I recently wrote a guest-review over at Mac OS X-based graphic design blog The Graphic Mac for the brand-new font management utility Fontcase.

In short, I have found Fontcase to be a very cool new font manager for OS X. It has a few limitations, but the good news is that the developers at Bohemian Coding have told me all the small gripes I had were to be remedied in the near future and the ones they weren’t aware of (which I suggested) were also added to the feature list.

The biggest drawback for me was the lack of auto-activation plugins for the Adobe Creative Suite software. I currently use the free version of Font Explorer X by Linotype, and it’s something that would be difficult to work without. But it’s coming for Fontcase, and once it does I can see myself seriously considering picking up a license and switching my font manager in the (hopefully) near future.

Head on over to the Fontcase review at The Graphic Mac for my full thoughts.

Fontcase Review at The Graphic Mac is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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Actually, the Adobe issues began with 10.5 and Acrobat Professional. There was an issue with the print function, but this was something Adobe recognize and blatantly acknowledged would be fixed in late January 2008 — and indeed it was. But other, more sinister issues were lurking in the shadows, preying on InDesign CS3 — issues with placing objects, using the open/save dialog boxes. Yikes. Issues with placing objects in InDesign is pretty much a deal-killer, no?

Turns out the Adobe InDesign team was aware of, and working on, the issues. Only problem is that they weren’t exactly sure what the problem was, although they had it narrowed down to some degree. From what I can gather over at Tim Cole’s InDesign Back Channel blog, the issues are still not fixed but anticipated to be resolved shortly.

As I recently upgraded to a awesome new MacPro, I had no choice but to move to Leopard. I was a bit hesitant about doing so, but a friend was looking to buy my old G4, and I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to offset (some of) the cost of a new machine. As I mentioned above, for the most part things have been just fine.

There are some issues however; another non-critical issue with InDesign not respecting the “hide” menu command has reared it head. Not a big deal as it doesn’t affect workflow. And ever since I activated 10.5’s new “Spaces” (multiple virtual desktops) feature, I sometimes lose all my palettes, requiring an old-fashioned ‘tab’ keystroke (twice in this case) to bring them back. And this happens in Illustrator as well. I have read that Adobe is aware of this issue as well. Kind of annoying, but Spaces, at least on main work machine, is losing favor with me anyways.

I still believe, at least as of the date of this post, that the user should be aware and cautious when upgrading to Leopard if one is a CS3 user.

InDesign CS3 & Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”: The Good, The Bad & The Not-Too-Shabby is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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The review is a companion blog post to his video segment on The Lab with Leo Laporte, which is included as a Google video clip on the post as well.

Rick’s opinion overall is that Spreadshirt is the way to go. Personally, I use the Zazzle service for my cartoon art t-shirts, and have not seen samples of the other services so I can’t compare. I have only seen samples of the light-color shirt printing from Zazzle, and thought it had pretty good quality for the printing technology. I need to order a dark shirt and compare quality.

Spreadshirt has one feature not offered by the others: plot printing. Plot printing is basically like a vinyl sign print, and therefore is limited to flat colors only, and three colors max. While this eliminates blends, gradients and the like, one could still make some exaggerated halftone dots in plot-printed designs. James Dempsey has a great Adobe Illustrator tutorial on creating halftone dots, and Vonster has another excellent halftone dot effect tutorial over at Illustration Class. Note that plot-printing with Spreadshirt requires elements to be a minimum width of .061″.

Overall, an excellent resource for anyone wanting a comparison of these services.

CafePress, Zazzle & Spreadshirt Showdown is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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In short, the Bamboo is a great entry-level tablet for casual users, but graphic artists will want to seriously consider investing in one of the pricier, but more fully-featured Intuos3 models. Read on for full details.

Out of the box, this thing impresses. Looks very slick, and is amazingly and significantly thinner than the Intuos3 series graphics tablets. Also, the non-active area around the tablet is much reduced, although it may be an optical illusion based on the differing placement of the buttons and scroll area.

