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I do not find it hard to believe that everyone needs a copy of Bridge, and I've been asking for it since it first got detached from the Photoshop File Browser. Bridge SHOULD be available as a standalone product. I do not believe that it should be free, however. Perhaps it should be included with the solo point products, or perhaps as a standalone for $49 or $99 or $199; that's for smarter people than me to decide! Now, Bridge is available with Photoshop Elements, so savvy folks will agree that Adobe would be hard pressed to set a price above $99, the list price for Photoshop Elements.

Unfortunately, we, the consultants on the ground and sales folks I support, have a hard enough time getting customers to stay within two versions of current with Creative Suite. Ask the InDesign Secrets folks how many classes they still run for CS2 to CS3 migration, or how many classes they run for InDesign CS! I frequently get requests for help in old, deprecated versions of CS apps.

I have customers in many verticals, but let's look at the ad agency space. Believe it or not, every agency isn't particularly flush with cash. That having been said, I am asked to work within a mixture of Creative Suite versions and also a mishmash of point products. Also, I find that many agencies are part of larger holding companies that have no standardization for their graphics tools, but they do have standardization for operating systems and Office apps. This means that although ABC agency may have K4, and XYZ agency may have Bridge, and JKL agency may have XINET, they are all owned by QRS holding company which holds the purse strings for all of them. Now, another thing to know about agencies is that they are often representing competing brands. In Pharma, one holding company may represent competing smoking cessation drugs, and the two product teams are not allowed to interact. The business firewalls that exist between the agencies also extend to workflows. Also, tool and workflows are often dictated by the client. If a client is using InDesign CS or even QuarkXPress 4 to create and edit collateral, there's no chance that CS4 is making its way to the agency, despite how much better it is for productivity and product quality.

Bridge, though, is a tool that can work across versions and across platforms, and introduce customers to some of the efficiencies of the latest version of CS. If Bridge were installed, for instance, it will allow files to be opened easily in the apps we want, not the ones the OS demands. It will provide an interface to XMP, and super-duper image and file previews, image comp PDF sheet generation, photobook web site creation, and more. Editors and copywriters need to add metadata to photos and other files, but they don't want to browse to a CMS/DMS web site, login to the site, search for images, and then tag them. They need add story tags, content id numbers, cost centers, and a whole host of other contextual information to these assets. Bridge simplifies this whole process and makes it accessible to everyone.

Depending on a CMS/DMS to take up the slack in XMP/EXIF workflows is not practical, since these systems aren't even close universally deployed. I work for some very large agencies with very, very large customers, and many of them rely on basic folder structures on a shared file system for content management. Naming convention is the version control method, and duplicate files per project is the norm. Enabling Bridge outside of the creative department would expose more people within those companies to the power of XMP, and perhaps allow the creative departments more flexibility to upgrade. If XMP is important to Adobe, and the Omniture acquisition tells me that metadata and activities around metadata are very, very high on Adobe's list right now, then universal Bridge deployment should be just as high. Waiting for operating systems to catch up (at least Vista and Wondows 7 can interact with XMP and MacOS can display EXIF info) will be counterproductive to this goal.

The utility of Bridge should be seen as the teaser to get folks to deploy the latest version of Creative Suite rather than a benefit of the latest version of Creative Suite. Universal Bridge deployment would increase adoption of Creative Suite and, by extension, improve Adobe's bottom line.

Citing a declining market (that means that the number of print shops around the world is dwindling) and increasing overhead costs, Adobe is recommending that members join PIA or a local PIA affiliate, where they can enjoy some of the benefits of the Adobe program, but not the direct line to technical support, which was a huge benefit for many companies. My companies have been members of the Adobe program for 10 years or more, and I am sorry to see it go.

The Pilgrims left England over religious persecution. Today, tax paying citizens face the same religious persecution in the form of scare tactic ads promising the gay-ification of our schools. There was another issue on the ballot calling itself the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, and another one looking to limit excise taxes on new (6 yrs old or less) cars. Both of these were defeated, so our taxes will remain among the highest in the nation for another year or two, anyway.

Now, I know that this is going to sound stereotypical, but my gay friends and acquaintances are folks who earn decent money, have no kids, and like to spend. Now, who do you want in your town, propping up your school departments? The retirees, the new homeowners, the struggling small businesses, or the well-to-do couple with no kids and no drain on the tax base?

Of course, people live where they work, and it is unlikely that these couples will not pick up stakes and bolt for Massachusetts. However, in our Internet economy, where you live is less and less important, so there may be little to keep these couples here.

