Thanksgiving Playlist 2010

Here is a playlist set up on iPod #1 (a 60g fourth generation classic) for our Thanksgiving celebration tomorrow. After all Martha Stewart has a Thanksgiving playlist too! Click on the list below to see the version uploaded to Scribd.

InDesign CS5 & Flash

Adobe CS5 was officially announced/launched today! I've been working on InDesign CS5 for the past 18 months or so and wanted to show some cool animations that can be created in InDesign and then exported to Flash.

I took individual images of the family with their iPods (or borrowed iPods...from me). Dropped them into Photoshop and created the iPod ad-like image. Placed both images into InDesign then did a fade-out animation on the top image on mouse-over. This was exported to Flash and embedded here.

And this proves that Flash can work with iPods! (...okay maybe that is stretching things a little). Just mouse over the image below or open in a new window with this link.

Shuffle shuffle

It’s understandable that our iRiver U10 failed after it fell into the toilet – we didn’t even ask Rilla (3) about the details on that one. Colin (6) perhaps was the most upset since he was the undisputed champion of the pre-loaded Flash games. But when the Apple iPod Shuffle (albeit 1st generation) started to fail intermittently and then came up with an unknown 1418 error when connected to iTunes and then totally conked out – we felt cheated.

You see, that shuffle was better than a stick of gum (…okay, admittedly it does look like a pack of gum) especially at events like gymnastics meets and trampoline contests where the kids that weren’t competing needed some entertaining. I confess to even plugging in Rilla, the iRiver deviant, to the shuffle at a church event to quiet her down(!). Anyway, the kids really appreciated the entertainment value – even, not unlike gum, it was good ear candy. So much so that Emma (8) chose an iPod Nano over MyTwinn Doll accessories for a birthday gift (to go with her iDog – another birthday gift). Now even Caleb (10) who rarely asks for anything is looking into an iPod for his birthday. Though instead of wanting an iDog to go with it he is asking for an iFish instead.

So anyway in the meantime we were able to figure out how to resurrect the Shuffle…after hours of internet searches and trying this and that we let the battery die, preformed the “bang-it-on-the-desk” operation and plugged it in. iTunes was able to recognize it and started syncing it up with no unknown errors. Interestingly, my iMac at work was little help for its Shuffle cousin where as the IBM laptop with XP ended up being the Shuffle’s Good Samaritan. At least it looks like we won’t need to resort to gum at all those up-coming meets!