In bygone days, system hardware and software vendors would take advantage of trade shows for content creation professionals to pitch the relative merits of their respective platforms: Mac, Windows, whatever. Nowadays, capturing the pulse of the market from the show floor is more difficult as vendors target the needs of commodity products, business computing, or […]

Technology that can beef up the performance of either hardware or software is always of interest to professional content creators, whatever their medium of expression. Likewise, the demands of digital-video applications, especially for the generation of high-resolution effects, can eat up the performance of most mainstream computing platforms on the market. To no surprise, technologists […]

One important performance consideration for the professional digital content creator is that of platform. However, instead of the usual dispute over differences between Mac and PC platforms, nowadays the discussion can often range over the everyday use of mobile or desktop machines for content creation. My attention was drawn to a recent advertisement by Avid […]

When it comes to today’s digitally-connected world, professional content creators often call upon many forms of communication. While most content creators rely on e-mail messages to share images with clients and relay day-to-day changes in a job or workflow, almost all of us use our ordinary telephones for important communication. However, some recent changes in […]

The arrival of the MyDoom worm last week disrupted the regular working of the worldwide Internet. At the same time, it must have knocked more than a few professional content creators off the map for a good while. This assertion isn’t mere conjecture: I was working with one of them, by the name of Mr. […]

The moniker “digital divide” has a certain meaning in today’s computing world: the gap between the computer literate, or even the owners of computing products, and those without access to online content and resources. Another kind of digital divide was evident at last week’s Macworld Expo San Francisco: it was the growing differences between the […]

With New Year’s Day just a couple of weeks away, there’s still time to add an item or two to the resolution list of every content-creation professional. At the top of your list should be an increased concern and action to prevent the spread of computer security vulnerabilities (viruses and worms). Over the past year, […]

The waning of the year is a traditional time for folks to reflect on the year almost gone and the one nearly here. It’s also a convenient opportunity for a rant. Selecting one of the year’s many screw-ups and failures is a difficult choice. However, my rant concerns the continuing decline of display choices for […]

Creative professionals on the Macintosh have taken their sweet time to move to Mac OS X. And that reluctance is understandable. After all, I experienced a bit of that feeling this week when installing OS X 10.3, or Panther. And I’ve been using the OS X operating system day in, and day out since it […]

One place to check the pulse of professional publishing industry has been the annual Seybold expo in San Francisco. It presents an eclectic mix of products, some focused on small design shops and others on large-scale publishing. The Seybold conferences cover publishing, emphasizing products that let organizations create, evaluate and organize content, and then later […]