Shame on you, Maine, for shooting down an opportunity to attract more highly paid, intelligent, and creative people to our otherwise lackluster economy. Shame on you, Maine, for caving to outside interests. And shame on you, Maine, for not doing the right thing.

How about perl, or PHP, or MySQL? I used to have a perfectly acceptable Movable Type blog (this one, in fact) running happy as a clam on this server. I had never been able to get ImageMagick to properly install, though, as well as some convenience modules like Compress, but hey, Leopard was going to make everything all better. However, when we (props to my son Arthur, whose patience and tenacity led to success) "upgraded," nothing worked anymore. The web is full of complaints about various pieces of this puzzle, so I will leave it up to you to go digging. As for my blog and other data-driven and dynamic graphics-based sites that used to reside on this server, they were defunct. Dead. Doornail dead.

GD is important, as is DBI, DBI::MySql, ImageMagick, PerlMagick, and others. Without them, the Blog just doesn't go. Of course, the major technologies like MySQL and PHP are essential, but the versions provided by Apple were either just plain broken, or were inadequate for the tasks at hand. Of course, we reinstalled!

MySQL and PHP installers are available and we installed them according to the clear instructions provided by MySQL.com and Marc Liyanage, respectively. The tricky part was getting the built-in PHP to shut off and the new one to turn on, but judicious application of the "refresh view" button on the server manager cured that.

Then we turned to MacPorts to install the additional modules. What a disaster.  Not MacPorts, mind you, it performed admirably. None of the ports we installed appeared in the list of installed perl modules, despite getting successful reports from MacPorts. I admit that after a few days of banging my head against the wall, I had had enough. Giving up, we scrapped Leopard Server and went back to Tiger Server. But, we were still without some modules.

It turns out that Apple's installation location for the remaining items is not where the rest of the world expects them to be. In the case of perl, when we check our version with CPAN, it reports that we have the current version of perl, and that our modules are installed. We were successfully able to install modules, and they all appear to install without issue, except for PerlMagick, which reports a whole pile of errors. More on that later. When we run the mt-check.cgi from the Movable Type installation, however, we get paths to multiple perl installs, none of which are the current version. Clearly, there is some major confusion here.

The solution turns out to be easy: ditch Apple's mangled perl distribution and put in a link to the good, current installation in its place. The following two lines in the terminal move the old perl installation to a safe place where it can do no harm, and then create the appropriate symbolic link to the /opt/local/bin/perl folder, where we have all of our modules installed.

And I grew up with Richard Nixon, Gerry Ford and Jimmy Carter!

1. A new AT&T account for the iPhones;
2. The old account was cancelled;
3. The minutes were left behind.

Unhappy with losing the minutes, I called and learned that the old account was a business account and the new one was personal. Regardless, I argued, I should be able to keep my minutes. without any hesitation, the lovely gal on the line told me that she could give me 1000, but she'd have to ask her manager about more. She text messages her manager (I kid you not) and the result is that we got 4000 of the minutes restored. Better than zero, and there's more. 

Because of the large number of accumulated minutes, I wasn't paying much attention to the minutes on the phone. Good thing I did, though, because the counter was reading low near the end of the month. I knew that we had called everyone we knew on these new gadgets, and that I was using it for most of my business activities, so I figured that I needed a plan with more minutes. I changed to the 1400 minute plan with minutes to spare, and forgot about it. I got the bill, and it claimed that I had gone over by ~150 minutes! The same call got the charges refunded.

I must say that the experience was pleasant and very rewarding, for me, anyway, and AT&T gets a thumbs up from me.

The upshot for mailers is that the hours during which a mailer may enter mail into the system have been reduced at the end of the day, which is the exact opposite of what would be more efficient for the mailers themselves. Mailers now must push their production back a day in order to meet the new, shorter insertion windows. At a time when the post office is struggling to remain relevant, effectively adding a day to the time to deliver mail is absurd.

The Post Office is not new to regulations that are convenient to themselves and detrimental to the customer. Recently, they changed the rules about how booklets were to be tabbed. Previously, tabs (tape circles that close the open edge) along the open long edge of the booklet were sufficient, but now, the booklets must have tabs on all three open sides. This triples the processing time and expense for mailers, since most mailers will send the piece through the tabber three times rather than invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in new tabbing equipment.

If the US Government wants to stimulate the economy, how about taking a look at the Post Office and how it seems to be working to make themselves the least convenient, least reliable, and least accommodating service available. No wonder email marketing is kicking the Post Office's behind.