The scroll area is round, as opposed to the vertical Touch Strip on the Intuos. I don’t like the Intuos3’s TouchStrip, and found the round touch-sensitive scroll area on the Bamboo to be much more ergonomic. The Bamboo has a unique pen as well, about the same thickness as the Intuos3 stylus, but shorter. It has a decent weight and balance to it, but here I prefer the Intuos3 stylus.

Driver installation was a breeze – the software doesn’t even require a reboot on OS X. Otherwise you just plug it in to a free USB port and you’re all set. One nice feature on the Bamboo that I wish my Intuos had: a detachable USB cable. Nice touch, and I have no idea why the smallest model in the Intuos3 series doesn’t follow suit. Not a deal-breaker for the Intuos3, but cool nonetheless.

I let Dad play around for a while, a bit (understandably) bewildered. Using a graphics tablet takes some acclimatization; I usually recommend using for at least an hour a day for about a month or so. Your mind & meat need to get used to the mechanics of the new device. I swear by ‘Pen Mode’ , where the area of the tablet is matched exactly to the area of the monitor. There’s also ‘Mouse Mode’, where the tablet acts just like a mouse – you can lift away from the tablet surface and drop the stylus back down in another area on the tablet, and the pointer stays where you left it on-screen. Dad seemed to prefer Mouse Mode, but I think that preference will soon wear off. It probably helps with the transition, however.

When I finally had my chance to play with the Bamboo a bit, the first glaring difference I noticed was in the material used for the tablet surface itself – much less silky than the Intuos3 surface. Not bad by any means, but after using the pro series, it’s very noticeable. It reminds me very much of the surface on the old Wacom tablet I use at a contract client’s office who still uses G3 computers (and OS9!) – those older tablets need Apple’s old ADB/serial port that is now (thankfully) discontinued on Macs in favor of USB. I’m not sure of the exact model, but it was not a pro series for sure. Probably an equivalent to the niche the Bamboo now fills.

Another major difference was the driver software. I was quite surprised to see that the Bamboo driver software does not support application-specific settings as does the Intuos3 series. You can set sensitivity settings and customize the stylus buttons, but these are applied system-wide.

Not a major issue, but for customization geeks like myself, this is a limiting feature. Per-application settings for stylus button functions and pressure sensitivity is handy for those instances when you want it. For the target Bamboo customer though, probably fine. The driver software also required you to set everything with sliders, as opposed to the small “scratch pad” area on the Intuos3 driver which would interpret your actual stylus usage and set the sliders automagically.

I thought to myself that Wacom should incorporate the advanced Intuos3 features in the preferences – but gray them out so users would know what other features are available with the high-end models.

Otherwise, the Bamboo was quite impressive, especially considering the price point. I went with the bare-bones version because I knew the Bamboo Fun’s mouse would never be used, and the Bamboo Fun also didn’t look a sleek as the standard version – the rounded edges make it look too toy-like. With a lower pressure sensitivity than the Intuos3 series, you have to allow for the inherent differences. But for basic, casual drawing and photo retouching — as well as general input device usage — the Bamboo delivers.

If you are a graphics professional, or prefer more customization with your tools, I highly suggest spending the extra cash to get an Intuos3 series graphics tablet instead; it’s well worth the price jump. However for the basic, occasional use — or for an introduction into the world of graphics tablets — you can’t go wrong with the Wacom Bamboo.

Wacom Bamboo Graphics Tablet: Nice Entry-Level Tool, But Limited is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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In short, I would recommend waiting to upgrade your Mac to at least a G5 or an Intel based Mac before going to CS3, but that said it’s still usable.

I should point out that I am a shareware junkie, and over the years I have demoed (and kept or bought) many freeware and shareware applications for my Macintosh machines. The positive thing is that some of these independently developed software applications can be very handy and speed up your workflow and productivity (and I will be posting some reviews on the best ones in the future). The potential negative side to these add-ons are the increased load on your Mac, as well as apps that might not be engineered the best, and might be causing overall system performance degradation. That said, I have tested CS3 out on a clean user account, and the performance seems about the same. So, to some degree this can all be read with a grain of silicon, but keep in mind CS1 was running just fine before the upgrade, and really I am basing performance issues on that comparison.

