Adobe has released its newest versions of its industry standard software, CS6. To everyone’s disappointment, or at least mine, Adobe Edge is still not a finalized product included in their Creative Suite. Although they have released a great solution called Creative Cloud, a subscription service offering access to all CS6 applications as well as other cloud services. This facilitates the integration of desktop Adobe software with the company’s growing staple of tablet and smartphone applications.Creative Cloud is priced at $49.99 per month for an annual membership, or $74.99 per month on a month-to-month basis. The service is also being offered at a special introductory rate of $29.99 per month for current users of Adobe’s CS3, CS4, CS5, and CS5.5 software. This service can save you a lot of money and time if you use these programs on a daily basis. An annual membership over the span of three years will have paid for an entire Adobe Creative Suite, and we all know it stinks to buy a $3500 program that is upgraded within a year. Having access to all Adobe programs across multiple platforms, and getting automatic updates for all of your Adobe programs as they come out is a win-win situation for me.
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite.html
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201204/042312AdobeCreativeCloud.html

By:Clint Smith

Source: Skynet Solutions

This past week, I attended a couple of webinars put on by Topaz Labs that featured some of their plug-in software for Adobe Photoshop.

The first webinar was hosted by Nichole Paschal, a Topaz representative, and it featured B&W effect plug-in and Adjust. Topaz Adjust allows you to make Pseudo HDR pictures without having to compile several different exposures into one. Once installed, the plug-in is easy to jump into and use in your normal work flow for photography. The interface is fairly easy to grasp with multiple presets and many sections with individual sliders. Watching someone’s work flow can be informative because there is always more than one way to do something in Adobe Photoshop, and you can benefit from knowing more about how to use Adobe Photoshop. I have already been introduced to Topaz Adjust about a year ago, and so far, it has been a great Adobe Photoshop plug-in.

The second webinar was hosted by an established photographer, Joel Wolfson. He demonstrated a new plug-in for Topaz called Star Effects. This plug-in allowed Joel to amplify lighting effects with ease. As I mentioned before, watching someone’s work flow can be more informative than expected. I watched Joel copy a layer mask to another layer and invert it with some hotkey movements that I had previously been unaware of.

The webinars are only an hour and are well worth it, especially when the event is free! They also have software giveaways for random people in the webinar, and everyone gets a discount code! Check out the Topaz Labs site for more information about their products, or check out their YouTube channel to re-watch a previous webinar.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Clint Smith

Adobe Edge 2 is now available, but they still haven’t gotten around to making it work when jQuery is in noConflict mode.

Download the 0.1.2 fix

Again, you will still need to edit your project file like so:

/**
 * Adobe Edge DOM Ready Event Handler
 */
$(window).ready(function() {
     $.Edge.initialize(symbols);
});
/**
 * Adobe Edge Timeline Launch
 */
$(window).load(function() {
    $.Edge.play();
});

I simply added the noConflict() function and changed the four instances of “$” to “jQuery”.

/**
 * Adobe Edge DOM Ready Event Handler
 */
jQuery.noConflict();
jQuery(window).ready(function() {
     jQuery.Edge.initialize(symbols);
});
/**
 * Adobe Edge Timeline Launch
 */
jQuery(window).load(function() {
    jQuery.Edge.play();
});

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Blaine Schmeisser

Recently our designer here at Skynet Solutions, Inc. started playing around with Adobe Edge, which helps create animation using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. He sent over some files and asked me if I could get them to work on our website. The request sounded simple enough. However, I quickly ran into issues since Edge uses jQuery and Skynet has a strong history of using a different library, Mootools. I realized this and put it in noConflict mode, yet it still didn’t work. Even though Edge was passing the noConflict variable jQuery, it was not using it the entire time within itself; often the variable it renamed it to was overwritten by another variable or function.

The attached file can overwrite the original folder “edge_includes.” I left the original files for reference which have a appended underscore before the file names.

You will still need to do slight editing on your project file that it provided which is rather simple. At the bottom of the file I started with:

/**
 * Adobe Edge DOM Ready Event Handler
 */
$(window).ready(function() {
     $.Edge.initialize(symbols);
});
/**
 * Adobe Edge Timeline Launch
 */
$(window).load(function() {
    $.Edge.play();
});

I simply added the noConflict() function and changed the four instances of “$” to “jQuery”.

/**
 * Adobe Edge DOM Ready Event Handler
 */
jQuery.noConflict();
jQuery(window).ready(function() {
     jQuery.Edge.initialize(symbols);
});
/**
 * Adobe Edge Timeline Launch
 */
jQuery(window).load(function() {
    jQuery.Edge.play();
});

Download “edge_includes” files.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Blaine Schmeisser