Pre-Press Tips to Improve Productivity and Your Bottom Line Presented by the Greater Baltimore InDesign User Group – Sponsored by MacMedics

MacMedics is pleased to be able to sponsor an upcoming meeting of the Greater Baltimore InDesign User Group. We have long been a sponsor of the Washington DC InDesign User Group, so naturally we were thrilled to be invited to sponsor the Baltimore chapter as well. We hope you will be able to attend this meeting, as we’re giving away an Apple iPod as a door prize.

When:
Tue, October 19, 2010, 6:00 PM

Where:
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Parsons Auditorium and Cafeteria, Building 1, Main Campus (Enter at Lobby 1)
Laurel, MD 20723

The URL for the Greater Baltimore InDesign User Group is located here, and is where you can register for the meeting.

There will be three speakers at this meeting, all production experts from local printing companies.

Our first Presenter is Martin Nibali, from KM Printing, which started out as a single Minuteman Press franchise and has grown to become “not your typical quick printer”. KM Printing is full service communications company offering marketing consulting, graphic design, print production, promotional products, and direct mail. Martin will give us many useful pre-press tips including creating InDesign preflight profiles to preflight your document as you design and choosing the correct PDF profiles, just to name a few.

Our second two presenters, Jim Hogan and Joe Wagner, are from The Whitmore Group, a commercial printing and communications company serving the mid-Atlantic region providing innovative prepress, manufacturing, and print management solutions that maximize technology and talent. Jim and Joe will demonstrate the INSITE Creative Workflow, a web-based system that enables teamwork and improves efficiency of creative development. This process allows for proof and approval of files over the internet, will track project status and support creative professionals while tracking costs and time.

Agenda:

6:00 p.m. Registration, Raffles, Networking, and Refreshments sponsored by MacMedics
6:30 p.m. Welcome, Group Business, and Adobe news
7:00 p.m. Feature Presentation I: Pre-Press Tips by Martin Nibali
7:30 p.m. Break (and final raffle sales)
7:40 p.m. Feature Presentation II: Increase Productivity with INSITE Creative Workflow, by Jim Hogan and Joe Wagner
8:10 p.m. Questions & Answers
8:25 p.m. Selecting Raffle Winners
8:35 p.m. Adjourn

MacMedics is proud to be a sponsor of the Washington DC area InDesign User Group’s Adobe CS 5 release event for the third time!

The DC-Area InDesign User Group is once again holding an all-day, special event heralding the introduction of the latest version of Adobe’s leading creative software, CS 5. The featured presenters are:

CHRIS CONVERSE, author of the new book “Bringing Your Web Design to Life”

NOHA EDELL of Adobe Systems

MICHAEL MURPHY, creator and host of “The InDesigner” podcasts

The all-day event will be held TUESDAY, MAY 25 At the U.S. Navy Memorial Auditorium, 701 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC.

This year’s venue is smaller then the Shakespeare Theatre where it was held for the CS 4 roll out event, so reserve your seat early! You can register right here!

The Power Mac G5 is really pretty much over in terms of being powerful enough for someone who is doing professional design work. We have very few clients left still doing professional design work on G5′s. Some of the more recent Power Mac G5′s are “okay” for some use, but at this point, it’s really time to move on. In some cases, even the Mac Mini is a better machine in certain situations. If someone comes to us with a Power Mac G5 that needs, more RAM, a new hard drive, AND wants to also upgrade to Leopard, it’s pretty much not even worth it. Leopard (10.5) is the last OS that will run on the G5 and is no longer available for sale from Apple. With a Mac Mini you get a new OS (10.6) and iLife ’09 for free. A new Mini is only $599. Same holds true for a unit that needs a major repair, in almost all cases a repair is not worth pursuing.

If you “retire” a Power Mac G5 you can reuse your keyboard and mouse, and in most cases your monitor too with the new Mac Mini.

Now that the new iMacs can support up to 8 GBs of RAM, even the low end one is pretty nice for a designer (it now is 21.5″ and has a great display), but the high end iMacs are even better for design work with better video performance and a 27″ display. You can get one with a Quad-Core processor for $2000.

Some of the G5′s are now on Apple’s “Vintage” list and we’ll start having issues finding parts here pretty soon. Also, Apple’s newest OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) won’t run on the Power PC platform.

If you have a G5 and you’re still using it, the hard drive is really beyond it’s life expectancy, so if you plan on continuing to use it, the hard drive should be replaced at some point. I have a whole website about hard drive retirement. And, as always make sure you have your data backed up as hard drives seem to have way of dying at the worst possible time.

See my web page about why you should consider “retiring” your hard drive before it fails at: http://www.HardDrivesDie.com

For more facts on why retiring a Power Mac G4 or G5 is a good idea, take a look at this previous MacMedics Blog post from earlier this year.

If you’re thinking about a new Macintosh system for Graphic Design (or anything else!), please give your closest MacMedics office a call. We would be delighted to help you pick out a new model.