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The Greatest Software Product of All Time: A Developer’s Appreciation of Adobe InDesign
https://medium.com/tech-talk/a708cda55921Anything you can dream, you can do.
When the Minimum Viable Product is Not Enough
Good News and Bad News for HTML5
I am at the HTML5 Developers' Conference in San Francisco. One of my friends said "it must feel like Christmas for you over there" and it actually does feel that way, not in the sense of "everything is easy now" but more in the sense of "our path forward is clear."...
Five Considerations in User Interface for Online Design
We at Silicon Publishing have come to specialize in developing online design applications, with years of extensive work building web-to-print solutions based on InDesign (yes, pre-server) and Adobe InDesign Server. Because we didn't start with a product, but spent our...
Silicon Publishing Invents the desperationCounter
Anybody who works with automating Adobe Illustrator long enough will find some level of flakiness in the behavior of this application. It is very old, and doesn't enjoy the same level of support for automation as does InDesign, a much more modern application. I got...
Moore’s Law and Adobe InDesign Server
We have been automating Adobe InDesign for 12 years, InDesign Server for 7 (since it came out), and it seems that just now we are finally being proven right in our bet long ago that going with the slowest, yet far and away most robust, composition engine would in the...
A Great Technologist Passes
I only saw Steve Jobs twice, but he had a huge influence on my life at about 5 points that come to mind. I am very proud that such a person would come from Northern California, and Steve Jobs certainly represents the best you find in humanity. Really, the culture of...
Connecting InDesign to Web-based Assets
For ten years I have been automating Adobe InDesign, and for 10 years I have had to deal with assets that were exclusively on the file system. InDesign won't generally let you link to an asset on the web. When I first met InDesign, in 2000, I (like many users then and...
How the Web has advanced since its original design
I just set up a basic Web site (WordPress blog) for a friend, Paris Tompkins. This took only a few minutes' spare time, including the hosting, DNS, customization. She chose the theme herself; I just made the side look OK and added the vital "Add to Any" plugin. I...
The Two Perspectives on XML
I have been working with XML since it was a glimmer in the eye of Jon Bosak. In fact, before XML was conceived, there was SGML; this evolution of SGML represented a streamlining for the web, but at its core there was not much functional difference. In fact, the new...