Over the last decade, CreativeTechs has grown into the Pacific Northwest’s premiere team of Macintosh experts. Our Mac IT consultants support some of the best Mac-based creative teams in the greater Seattle area, including design firms, ad agencies, photographers, video studios, and in-house creative departments.

What is a CreativeTechs Macintosh Consultant?

CreativeTechs’s focus on supporting creative professionals means we are looking for someone with a unique blend of great technical skills, and a knowledge of the graphic design industry:

#1: Great Macintosh troubleshooting and support skills.
#2: Experience supporting a variety of graphic software.
#3: Something Extra.

Mac Troubleshooting: You’ll need to move confidently between a wide variety of environments. You must be very comfortable supporting Mac OS X, with a variety of hardware, printers, and networks. Strengths supporting Mac OS X Server environments strongly preferred.

Graphic Software: You should be very comfortable troubleshooting a wide range of design applications in a production setting. Including Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXPress and many others. The more experience you can demonstrate with design-related workflow the better.

Something Extra: Every new team member adds something special to our team. Beyond the basics, what extra can you bring to our team? With our focus on supporting creative professionals, do you have unique talents you could bring to our clients?

A great job for the right person.

This position is not for everyone. You’ll have to love working independently — we have a central office, but most of your time is spent in the field with clients. You’ll be traveling between clients during the day, so reliable transportation is a must.

We work with a lot of fun, talented clients — and we make a difference in their lives. Our business is built entirely on referrals, so you’d better be great at taking care of clients.

How to apply.

If this sounds like a great opportunity, please send a cover letter with your resume to jobs@creativetechs.com. We strongly prefer PDFs.

Local candidates only please — we are not considering out of town applications.

The acceptance of mainstream eBooks is just getting started, and publishers are very interested in the future of digital books. Apple’s new iPad will use the open EPUB format for selling and distributing electronic books (iBooks) on their new tablet.

If you work in the publishing industry, it’s time to learn what the EPUB format is all about. A good place to start is with a series of three new how-to guides from Adobe on producing and exporting EPUB eBooks from InDesign:

PDF: How to export EPUB eBooks from InDesign.

PDF: Working with images in InDesign for export to EPUB.

PDF: Common questions about exporting EPUB files from InDesign.

Link: Adobe How-To Guides: Producing EPUB eBooks from InDesign.

Source: This tip inspired by a post by Anne-Marie Concepcion on InDesign Secrets. Designer’s in Seattle may be interested in The InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference May 12–14, 2010.

Photoshop Product Manager, Bryan O’Neil Hughes, shared a glimpse of new selection technology that offers better edge detection and masking results in less time—even with the trickiest images, like hair.

Video: Photoshop Selections Sneak Peek.

The video is only about a minute long, but it reveals that Adobe has some powerful tools slated for future versions of Photoshop.

Source: We don’t know when CS5 will ship (or even if that’s what it will be called) — but rest assured that as soon as the new tools are unveiled, you can expect a slate of live worldwide classes exploring the latest features in our online classroom.

I love the solid feel of a clean grid-based layout. Get started with this handy collection of resources for working with the 960 pixel grid system many web designers use to streamline web development.

Link: 960 Gridder Overlay. (shown above)

Link: 960 Grid System – Resources and Links.

Link: The Grid System – Grid systems for designers (print & web).

Link: Typogridphy – Working the 960 grid with Type.

Source: I’d been thinking a lot about grids lately. This tip inspired by an upcoming website redesign for the CreativeTechs Training site.

Let me start off by saying that I LOVE the MailChimp service for handling email newsletters. We’ve been MailChimp clients for over years, and MailChimp has been my product of choice for most of the email marketing classes I’ve led over the years.

But the Interest Groups feature in MailChimp is broken. I’m hoping that by demonstrating our problems with the current Interest Groups implementation, those issues will be addressed, and I’ll be able to continue using MailChimp for many years to come. As it stands today, I’m seriously considering moving to another service for our training classes. And I’d really prefer to stay with MailChimp.

Problem #1: Can’t Preselect Groups during Sign-Up

Note: This problem is less important than Problem #2, but we need to take things in order.

We can’t pre-select an interest group in the users sign-up page. If someone signs-up from a page describing “Topic A”, we’d like Topic A to be preselected on the resulting sign-up page. Likewise if someone links from a page describing the benefits of “Topic B” we’d like to be able to have Topic B preselected.

