Adobe AIR aps
Adobe Media Player If you're a Photoshop, Premiere, or Dreamweaver user, the Adobe Media Player will come in handy. The app lets you watch a slew of videos that train you how to use Adobe's applications.
Although there are videos for advanced users, there are quite a few videos that help Photoshop novices find their way around the sophisticated program. You can also save your favorite videos and go step-by-step during instruction. It's a great app for anyone who wants to be creative.
AOL Top 100 Videos If you're a music lover, you'll love the AOL Top 100 Videos app. Instead of forcing you to go to YouTube to find videos or search through Google, AOL Top 100 Videos lets you watch them all right from the app. Besides having an outstanding design, the app lets you share clips with friends, create a "favorite videos" playlist, and pick the genre of music you like. The videos load quickly, and the quality is stellar.
Desktop iPhone Desktop iPhone is one of the coolest apps in this roundup. You can experience the iPhone user interface, check the weather, and record voice messages. But the Desktop iPhone app's best feature is the ability to make phone calls from the app with an account from online phone company Ribbit. More features, including Google Maps, Calculator, and other options haven't been enabled.
DeskTube DeskTube is the best YouTube AIR application I've used. The app provides you with a full listing of all the recently featured videos on YouTube. You can search the video site, as well as see all the top videos. If you have a YouTube account, you can upload videos directly from the app instead of going to the YouTube page. The app even lets you share videos on Facebook and Twitter.
Finetune Desktop Finetune Desktop is a beautifully designed music player. It finds all the music on your computer and allows you to play those tracks. You can also search the Finetune library of music to find songs you might like, and you can add those tracks to a custom playlist.
Quakeshakes Tracking earthquakes can be difficult, but with the help of Quakeshakes, it won't be so bad. The Quakeshakes app lets you see where earthquakes have hit around the world in the past week. You can also see where the plates boundaries around the world are, so you can determine if you're in an area with a high potential of being affected by an earthquake. It's a really neat app that will come in handy.
Remember the Task Remember the Task is the Adobe AIR app version of the popular to-do list site Remember the Milk. Remember the Task lets you quickly input tasks you need to complete. When you do that, it adds that task to your online Remember the Milk profile. You can set priority, input time estimates, and add tags to your tasks. It's a simple app, but it's a quick and easy way to remember all the things you need to do.
TweetDeck TweetDeck is the best Twitter client in this roundup. The Adobe AIR app is designed well and allows you to see your Twitter stream, replies, and direct messages. It also makes it easy to send tweets to update your status. Thanks to its URL-shortening tool, you can quickly reduce the size of a link by choosing between Bit.ly, TinyURL, and others. TweetDeck also provides a link to TwitPic so you can tweet pictures. The app even lets you update your Facebook status.
Twhirl Twhirl is another Adobe AIR app designed to provide you with access to your Twitter account. You can update your Twitter stream, view what others are saying, see your replies, and send direct messages. You can even search Twitter Search or TweetScan to see what's going on in the social network. Twhirl alerts you to replies made to your tweets. It also sends you alerts when it receives tweets. Twhirl isn't nearly as beautifully designed as TweetDeck, so keep that in mind when deciding between the services.
Wikipedia Desktop Widget This Wikipedia application isn't going to shock you with its beauty. But it's a quick and easy way to access the online encyclopedia. After it's installed, you'll find just a simple Wikipedia search box. Input your query, and the app will open the Wikipedia page for you to view. You can then search the site again or access the citations in the app.
Image-placing Shortcuts in Adobe InDesign
Posted by ajay karthick in Adobe, Apple, mac, tutorials, tweaks
Placing a Single Image Of course the basic method for placing an image is to simply hit Command-D, which invokes the Place command from the File menu. This brings up a dialog box to choose your image, loads the Place Gun, then places the image at 100 percent wherever you click the loaded Place Gun on the page. However, unless you've already pre-sized the image, you're likely going to have to do some resizing and cropping. Holding the Shift key down while dragging the loaded Place Gun will allow you to create a frame of any shape, and scale the image inside it. However, the image will only scale to fit either the width or height of the frame, depending on the orientation of the image being placed. To get around this shortcoming, click and drag your loaded Place Gun on the page. InDesign will create a frame with the image placed inside it sized proportionally to fill the frame. As you're dragging the Place Gun, InDesign will show you the scaling percentage of the image (as shown on the right). If you want to see the measurements of the image being placed as you're dragging, tap the Shift key and the percentage indicator will show you the width and height dimensions instead. Placing Multiple Images You don't have to place images into your document one at a time. InDesign offers you a few ways to quickly place many images at once, the easiest of which is to select the images you want to place in the Finder, and simply drag them into your InDesign document window. While this is certainly quick, it's not exactly painless. Your images will be placed in cascading fashion at 100 percent--requiring a lot of work cropping and resizing. Instead, use the method I've already described above. Invoke the Place dialog box (Command-D), and either Shift-click or Command-click to select the images you want to place. Once the Place Gun is loaded with your images, hold down the Shift and Command keys and start dragging the Place Gun. Once the proportional grid of image frames appears, you can release the Shift and Command keys (keep the mouse button held down) and continue dragging the frame grid out to your desired size. InDesign will place your images in a 3-by-3 grid by default, so if you have more than nine images loaded, you'll have to drag-out more than one grid. While handy, this isn't ideal. If you have a specific grid in mind, you can customize the grid on-the-fly by using the Shift-Command-and-drag method described above, but when you let go of the keys, you can use the Up and Down arrow keys to increase or decrease the number of columns, and the Left and Right arrow keys to increase or decrease the number of rows. Though you'll have to go back and size each image inside the frames if they're not scaled to fill the frame, placing your images in this manner creates a nice even grid with equal spacing between each image frame. But what if you don't want equal spacing? Let's say you want the images to have more space below each image frame so you can add a text box below each image. No problem. Using the method described above, just hold the Shift key down while hitting the arrow keys to increase the amount of space between each row or column as seen in the image to the right. These methods of placing images in grids can be of particular value to designers working on product catalogs, contact sheets, or any project that requires image grids. One final tip: As you may know, InDesign offers Import Options when placing images into your document. In the Place dialog box, you'll find a checkbox at the bottom that allows you to turn on and off the Import Options. I prefer to have this feature turned off, as more often than not I'm placing a single image. However, you can temporarily invoke the Import Options dialog box by holding down the Shift key while hitting the Open button. This is particularly useful when you want to place on a single page of a multipage PDF file, or adjust which color profile an image includes when placed.
In keeping with a scheduled plan, Adobe has released the first of its quarterly patch collections for Reader and Acrobat. Both programs have been upgraded to v9.1.2, addressing "critical vulnerabilities" which could trigger a crash and allow hackers to assume control of a computer. Mac and Windows editions are equally affected
