Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

For all you Photoshop brush junkies out there, here’s a Mac OS X Quick Look plugin to preview Photoshop Brush Files (.abr) in the Finder.

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Recently I was dealing with a problem in GarageBand, where the application would lock up when I was attempting the change the tempo of a song. For many months I struggled with this until it got to the point where I decided to do some in-depth troubleshooting. How does this relate to illustration you may ask? Turns out the problem was font related, and affected the performance of the software. Since this could affect any piece of software on your Mac, and therefore productivity, I thought it worth passing along as this could easily affect your graphics software as well.

Continue reading 'Mac OS X 10.5: Essential System Fonts'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

SneakPeek Pro is a QuickLook plugin fro Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”). In a nutshell, it extends file previews in both QuickLook and the Finder to previously unsupported file types such as Adobe Illustrator .ai files and EPS files.

If you aren’t familiar with QuickLook, it’s a pretty awesome new feature of 10.5 which allows you to quickly preview a good number of core file types — PDF, JPG, PSD, Word docs, movies, text files and more — without actually opening an application. One just needs to tap the spacebar with a file highlighted in the Finder, and a floating bezel-type window opens up with the full image, document or movie. Even works with multi-page documents as well. It’s just plain awesome.

Continue reading 'Illustrator File Previews: SneakPeek Pro QuickLook Plugin For Mac OS X'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

A while back I was ranting about the myriad issues I had been reading about concerning Adobe InDesign CS3 and Apple’s (then) new operating system Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”. I am happy to report that upon upgrading to 10.5, and using InDesign CS3, everything has been working (for the most part) just great.

Continue reading 'InDesign CS3 & Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”: The Good, The Bad & The Not-Too-Shabby'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Adobe just released an incremental update to InDesign CS3 (5.02), and it’s so new it seems to not be in the auto-update as of yet. Per the Read Me file:

 This update fixes known issues with Anchored Objects, Character Alignment, Step and Repeat, Indexing and Table of Contents, Text and Fonts, Dictionaries, Color, Scripting, Graphics Import/Export, InDesign Interchange files (INX), XML, Library files, and Printing, as well as other miscellaneous issues. 

Continue reading 'Adobe InDesign CS3 5.02 Update Released – 10.5 Fixes On Apple’s Shoulders'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

I just stumbled across some more Creative Suite 3 issues on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, on the Adobe support site Photoshop page. Supposedly this will be fixed by an OS X update, not an Adobe update (and Adobe and Apple are working together on this issue).

Continue reading 'Even More CS3 & 10.5 Leopard Issues: Photoshop CS3'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

James Demsey over at design blog The Creative Mac (formerly The Creative Guy) posted some additional issues with Adobe Creative Suite 3 and Mac OS X 10.5. Seems in addition to the Open/Save/Place issues I mentioned earlier, copying vector art from InDesign to Illustrator has issues, as does hiding InDesign.

Continue reading 'More CS3 Problems On Leopard'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Yikes, just read over at MacMerc.com that one of Adobe’s guys posted a blog entry recently regarding some serious issues with InDesign, basically in all the dialog boxes. That means crashes for Save, Place, Open — doesn’t sound like something I would want to deal with. They did say this seems to be primarily with PowerPC based Macs, but that affects those of us still on a G4. These new InDesign bugs Adobe says they need Apple’s help to squash.

Continue reading 'Serious Issues With InDesign CS3 & Mac OSX 10.5'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Just a quick post to let all you Wacom users out there know that a Wacom driver which supports compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is now available. The new version is 6.05-3.

Continue reading 'Wacom Tablet Driver for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Released'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

There’s a handy Mac OS X application list & summary over at graphic designer James Dempsey’s Creative Guy blog about which software applications seem to be working and which seem not to be working on his Intel MacPro.

Continue reading 'Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: What works, what doesn’t'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.