And now for something completely different…

I don’t knit as much as I used to – embarrassingly enough, my current project is a sock that I started back in 2009 – but I do appreciate a well stocked yarn store. On a recent trip to Main, I had the chance to visit Halcyon’s store. For anybody who enjoys some high quality fibers (and I am not talking Metamucil here), this is quite an experience (forget WEBS, Halcyon is the place to be).

I just learned that they are celebrating their 45’s birthday, and having a giveaway for that occasion. If you want to win a $450 shopping trip at their store, check out the Halcyon Yarn’s 45th Sweepstakes page: https://gleam.io/cwiwa/45th-anniversary-give-away

I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to manage and edit my images. I also teach a class at our local Community Darkroom, and students ask me all sorts of photography related software questions. For that reason, I also have the Canon software that came with my camera installed on my Mac. With the actual Canon DPP software, I also got the ImageBrowser EX installed, which pops up every time I either connect the camera or insert a memory card from a camera. I use Lightroom to copy the image files from the camera or the memory card to my computer, so I always have to exit the ImageBrowser in order to silence it – until the next time it thinks I need it’s help…

Looking at this dialog (and the menus), it seems that the “Preferences” function may be the key to configuring when this application gets launched. But when we take a look at the Preferences dialog, there is unfortunately nothing that suggests that we can even disable this tool:

The key is a bit more hidden and obscure: We need to start the Mac OS X Image Capture application when a memory card is inserted, or the camera is connected:

It’s not obvious how to disable the launching of an application when an image source is detected, so here is the trick: Expand the camera options via the button in the lower left corner of the application window. I’ve marked the button with a red border. This will display the “Connecting this camera opens” dialog:

And now, finally, we can select to not open an application when the camera is connected:

In order to restore the old behavior, you will have to select the “Other” option and then navigate to the application file, which you can find as

/Applications/Canon Utilities/CameraWindow/CameraWindow.app

I hope this tip helps somebody to figure out how to get rid of this dialog a bit quicker. It took me about half a year to finally research how it’s done 🙂

I am usually quick to admit “with Apple products, it just works…”. That was not the case when it came to the new “Continuity” feature in Yosemite/iOS8. As in the past, I expected things to just work, and when it did not, I put a whole bunch of Apple devices in front of me and ran a number of tests. I used a late 2013 model of a MacBook Pro with Retina Display using Yosemite, an iPhone 6 using iOS 8, an iPhone 5 using iOS 8.1b2, and an iPad Mini running iOS 8.

The interesting thing was that the Continuity feature seemed to work without a problem between the iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini, but the two newer devices just would not want to play.

After some googling, I found some indication that logging out of iCloud on the MacBook, rebooting and then logging in again should give the Continuity feature the necessary kick to start working. This did not work on my iPhone 6, but now the MacBook Pro “knew” about what was going on on the iPhone 5 and the iPad. Previous experience with networking problems on iOS devices suggested to just “Reset Network Settings” on the device (select “Settings>General>Reset>Reset Network Settings”).

After the device reset, I started up the browser on the iPhone 6, and the Handoff icon showed up immediately on my MacBook Pro. Yay!

The 7th Worldwide Photo Walk 2014 will happen in three days: On Saturday, October 11 2014. I will again lead a walk in Rochester, NY. The details can be found on “my” poster (click on the image to download the PDF version):

This year, we will be walking at Mount Hope Cemetery. All the details can be found at my walk page, which is also where you can sign up for the walk. There are still plenty of spots available: http://kelbyone.com/photowalk/walk/rochester-ny-united-states-mount-hope-cemetery/

If you don’t have plans yet for Saturday, you have a camera and you like to take pictures, join us!

Many of you come to this site because of the Adobe Acrobat and PDF related posts. I’ve moved all that to my business site at http://www.khkonsulting.com a while ago, but Google still likes to point searchers here. If you are not keeping up with what’s going on over there, here is some information about my recent posts:

Validating Field Content

A tutorial to validate field content with custom JavaScript validation scripts. 

