artist and take her to the top. Along the way we meet Vince Vaughn, who is a pimp and talks like he is ethnic, The Rock, who is a very gay bodyguard, and Cedric, who is a Beverly Hills Harvard gangsta with a whole posse of huge guys.

There are some very funny parts, but there are parts that are like nails on a chalkboard. From Vince Vaughn talking too much, to one of the hit men and his funny eating mannerisms, there were parts of this movie where I just wanted it to be over.

Not hardly for everyone, if you remember the first movie then see this one. If you can see it for .50 cents like we did, see it. But otherwise, I would pass. Poor John Travolta and Uma Thurman, they do a great job, but the rest of the movie kind of hops from one hilarious part to the next, with long dead awkward moments in between.