Minneapolis InDesign User Group

Meeting Summary

Fall 2008 Twin Cities IDUG meeting: CS4!
Tue, Oct 28th, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD)

Event Details

On Tuesday evening, October 28th, 140 eager InDesign users converged on the campus of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to learn more about the brand-new Adobe Creative Suite 4.

An informal show of hands at the start of the meeting showed that 3 people already had CS4 in their possession. At least 20 people were still using CS2. Attendees were assured that future content of the user group will not be CS4 only, but will include some content applicable to all versions.

Noha Edell, Business Development Manager for Creative Pro products at Adobe, began the evening by demonstrating many of he new features of InDesign CS4. The new tabbed interface, proportional place, Smart Guides, spread rotation, reworked Links panel and Live Preflight caused excited "oohs" and "aahs" from the audience. Noha also demonstrated the new "Content Aware Scaling" feature, which you have to see to believe.

Next up, Keith Gilbert, a local training consultant (gilbertconsulting.com), did a fast-paced demo of a single feature from each of the remaining programs in Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium. He began by showing the new Full Screen Preview and Review Mode feature in Bridge. Then he showed how to export from InDesign to Flash, exporting an InDesign book layout in one step to a finished Flash SWF file, complete with an automatic "page curl" effect. Next, he exported a finished book layout to XFL format, opened the XFL format in Flash, revised the text and added some simple animation to the InDesign page objects in Flash, and exported the final result as a Flash animation. Keith went on to show the fantastic improvements to the Appearance panel in Illustrator, and the blazing fast "GPU acceleration" features of Photoshop. Running out of time, he ended by mentioning the new In Context Editing feature of Dreamweaver that allows a designer to create a Web site and enable a client to updated the Web site content, without any software required on the client end.

The evening concluded lots of great giveaways (books, shirts, iTunes gift cards, pens, mice, luggage tags, and a copy of InDesign CS4) given to dozens of lucky winners. The goods were donated by Central Coast Solutions (centralcoastweb.com), Peachpit Press, Software One (softwareone.com) and Adobe Systems.

Thank You

Once again, the facility fee for the evening was generously underwritten by MCAD and Central Coast Solutions. Their support is why the Twin Cities InDesign User Group meetings continue to be completely free for registered members.

Comments from the evaluation sheets

“Wow!! Make me salivate for CS4”

“Fantastic, can not wait to play with the new features”

“Both presenters were very good and extremely knowledgeable. Good exposure to CS4, good tips and tricks. This was my first IDUG meeting and it was very informative. I will definitely be back.”

“Love the Content Aware Scale in Photoshop. Very nice improvements to the Links panel in InDesign.”

“CS4 Awesome! I love the Share my screen feature.”

“The meeting had a great summary of the new CS4 features. I work a lot in Flash, so I really appreciated the second half of the presentation.”

“Another top-notch presentation, as usual!”

“Enjoyed the Appearance panel in Illustrator. Share my screen looks awesome.”

“I love the tabbed windows. Saving changes to workspaces automatically is fantastic. I am very excited about all the changes to the links panel. CAS! Yahoo! Finally, Thank you.”

“Totally jazzed about CS4’s new capabilities”

“This was so worth the 2 1/2 hours drive from Fairmont. Feel inspired to make our newsletter interactive.”

“My first meeting. Loved the content. I am sold on CS4”

“Great introduction to CS4. It gave me a lot of ideas about new things to do for my projects at work. Many thanks.”

“I love Content Aware Scale. I like the option to set your own preflight profiles in InDesign.”

“Love the CS4 features, worth upgrading to.”

“I have been resisting to upgrade because I just upgraded to CS3, I guess it’s time to upgrade again. Thankfully Quark is falling behind so I don’t have to upgrade it too.”

“Interactivity: From InDesign to Flash was a great tip...Very useful!”