Okay, this falls into the category of “nearly-useless-but-fun InDesign trick” but I’m going to file it under Troubleshooting because… well… I’ll try to think of a reason soon. Here’s the deal: When you launch InDesign CS3, you typically get a Welcome screen. Some folks disable this by clicking the Don’t Show Again checkbox, but I don’t — I think it’s helpful.
Well, the area in the lower-right corner of the Welcome Screen is “live.” That is, it’s actually a little window for Flash (SWF) content that can change from time to time. When you launch InDesign, the app looks across the internet to see if there’s anything new it should display (such as a tip or InDesign news). If you have a Webcam attached, it also takes a quick snapshot of what you’re doing and sends it to the authorities. No! Just kidding! It doesn’t send any personal information to Adobe or anything like that, so don’t freak out about it.
However, if InDesign can’t find an Internet connection, it defaults to a little image that lives inside your Apps > InDesign > Presets > Startpage folder.
The program looks at the config.xml file for instructions on how to build that little segment of the dialog box… and you can edit that file in any text editor! I edited mine to say that this was InDesignSecrets and insert my Blatner Books logo (I just duplicated the id_appicon_xl.png file and edited the copy in Photoshop).
Okay, so why is this Troubleshooting and not 100% useless? Well… hm… it’s a way to tell whether you have a live Internet connection or not without ever leaving InDesign!
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on June 28, 2007
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