Yesterday I arrived home from the SOSA appreciation brunch to find my Adobe CS5 sitting on the doorstop. Quite exciting! I decided to do some ‘clean’ up on the computer before installing as I know i will not need to complete CS4 and CS5 on my system. Went through and uninstalled everything except Photoshop and InDesign CS4 since those two are the ones I use the most and was most concerned about upgrade glitches on – the others I figured CS5 would do the trick. Loaded up CS5 and copied over my preferences.

Alot of the user preferences for adobe products are located in: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Product\Product Version\Language  at least that is basic format.

So if you are like me and have some Grep Find-Change Queries you want to grab the “Find-Change Queries” folder from the previous InDesign folder (C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\InDesign\Version6.0\en_US\) and copy to the new version  – then you don’t have to recreate your saved queries.

Likewise, I copy over my “Snippnets” and “Workspace” from Dreamweaver above format and then Configuration\Snippets and Configuration\Workspace, some custom Save for Web Setting I have in Illustrator and some Photoshop Settings… Makes it easier to get up and running.

Only ‘snag’ I had with the install was when it came to the registration. Like in previous versions, when you register your product you are offered a “complimentary benefit” for registration. CS5′s included the new  AdobeText Font, 30 day trial of Linda.com, 30 day trial to Safary Book, 40% off 2 or more titles from Adobe Classroom in a book series, Phototools standard 2.5, or 2 issues of Layers magazine. In the past they have emailed you a link after you’ve registered. This procedure seems to have changed. What was frustrating is at one point you have the choice of continuing updating your profile or picking your freebie – I went with updating the profile and couldn’t get back to the freebie selection page and never got an email for it. So I tried Adobe Support Chat – TOTALLY USELESS! Finally figured out that if you open Photoshop or one of the others and go to “Help/Complete Update Adobe ID Profile” you can again get the options for the freebie…

This morning I actually got to go in and do some work in Dreamweaver - I just did some minor updates to a couple sites and everything went smoothly. I didn’t play with anything new though I’m looking forward to a couple new features I’ve read about… 

Next was InDesign…  Unforutnately, Extensis has not updated it’s Fusion 2 font activator for CS5. So I had to open Fusion and manually activate the fonts used in the newsletter I was working on. I did get to check out a new feature here that I was looking foward to and that was the span paragraph – works beautifully! Looking forward to working with this new version more!

In regards to the Extensis Font activator – while it would not work in InDesign, moving the ExtensisFontManagementAICS4.aip from the plugin directory in Illustrator CS4 to the plugins directory in CS5 does seem to work. Looking at the InDesign plugins folder, it appears Adobe changed the format of the InDesign plugin which would explain why it doesn’t work there.

One last little note – Acrobat is still the Acrobat 9 that was in the CS4 packages, apparently it did not get an update. It is also interesting that it has it’s own serial separate from the collection.

All in all happy – though I wish I had more time to play with the new features…

I’ve spent the past month building a new desktop computer.

It is something I’ve meant to do for the past year and half and just hadn’t had the time or patience to dedicate to it. I had built my previous machine, a Pentium 4 2.6GHz on a ASUS P4C800E Deluxe board in December 2003. It was my first real build and was a good machine however with advances and demands on resources with Photoshop etc it was becoming a bit frustrating to work with on a daily basis. Right after Thanksgiving NewEgg had a great deal the on the case I had been eyeing so I bought that (Antec Nine Hundred) and an Antec PSU and the end of December I started putting together the rest of the parts list…

I ended up with:

ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 Board
i7 Core 920
EVGA 980GTX Video Card
Corsair Dominator 8GB DDR3
WD 150 VelociRaptor for the OS
WD 750 Caviar Black for data
Rosewill 3.5 Floppy and Card Reader
Sony Optiarc Black DVD/RW
An additional 120mm fan to put on the side door..
Windows 7 64bit for the Operating System

I messed up on the memory as it is a Quad kit and the board is triple channel… didn’t realized that until after the face and everything still works so I’m not going about changing it.