The Trouble With the XREF Table

Information about how a corrupt XREF table will mess up a PDF file and how to debug XREF table problems. 

The End is Here – of ADM that is

Adobe has ended support for ADM (the Adobe Dialog Manager)  in Acrobat plug-ins. I’ve warned about this before, but now it actually happened. 

 

It’s Worldwide Photo Walk time again – this time it’s not just one day, it’s a weekend of photo walks.

Just in case it’s not clear what I’m talking about, here is a short explanation. For the forth time Scott Kelby has organized a worldwide event: Groups of photographers will gather on the weekend of October 1st and 2nd and take pictures for about two hours. It is very interesting to experience how (up to) 50 people basically looking at the same “things” interpret what they see completely differently.

I’m leading the Rochester, NY walk at High Falls this year (after leading a downtown walk in Rochester two years ago, and a walk in Memmingen, Germany last year).

If you are interested in photography, are in Rochester, NY and have some time, join us for this years Worldwide Photo Walk.

You can find pictures from previous walks on Flickr: Rochester and Memmingen.

[This blog post appeared first on my professional site at KHKonsulting.com – Please head over there if you want to comment or see any potential comments to this article]

A New Version of Acrobat

Have you noticed that it’s been more than two years since the release of Adobe Acrobat 9? Usually, Adobe releases a new version every 18 to 24 months, so a new version has been overdue. Today they let the cat out of the bag, and announced Acrobat X. There is already a lot of information available about what it is, and to some extend also how it is different from previous releases.

Take a look at the press release to get a quick overview of what’s new, or browse over two Adobe TV and watch the Acrobat X Tips & Tricks episodes. There is a lot of information available to give you a pretty good idea about what’s new and different.

User Interface

If you’ve attended one of my training seminars about Acrobat, you know that one of my pet peeves has always been that Adobe added to the UI clutter with every new release of Acrobat. Yes, every now and then they tried to clean it up, but at the end, it just caused more and more confusion among both novice, but also experienced users.

This time around, they took a completely new approach and ripped out the old menu and toolbar system and replaced it with something completely new. I am still trying to wrap my head around where things are now located, but in general, the new layout is a good idea. It will be much easier for the novice user to explore the UI and find new features that they might want to use, but for users who’ve worked with Acrobat since the early days of the product (in my case since Acrobat 3), it will take a while until we find all the tools that we’ve known by heart. But in the long run, I think it’s a good move, and I am more than willing to go through the learning process to get to know the new UI.

Plug-Ins

Every time Acrobat changed it’s UI in the past, there were major ripple effects through the plug-in community – things just did not work anymore, or not quite right, and we plug-in developers had some work to do to modify our plug-ins so that users could rely on these 3rd party components again.

If you have not yet tested your own plug-ins on an Acrobat X pre-release, don’t waste any time. Chances are that your code needs to be modified to work seamlessly with Acrobat X. If you need help with that, get in touch with me, I am a seasoned plug-in developer and I can certainly assist you with those efforts.

Favorite Feature

I don’t have a favorite new feature, but I have two favorite updated features:

Number one is what Adobe has done with Portfolios. In my opinion, Portfolios were one of the most underused features in Acrobat 9, and I hope that the updates to the Portfolio system will help to give that feature the necessary exposure so that we see more and more of these compound documents.

My number two updated feature is the much improved export function to other file formats. Whenever I had to create a MS Word document out of a PDF file in the past, it was always a hit-or-miss job – some documents worked reasonably well, others didn’t work at all. But regardless of how well it worked, there was always some editing necessary after the export to make the Word file look like the original PDF document. With the new export in Acrobat X, I get Word documents that look exactly like the PDF file. Great job, Adobe!

