Claudia McCue

True confession: I don’t have an iPhone (what?! What’s wrong with you?!).

That’s right — I’m a cellphone infidel. I’d like to have a sleek, hip iPhone, but I’m not willing to abandon Sprint for the more expensive AT&T service that’s spotty out here in the sticks where I live. Yet, I lust after the thousands of apps.

However, I do have an iPod Touch, so I can watch videos and listen to music while stuck on a plane, so I can run most of the apps I want, including the spiffy Color Expert app from Code Line Communicators. While it’s true that you’d get the most out of Color Expert with an iPhone (because of the camera), it’s still quite useful (and fun) on an iPod.

Some of the app screens in Color Expert. Note the photo at upper right, being sampled to pick a starter color for the palette-generation process.

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Choose from Color Wheel or Swatch mode, and then choose a color. Better than that? If you have an iPhone, use the camera to take a photo, and pick colors from that (on the iPod, you can pick colors from a stored photo). Then, choose the method for generating additional colors (e.g., Split Complementary, Triadic, etc.) If you’ve started with a color in the Pantone swatch book, all secondary colors are Pantone colors as well — very slick. A plus: Color Expert will display the CMYK, RGB, HSB, and Lab values for Pantone swatches. Is it a replacement for your Pantone fanbook? No, of course not — but it’s a great portable quick reference. Besides, you can’t play music on your Pantone Color Bridge swatchbook.

Once you have these palettes, what do you do besides admire your little screen? Well, you can save color palettes and email them. Unfortunately, they aren’t in a standard Adobe Swatch Exchange format, but at least you have a record of the swatch numbers or recipes. More than anything, I think, it’s a great way to brainstorm.

And it helps me justify having the iPod Touch

I realize this doesn’t fall under the heading of “graphics,” but I’ll bet a lot of you have an iPod touch. Even though I’d heard that the screen is sturdy and scratch-resistant, I wanted to ensure its smooth surface would remain unmarred.

There are a bazillion products to protect these things; I first bought a protector for about $20 that used a squeegee, sponge, and a small container of liquid to adhere the film. I made quite a mess, but with a lot of squeegeeing (is that a word?) I finally eliminated all the bubbles, only to find a piece of lint trapped smack in the middle. Aargh!

Then I found this product, absurdly priced, on Amazon. At first glance, you might get the idea that this is a cheap product. Its enthusiastic tagline — “The greatest guarder for LCD screen” — is quaint. The back of the package says “For iTouch II,” but it fit my iPod Touch 3rd gen perfectly. (Despite the illustration, it wouldn’t be appropriate for iPhone, unless you’re willing to cut a little hole for the speaker.) But it’s very well made, smooth and flawless, and the application procedure is painless and well thought-out.

It’s currently priced at $3.00, so I ordered 5 of them (in case I botched the installation–still cheaper than the one protector I’d already used). This protector provides a “tack cloth” to clean dust off the screen (I recommend using a good glass cleaner first). And it has a unique approach: there are two sheets protecting the screenguard: one covering the adhesive side, and one to act as a thick carrier sheet as you position the protector. A small protruding tag on the carrier sheet makes it easy to position the protector and use your fingers (or the tack cloth) to “roll across” the sheet and anchor it. The surface is smooth (not “rubbery” like the previous protector I used). It’s crystal clear, and you don’t even know it’s there. Highly recommended.

You’re probably familiar with Helvetica Neue. On the Mac, it’s even one of the built-in System fonts. It’s a commonly-used font — and commonly mispronounced.

It’s not “Helvetica Nu.” It’s “Helvetica Noy-yeh.” Sparked by my teenage love of German cars and a stint in high-school German classes, I long ago learned to love the Germanic economy of language. I always considered it wasteful that the French would put a perfectly good “T” at the end of a word, and then not pronounce it. The Germans, however, don’t waste letters. Porsche is pronounced “Porsh-eh,” not “Porsh.” It’s Noy-yeh, not Nu.

This has been a public service announcement

At first glance, you may have read this as “Hotel HelvetiCa,” just because we’re all so accustomed to the common font name. Our brains just want to fill in the “missing” C.

Helvetia was the Latin name for Switzerland in the Middle Ages. The label HELVETIA can be found on Swiss coins and postal stamps, while the abbreviation “CH” stands for “Confoederatio Helvetica,” the Latin version of “Swiss Confederation” (hence the CH sticker on Swiss cars and Switzerland’s top level internet domain, .ch.)

This is the Hotel Helvetia, in Lindau, Germany, on the beautiful Lake Bodensee.

The book — “Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications” (or “Son of RWPP,” as I call it)— is now in stores! It’s thoroughly updated for CS4 apps, including Acrobat 9 Pro. As you might expect, the chapters on QuarkXPress and Freehand are gone, but the general material about printing process and technology reflect some of the improvements in the intervening years, such as the spread of the Adobe PDF Print Engine in many vendors’ RIPs (we live in wonderful times).

