I’ve blogged in the past about Bob Stucky’s great scripting solution, which enables you to invoke InDesign from within Bridge, in order to generate a truly editable InDesign contact sheet.

I’m tickled to announce that Bob has updated the script for CS5, and it’s even better than before. You can now include your Bridge ratings (in color!), and create separate masters for the first page and the remainder of the document. You can completely customize a template and invoke it when you create the contact sheet. It’s quick, it’s slick, it’s really trick (and I love it).

Bob has posted a video here, showing all the cool new features.

As before, the Bridge Contact Sheet is priced at a paltry $30 (and it’s easily worth at least twice that). It can be purchased here. (NOTE: The Contact Sheet solution for CS4 is still available on the Creating Scripting suite, if you haven’t upgraded to CS5.

IMPORTANT: Keep in mind that you need both Bridge CS5 and InDesign CS5 to benefit from this; apparently some very confused users have not understood that a script that works from within Bridge to wake up InDesign would have nothing to wake up if they didn’t already have InDesign (as we say here in Dixie, “bless their little hearts”).

I’ve found this solution indispensable for creating contact sheets when I do retouching jobs: I view the contact sheet in InDesign to evaluate all images at once. It’s so easy to see all the photos together simultaneously and determine whether they’re as consistent as I thought (is the singer’s dress exactly the same shade of green in every image?). If I need to fix an image, I can use Edit Original in InDesign to crank up Photoshop, perform the necessary edits, and update the InDesign file. Easy peasy.

If you’re a printer or photographer who wants to create scatter proofing sheets, this solution is quick and painless. The ability to create a custom template with your logo and company information lets you create output that’s not just practical, but marketable.

TIP: Generate a contact sheet using the default settings, and then examine the Object Styles that are used for the caption frame (”captions”) and image frames (”images”), as well as the Paragraph Style (”labels”) that’s used for the caption text. When you create a template, you can include these styles, modified to suit your preferences. For example, I modify the “captions” Object Style to delete its black stroke, and change the “images” style to center the images.

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

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.

The Font Bureau, Inc. has filed a $2 million lawsuit against NBC over unlicensed installations of fonts, including Bureau Grotesque and Interstate.

Apparently, NBC used purchased fonts on many more computers than the original license allowed, and also used fonts which had not been purchased.

More information here.

Guess we can look forward to a lot of creative uses of Times New Roman in upcoming NBC advertising.

PS: when’s the last time you read the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) for the fonts you own? (And I do mean own. You do, don’t you?)

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.

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!

Follow the instructions to download and print the PDF target, then click on the “Wind Turbine” or “Solar Energy” button on the right side of the web page. Show the printed target artwork to the webcam, and watch the fun literally unfold. Very cool!

Why did I do this? So that I could handle customers’ PC files when they came into the printing plant. We had quickly learned that it wasn’t smart to try to move the files to the Mac: fonts didn’t translate, text reflowed, and things generally fell apart. It made more sense to keep the jobs in their native habitat.

In those long-ago days, PC designers were in the very small minority; that’s no longer the case. When I survey an audience these days, roughly 40% are PC users: the Mac monopoly on graphic arts is over. The predominant graphics programs — Adobe’s Creative Suite and QuarkXPress — are available on both platforms, PCs are often less expensive than Macs, and it’s easier to convince a corporate IT crew to let you get a PC than to bring a Mac into a Windows-only business environment.

In light of this, there’s no excuse for a printer to risk taking a file cross-platform because they either don’t own a PC, don’t have a prepress operator who knows how to use a PC, or because they think it doesn’t matter. None of those circumstances is excusable in the current marketplace.

Yet that’s what a printer recently did to a customer’s PC InDesign file. Not only did they open and resave the customer’s file on a Mac, they substituted Mac fonts for the PC fonts (not even the same fonts, for cryin’ out loud!), then returned the file to the customer. My customer can’t use the Mac PostScript fonts. Shoot, I couldn’t even use them on my Mac: they were corrupted, all weighing in at zero KB.

By the way, this is the same file that was “poisoned” by the XMPie plug-in in my earlier post. Poor file has really been through the wringer.

My advice to the customer is to have a stern conversation with the printer about file mistreatment, and to ask them if they have the capability to correctly handle PC files. If they don’t, then the customer will be forced to purchase OpenType versions of their preferred fonts. Then, at least their files will be safer regardless of sloppy and thoughtless file handling at the printer. Sheesh.

I’ve just received word that my book, “Real World Print Production” (Peachpit Press, 2006) is going to be revised. I’m pleased that Peachpit is going to let me update the book for current versions of software, and it will also give me the opportunity to expand some of the other content to reflect changes and growth in print and imaging technologies.

It all sounds like such fun now; check back when I’ve been up for 18 hours pounding the keyboard or staring at a stubborn paragraph

No ETA yet; I haven’t started pounding the keyboard. But I’m hoping to have it done by early Spring.

You can sign up here.

This is not, however, a shipping announcement, just a glimpse of upcoming wonderfulness. The announcement of that announcement will come later.