Another revolutionary product…

by admin on February 2, 2010

By the way, the niece and nephew are visiting and they brought the cat. It's a very quiet, child-friendly cat, except that at about 3 a.m. it gets the urge to wage a battle to the death with the living room carpet. I guess what I am trying to say is that I didn't get much sleep last night.

And oh, last evening the virtual private server of my client's main money site went down for a couple of hours. Awesome, I love going to bed with a thudding headache. And right now some supplier wants 2k up front for a SAAS  (software as a service) package. Um, no  you'll supposed to soak me after I get hooked on your service, not before.

Oh hey, were was I vis-a-vis this blog post, after explaining why my brain is numb. Oh yeah, spray-on-liquid-glass. No, it looks really cool. Probably the most interesting thing you'll read today.

I would go home and sleep, but the cat and kids are there. Maybe somewhere in this coffee shop, is a dark corner where I can lay up and have a nap.

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Apple and iBooks and iPad

by admin on January 27, 2010

Insane traffic over at Tech Crunch which is covering the release of Apple's tablet, the ipad. I've ripped off the latest news just in case you have trouble accessing the site:

Steve Jobs revealed the Apple iPad today, its much-awaited tablet computer (see our live notes). Jobs positions it as a third computing device between a laptop and a smartphone geared towards the “key tasks” of Web browsing, email, sharing photos, watching videos, playing games, and reading digital books. All current iPhone apps will run on the device, as well as new games and digital books designed specifically for it. An enhanced iPhone SDK released today will support both the iPhone and the iPad.

"Some specs: The device has a 9.7 inch display, weighs 1.5 pounds, and is half-an-inch thick. It is powered by new chip made by Apple itself, a 1 GHz A4 and will come with 16Gb to 64 GB of storage. It supports WiFi, has an accelerometer, compass, and built-in speaker and microphone, just like the iPhone. The screen is a full capacitive multi-touch screen. Battery life is supposed to be 10 hours. And it will cost $499." - Courtesy of techcrunch. Thanks guys

The iPad also comes with a new app called iBooks, of which there is absolutely no information about on the internet (yet). If you go to ibooks.com you'll see it's owned by a domain squatter who even now is probably getting a letter from Apple's legal representatives (give us the domain name or we kill you).

What is the ibook format? PDF? Ah, that would be interesting as we all know the printing industry runs on PDF. Probably not, as copy protection in the PDF is easily hackable so not very attractive to Apple. Still, the market has been missing an ebook reader/tablet that can give a nice visual presentation of colored PDFs and now the market has it.

The magazine publishers and newspapers are probably lining up at Apple's door trying to get their stuff in ibook format, whatever it is. As for printing? Well, this has been coming down the pipeline for quite awhile. What is your strategy for adapting?

UPDATE: Popular Mechanics liveblogged the event and has more info.

Only youtube video I could find of the event was a 41 second clip courtesy of NY Post. Oh well.

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What Makes for a Good Print Blog?

January 24, 2010

M-bossed did a blog listing his top 10 print blogs. There are some familiar ones there, like Gordon’s Quality in Print, and the group bloggers at PrintCEO. There are also some  print blogs I’ve never read before, like the dieline, a blog for the packaging printers (the pictures are gorgeous, by the way).
There was also [...]

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How to Build a Digital Print Parts Catalogue

January 18, 2010

And now we will take a pause from attempting to write reasonably amusing blog posts to focus on the logistics of building and maintaining a web site. You may click away now.
Prepress Pilgrim was the first web site I ever built, apart from a blogger account (now closed) and some weird pay-for-hosting account that had [...]

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G’bye Adobe Print Service Provider Program

January 13, 2010

Thread over at Printplanet about Adobe killing the Print Service provider program.
Lots of people not too happy. Dov Isaacs, to his credit, is jumping in and speaking for Adobe. Good for him, too many vendors that sell to printers don’t actually, you know, communicate with printers on forums when tough decisions have to be [...]

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Kodak’s Hot New Picture Frame

January 11, 2010

I last wrote about digital picture frames here. Slowly but surely they are gaining market share, but of course one barrier is usability.  Like my Mom loves getting pictures of the gran- kids but is not one to set up an electronic picture frame so that its ready for action.  The market needs a digital [...]

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Google Creeps Me Out Sometimes

January 9, 2010

So seriously, how do they know that’s the name of my frickin’ blog? It’s obviously some sort of localization algo, as they are showing queries that are relevant to Canadians in prepress, but how did they know to show my blog as #1.  It’s not like I feature a lot of Canadian content either.
The server [...]

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Top Ten Innovations of Prepress 1980-2010

January 4, 2010

So this idea of a blog post was bubbling around in my head for a least a couple of weeks, maybe more:  I thought it would make a nice end-of-the-decade summary. Plus, it would be easy to write. After all, there has been a lot of innovation in prepress over the last 30 years, n’est-ce [...]

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The Blog as Newspaper

December 27, 2009

Hyperlocalblogger has an entry on how to turn your blog into a printable newspaper. The company is called zinepal.com and it looks like it caters to blogs that focus on small communities or areas – which makes sense. Suppose you have a blog or web site and your target audience is 2000 to 20000 people [...]

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Nostalgia Time! The CreoScitex Weight-loss Program

December 18, 2009

Allan dug this up. Not much has changed. I’m still fat ’cause I’m busy looking after 3 kids and don’t have time to exercise. Allan is still thin because he’s a Daddy too looking after a couple (I think it’s a couple but I may have lost track).
Worthwhile to watch because it’s filmed at the [...]

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