CS3 is here!

To all those in the Creative Department who have waited patiently to attain the latest and greatest from Adobe, your time has almost come. We have all the newest versions of Adobe's Creative Suite. . .Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, and other odds and ends. Before we roll it out company wide we are doing some beta-testing. Peter Heppner and Jeff Russell are the brave souls who have volunteered to give it a shot. Like the previous switch from CS to CS2, InDesign is not backwards compatible. You will again be required to save CS3 ID files to .idx files for backwards compatibility with CS2. The biggest concern is performance. If the new apps kill the power of our fleet of G5's we will have to wait to roll out CS3. If all goes well we could start using CS3 within the next month or so.

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Firefox

Firefox is my and many others web browser of choice. I've posted an article on the top 10 reasons for switching away from Internet Explorer (IE) and to Firefox. Most of the functionality in IE 7 (the latest version) is an emulation of Firefox's features. As a Mac user I even prefer Firefox over Safari. Read the article here.

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Three great new tools

Over the past week I've discovered 3 amazing new tools.

The first gives you VoIP functionality. Callwave offers a free service where you can see all of your voice mails throug their website and listen, delete, save, and even reply all through an easy to use web interface. The only thing this tool does not do is convert your voicemail to text. I'm sure this feature will be coming soon. Check it out!

The next tool is called Zamzar (submitted by Sara Garland). This is a free online file conversion tool. Simply provide an email address, upload your file, chose what format you want it converted to. . .and within an hour you will receive a link to download you converted file. This tool will make PDFs, convert .mov to .mpg, and it may even make you coffee if you ask nicely. Check it out!

The last tool is kind of the inverse of the first tool. Jott let's you use your cell phone as an speech recognized email gateway. Once you get an account setup you can load all your contacts and start sending email via your cellphone using speech recognition. Simply call the toll free number, speak the name of your contact, dictate your message, and send it off. Jott automatically (and with surprising accuracy) converts your speech to text so it can be read by the recipient. Check it out!

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