Update:

Please visit the same post on my business site. The comments are closed here, so if you want to comment, you have to head over to http://khkonsulting.com/2010/09/reading-pdf-form-fields-with-vba/

I’ve written about VBA and Acrobat JavaScript before, and I’ve also mentioned that you can combine VBA and JavaScript to access PDF form fields, but I still owe a sample for that. I had to answer another question today about how to exactly do that, so I whipped up a quick sample program that demonstrates the use of the JavaScript Object (JSO) to read and write AcroForm fields.

We start the same way as in my old VBA sample to create a VBA program that references the Acrobat TLB and to add a button to a document. When we now use the following script as the button handler, we can work with form fields:

Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
    Dim AcroApp As Acrobat.CAcroApp
    Dim theForm As Acrobat.CAcroPDDoc
    Dim jso As Object
    Dim text1, text2 As String

    Set AcroApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.App")
    Set theForm = CreateObject("AcroExch.PDDoc")
    theForm.Open ("C:\temp\sampleForm.pdf")
    Set jso = theForm.GetJSObject

    ' get the information from the form fields Text1 and Text2
    text1 = jso.getField("Text1").Value
    text2 = jso.getField("Text2").Value

    MsgBox "Values read from PDF: " & text1 & " " & text2

    ' set a text field
    Dim field2 As Object
    Set field2 = jso.getField("Text2")

    field2.Value = 13   ' assign the number 13 to the fields value

    ' get the information from the form fields Text1 and Text2
    text1 = jso.getField("Text1").Value
    text2 = jso.getField("Text2").Value

    MsgBox "Values read from PDF: " & text1 & " " & text2

    theForm.Close

    AcroApp.Exit
    Set AcroApp = Nothing
    Set theForm = Nothing

    MsgBox "Done"
End Sub

This program requires a PDF file with text fields called “Text1” and “Text2” to be stored as C:\temp\sampleForm.pdf. With the explanation in the previous two blog posts, it should not be hard to understand what’s going on here. The only new command introduced is the getField() function, which returns a form field. The form field object has a property “value” which contains the actual value that’s assigned to the field. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you. The updated form field is not saved (because the document does not get saved) – I’ll leave that up to the reader to figure out.

Also, this program will not work with XFA forms (the ones you create in Designer). For those, you need to use the XFA DOM to access the form data. For anybody interested in XFA forms, the LifeCycle Designer ES Scripting Reference is a must read.

One day you need your Flickr uploads resized to 1000×1000 pixels, the next day you need to allow only friends and family access to your uploads – is there a way to make the Flickr upload more streamlined from within Lightroom?

Since the release of Lightroom 3 there is a convenient Flickr publishing service built right into the application, and with a few mouse-clicks users can upload any selection of images stored in the Lightroom catalog.

Thanks to the foresight of the designers of the application (or the beta testers), it is possible to set up multiple Flickr publishing services with different settings. In the following tutorial I will demonstrate how that is done. At first we’ll look at the long and complicated (no, not really) method – which you need to create your initial Flickr publishing service, but can also be used for the second, third and so on service. Then we’ll use a shortcut to create the “other” publishing services.

It does not matter if you’ve already set up one Flickr publishing service, or if you are starting from scratch, the process is the same. When you look at the left panel in Lightroom, you will see the “Publish Services” category with a little “+” sign to the right of the category title – plus a small triangle that indicates that there is a menu hidden behind the plug sign.

Once you click on that plus sign, the menu will be displayed. Select the “Go to Publishing Manager…” menu item, which will display the …

… “Lightroom Publishing Manager” dialog.

Right below the list of “Publish Services” on the left side is the “Add” button to add new services to the list. Click on that and specify the details for the new service.

That’s it. Now just drag&drop your images on one of the Flickr publishing services, and once you are done, select to actually publish the images by right-clicking on the Photostream (or your custom photo set) and select to “Publish Now”:

So, now that we know the long way, here is a shortcut: Once you have your first Flickr publishing service installed, just right-click on that publishing service and select “Create Another Publish Service via ‘Flickr'”:

After that, just follow the instructions above to setup the service.