Try this yourself. We’ve created a demo MailChimp account with three interest groups. I’d like to offer you links below that select certain topics for you. But I can’t:

Link 1: I’d Like Topic A Preselected
Link 2: I’d Like Topic B Preselected
Link 3: I’d Like Topic C Preselected

Using interest groups with MailChimp, we can’t do this. The result is many people end up signing up from a sign-up link on the “Topic A” page and don’t realize they were also suppose to check the “Topic A” option in their sign-up.

Problem #2: How Do Existing Subscribers Sign Up for a New Group?

Now try this. Say you signed-up on our sample email list for “Topic A”. Maybe you signed up a year ago.

Now, try to sign-up for “Topic B” from one of our website links:

Link: I’d Like Topic B Preselected

MailChimp rejects anyone who has already signed-up for one of our group topics (our best customers) with a curt error:

That person who is already subscribed to “Topic A” was using our website link to sign-up for the new “Topic B” group. And is soundly rejected.

So, how does an existing subscriber enroll in a new Interest Group that they didn’t check during their initial sign-up?

They could do it from one of our past emails, IF we provided the link in that email to update their profile, and IF they knew that is what they were supposed to do. But that is a terrible approach.

In our case, people will sign up for a single class (say Photoshop) from our website, and then later come back to sign-up for a new class (say Final Cut Pro). If we used MailChimp’s Interest Groups to try to manage those lists, people would never be able to sign-up for a 2nd class without going back through the awkward “update profile” option.

As a result we’re awkwardly juggling a separate mailing list for each class we host.

Last week Steve Jobs unvieled the new Apple iPad. Happily, almost everything we’ve been learning about developing iPhone Web Apps looks like it’s going to work the same for Apple’s new tablet.

Here is a short video exceprt from the first week of Elisabeth Robson’s course, Learn to Build iPhone Web Apps, showing how to use a simple CSS Media Query to easily customize your website for visitors on mobile browsers.

Note: Although this was presented two weeks before the iPad announcement, the first question asked in Q&A was about Apple’s upcoming then-unconfirmed tablet device.

Source: We demonstrate a simple CSS Media Query for sample CreativeTechs Web App. Visit this page from an iPhone, and you see a sample App. Visit from a desktop broswer and the page is tucked into a simple iPhone preview:

http://creativetechs.com/iphone

So, what does the web look like without Flash? If you are curious, there are a number of utilities and scripts that allow you to disable Flash on your desktop browser. Here are a couple plugins:

Safari (Mac): ClickToFlash

Firefox (both): Flashblocker

Flash elements are replaced with a simple box – which I find does speed up much of my web browsing. When you want to view the Flash, just click on it to play as normal (and option that won’t be available on the iPad).

Source: I was turned onto ClickToFlash by consultant Kyle Pauley who owns and leads the Mac Support side of CreativeTechs in Seattle.

That’s why photographer Stephen Trainor created the Photographer’s Ephemeris, an Adobe AIR application that provides a visual and simplified solution for finding vantage points for dusk and sunset photography. It integrates satellite and terrain maps from Google into a visually pleasing interface.

Link: The Photographer’s Ephemeris App

Read on for a couple video tutorials showing this tool in action.

Photographer’s Ephemeris: Video Tutorials

Two video tutorials from Yellow Wood Guiding on the use of The Photographer’s Ephemeris software:

Source: This tip is loosely inspired by a discussion last week with nature and wildlife photographer Jon Cornforth during the live recording session of the John Greengo Photography Show. You can subscribe in iTunes to be among the first to get a copy of that interview when we post it later this week.

This free collection of 220 Photoshop Layer Styles let your quickly sort through glow, gradient, glass, gel, and other effects. Nothing too complex, but a helpful assortment of effects that you can explore and modify for some quick designs.

Link: DezinerFolio’s 220 Amazing Free Photoshop Layer Styles

Source: DezinerFolio.com keeps a slew of fun freebies on their web design & development site. A similar collection was mentioned in the January issue of Design Tools Monthly.

Just launch the app, press the record button, and start talking. You can dictate anything from a short note to a longer soliloquy. Once the text is transcribed, you can send it as an email, text message, or copy to the clipboard. Clean up some missed words and add punctuation, and you are set!

Link: Dragon Dictation at App Store

I’ve been playing with this app over the last week, and I’m amazed at the accuracy of the speech-to-text conversion. There are typically a few errors, but they are easy to fix.

Tip: You can add punctuation to your text by saying ‘period’, ‘question mark’, or ‘exclamation mark’ as you talk. It’s a nice touch.

Source: I first ran across Dragon Dictation early last week on the always topical TUAW blog. Although I find myself wondering how long it will be before we have an app that combines this type of speech-to-text transcription with something like Google Translate.