Parts arrived on January 12th. The build went smoothly and spent a day crunching on the MS extended memory tests with no errors. The only surprises were the new ‘triple channel’ thing on the memory and the fact that my 2001 HP scanner (5300C) is not supported in anyway by Windows 7 or HP. HP’s site pretty much says the scanner is too old buy a new one… so I did… I bought a Canan LiDE 700F which I’m quite happy with.
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For the past several days I’ve noticed that Windows Security Center wasn’t happy with my ZoneAlarm Extreme Firewall/Anti-virus/Anti-spyware on my Vista Laptop. It kept trying to tell me that I didn’t have a Firewall running and to turn on Window’s Firewall – blahk! Typically the fix for this is to just turn off and re-turn on ZoneAlarm. So last night I gave that a try and found it didn’t work.. Looking deeper I also found “ZoneAlarm Extreme Anti-virus is on, but is reporting its status to Windows Security in a format that is no longer supported. Use the program’s automatic updating feature, or contact the program manufacturer for an updated version”.

I tried doing an update within ZoneAlarm and it told me my version was current and that no update was available… ok… did a search on the net for the issue and while I found a couple people having the same problem I found no solution.

Next I decided to go directly to ZoneAlarm.com to see if there was an update. Sure enough the current version of ZoneAlarm Extreme Security is 9.0.083.xxx. I was running 8.0.298.xxx. Apparently, ZoneAlarm can not find this update within the program itself via either automatic update or manual update (Open ZoneAlarm > On the bottom ‘Quick Tasks’ > Check for updates) You can however download it directly from ZoneAlarm.com by mousing over (do not click) “Download & Buy” > select “Free Downloads” > download the appropriate trial version.

I have rarely had success with upgrading ZA over the previous ZA settings so I uninstalled my old version and installed the new and re-set up my programs etc and now Windows Security Center is happy again… Even with uninstalling, the lience key did not need to be reinstalled, it transferred just fine.

I’ve been a user of Extensis’ Suitcase software to manage my fonts for many years and was a bit disappointed when I upgraded to Adobe CS4 and the auto activate plug in for Illustrator and InDesign was not upgraded in Suitcase 11.

Yesterday’s Layers Tip of the Day mentioned that Suitcase Fusion 2 has a new auto-active plug ins for CS4 and was very pleased to find that it is available for Windows users too! (Extensis Website)

Suitcase Fusion 2 requires that you uninstall Suitcase 11 before installing. It also does not automatically retrieve the Suitcase 11 database.. You can load the Suitcase 11 database by going to Tools > Import Suitcase for Windows Data

Note: Fusion 2′s default settings move all added fonts to a "font vault" within Local, Application Data of your C:/ drive. If you are like me with a lot of fonts, duplicating all of those somewhere else on your system is a bit crazy – I have all of mine stored in F:/fonts/ the items in the F drive do not change very often so it doesn’t have to backed up as frequently – rather convenient for my work flow. To change this setting go to: Edit > Preferences and under Font Vault Options change to "Add fonts leaving them in place." I also changed the Activations Options adding a check into "Notify if a conflict occurs."

That said – it seems that if you ‘Import Suitcase for Windows Data’ it goes to the vault vice leaving them so I ended up creating new sets. Something new and coinvent with Fusion 2 is you can "export sets" which are mini database files… to save sets/back them up.

You can also have multiple libraries… I now have a library for my standard fonts and another for various free fonts…

Other cool features include the ability to create popup boxes of fonts you are considering and being able to move fonts to sets from the preview window..

All in all a great upgrade… that took too long in the making!

I wanted to spread some awareness on a new email going around. This morning I got the lovely email from a ‘malware provider’ claiming to be MS. Basically saying, “Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.” First message I got had the ‘fix’ attached the other two have links… If you get one, don’t open it. Despite the fact that they do look real they are not – MS will never send you a link or the actual fix in an email, they will push it via Microsoft Updates. You can read more about it on SophosLabs Blog  but main point is to be aware of it and don’t open it or any others that look like it.

Off of the email topic and on to snail mail topic… really snail mail… you see back in January of 2007 I ordered a drying rack to dry hand washable etc. I watch the tracking progress and was puzzled when it said ‘delivered’ and I never got it! So I called the company and they did a search on it and couldn’t find it either so they sent me a 2nd one. Well today our mail lady showed up and mentioned she had a big package for me. I was really shocked because I haven’t ordered anything big. She opened up the back of the truck and when I saw it I started wondering if it was the long lost drying rack. Sure enough, I opened up the packing slip and it was shipped January 30, 2007. It arrived today, 2.5 years later… apparently it was sitting in a back storage room at the post office and the postmaster had someone clean it out this week.