The book is available from Peachpit Press, from Amazon, and through other booksellers.

Enjoy!

I’m sure you’ve seen and heard the flap over the Air Force One NYC flyover photo-op. It may merit the creation of an entirely new word for “stupid.”

But don’t you think it’s a great opportunity for a Photoshop ad?

I’m an advocate of neatly-trimmed filenames — I use InterCapsAsVisualSeparators  or underscores_as_physical_separators. You should avoid using the special characters that are often used to represent ?/@#$*\&! profanity, not to be polite, but because some of these characters have special meaning to operating systems.

For example, a period at the start of a filename drives it to the top of a directory list on a Mac, but if that file is uploaded to a Unix server, it becomes invisible. Whee! We’re no longer limited to the old eight-dot-three strictures (eight alphanumeric characters, then a period, followed by the three-letter extension, for you young folks out there), but excessively long filenames are truncated by some systems, which could munge your file linking in an InDesign file. (Where’s that file named “Rhododendrons in the mountains in Spring New Final Image.psd”? Oh, it’s now named “Rhododendrons in the mo~.psd”. No wonder InDesign is confused.)

For the most part, long names and special characters become an issue only when jumping platforms, but I discovered today that Illustrator CS3 and CS4 won’t allow you to place a file with a forward slash (/) in the filename. It allows you to select the file, but when you click to “deposit” it in the Illustrator file, nothing happens: there’s no error message — it just sort of turns up its nose, digitally speaking. (It has no objection to a file with a backslash (\) in the name, however.)

Oddly, InDesign and QuarkXPress don’t care; just Illustrator.

This won’t affect you, however, because you’re conscientious about your file naming, aren’t you?

I presented a seminar on InDesign and Photoshop CS4 in Birmingham, AL last week, for the delightful folks at EBSCO Media. It’s always fun doing events with them because they’re technologically wise, and have a great collective sense of humor. They drum up large and lively crowds for the events, which makes for a lot of positive energy.

During one of the breaks, one of the attendees came up to me and said “Rufus says hello.”

Wait… I only know one guy named Rufus: Rufus Deuchler, the charming and absurdly talented Adobe evangelist based in Italy — and I’m pretty sure he isn’t in Birmingham.

I ask, “You know Rufus? How is he?” The attendee says “No, I don’t know him; I was tweeting about being here at this seminar, and he picked up on it on Twitter, and tweeted back ‘tell Claudia hello for me.’” It was like a tap on the shoulder from across the world.

I’m so unhip — I confess I’m behind the curve on social networking; I should have started blogging long ago. I was dragged unwillingly onto Facebook (and it’s proving to be more of a time-vampire than a truly useful professional tool). And I think I’m too verbose to be a Twitterer. Tweeter? Twit? (I don’t know what Twitter participants are called…) But I’ll confess it was kind of cool to be on the receiving end. Maybe I’ll give it a shot: is there a “Twitter for Dummies”?

Just looked on Amazon: sure ’nuff, the “Dummies” book is due in July

Oh, and hi, Rufus, wherever you are.

This has nothing to do with print: So I offer this purely in the spirit of fun.

I don’t go to movies often; I venture out, oh, maybe twice a year, if it’s a compelling big sci-fi production. (Sometimes you just have to get away from the keyboard.) “Monsters vs. Aliens” looked like fun, but I wasn’t sure about the 3D version: would I get a headache? Would it have the brain-cramping effect of the red-and-blue cardboard glasses? Would I be deeply disappointed?

I’ll cut to the punchline: WOW!

The glasses are polarized, I suppose (darn; I should’ve kept them. But the “Recycle Your Glasses” sign was compelling so that I felt a pang of guilt, so I dropped ‘em in the canister), with gray lenses, and perfectly comfortable. The 3D effect seemed natural and realistic; there was no period of adjustment, nor a sense of “getting used to it.” It may have have helped that I went in a bit early and picked a seat smack dab in the middle of the row, about halfway back in the theater. I meant to move and see how things looked from the side, but, well, I sorta forgot to be clinical in my assessment.

Is it Great Cinema? Oh, probably not: after all, it didn’t make me cry, or send me home with a deep despondency, which it seems that Great Films are intended to do. It was cute, though, and I laughed out loud (excuse me: LOL’d) a few times. Stephen Colbert as the President is priceless, and it’s a perfectly good Do The Right Thing message flick, with sufficient amusement for kids and parents alike. Yes, the 3D shows are more expensive than the 2D presentations of the movie, but it really is worth the difference. Go have some silly fun!

Some people use those cheesy pine tree air fresheners hung from the rearview mirror. Not me. I went for the fully-organic, completely natural solution:

Of course, I’ll never get all those pine needles out of the upholstery…