And to clarify — this will not be a review per se of the Creative Suite CS3 software, but rather the performance on a G4 PowerMac compared to CS1.

The first (and worst, for me) issue was with Adobe Illustrator. Things seemed OK after the install, but I noticed over time that the Mac was becoming dead slow, and after looking at the Activity Monitor, I saw Illustrator was sucking up almost 35—40% of my CPU usage just sitting idle. That was a red flag. After a lot of research on the Adobe message boards, user Wade helped out with a suggestion to delete the “Settings” files (found in Users/Username/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator CS3 Settings) , which are separate from the Preference file in the Preferences folder (and a standard troubleshooting step for any application: “delete the prefs”). That cleared things right up. After a week or so I finally got a response from an Adobe tech with a generic support answer. I was pretty disappointed with Adobe’s tech support, especially compared to those Adobe Forums demigods who seem to always have the answer (and keep up on the posts). Thanks again Wade!

So I was back to a usable level with Illustrator, expect for the fact that things just seemed sluggish overall — slight delays when dragging objects, both in Illustrator and InDesign were the biggest culprits.Even using the keyboard arrows was giving me a lag. Photoshop brushes, with the Wacom tablet & pen, were juuuust a tad bit behind where I would draw, and this was a basic brush with no fancy settings applied.
Everything works fine — no crashes, decent launch times (usually). But the general usability in relation to everything running just a bit slower is, to be honest, kind of annoying and a bit unproductive. Since most of my projects are “low overhead”, I have been sticking with CS3 just to get a feel for it and try out some new features (which I really haven’t had the time to do just yet). I have an annual toy catalog design project coming up very soon, and I am debating if I should even bother using InDesign CS3 for the project or not. I have a feeling it’s going to choke on the 36-page layout.

I’m going to give it a shot though, as almost every new feature in InDesign CS3 I like, and have become very handy — except for the new way keyboard resizing works on objects. I hate it! Why they can’t make it a user-configurable option is beyond me. The new method of resizing the container box only is not very cool, at least not all the time. Needs to allow for another modifier key to resize both the container as well as the contained object. Anyways…

Illustrator seems fast enough when working on basic vector art, but as I have not delved into a really complex object yet, I am not sure how it will handle things. I was using some simple drop shadows for a project, and it was unbearably slow moving vector objects around. Things are much snappier on the Intel MacBook 1.83 Core Duo (2 Gb RAM).

As mentioned before, using a Wacom tablet and brushes in Photoshop is just a bit too slow in the response time compared to CS1. You notice you are working on a computer in CS3, as opposed to CS1 where the computer and software became transparent as you worked, which is the desired working situation. Again, things are much more fluid on the MacBook.

I realize that my old G4 just barely meets the requirements for CS3, but I really expected the optimized code to run better on even a G4 machine than it does for me. And part of me wonders if running dual flat-screen monitors on the stock video card (with 64 MB RAM) is also an issue. If I knew that was the cause, I would get a new video card this second. Otherwise, I’d rather put that cash towards a new Mac Pro.

Overall, CS3 is usable on the G4 but I would really have to say that anyone with a similar setup to mine might want to consider waiting until they have upgraded their Mac before making the jump. Me, I am going for a mid-range Mac Pro. I was considering one of the new aluminum iMac 24 inchers (they seem to have decent power and the cost is lower), but after this experience I realized what I want is a powerful machine that will also last me a few extra years with that added power and expandability. I’d also be paying for a monitor that I don’t really need. The extra cash for the Mac Pro will more than pay for itself in the productivity benefits alone.

CS3 + G4: Using Adobe Creative Suite CS3 on a PowerMac G4 is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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