Adobe, through TechSoup, is offering Photoshop, Creative Suite Design, and some of its other titles for Macs in a special promotion. These products are available to organizations that are not typically eligible for their discounted software, including health care organizations and schools and educational institutions. In addition to the Mac software, there are a few books on their software available through the program which can be used by Windows users. Here is the TechSoup page, which outlines this special offer.

We also have some Adobe classes for nonprofits coming up (all taught on PCs), and thanks to Adobe’s generous funding, these are all offered at half of the regular tuition rate:

• Photoshop Intermediate - February 9th at 9am
• Dreamweaver Foundations - February 16th at 9am
• InDesign Intermediate - February 17th at 9am
• Photoshop Advanced - February 18th at 1pm

Before putting the close on October, we thought it would be fun to revisit the top five NPowering: Nonprofit Technology blog posts (based on page views) from last month:

• Doing More with Less: Suggestions for some smart investments that may help your nonprofit raise capital or provide you with resources that go beyond a large check.
• Group Calendars and Salesforce: Discussion on reasons to use a group calendar and the group calendaring available to organizations using Salesforce.
• Windows 7: Discussion on evaluating and planning for the upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system.
• The Path to End of Year Fundraising Success: Resources and advice for improving the message and strategy of your end-of-year appeal.
• Create Cool Text in Illustrator: Tutorial from Layers Magazine for creating fun, eye-catching text with Adobe Illustrator.  (This one is a blast from the past.)

One of the things I cover in NPower’s InDesign Intermediate training is applying effects to your shapes & frames. Corner Effects are really cool, adding a Fancy or Bevel makes things stand out. The down side of corner effect is that they’re applied to all of the corners. What if you only want 1 or 2 corners to be rounded?

Turns out you can do this somewhat easily. Adobe included a script that allows you to apply corner effect individually. The folks over at The Graphic Mac have a step-by-step post on how to use the script. Check it out at http://thegraphicmac.com/creating-rounded-corner-boxes-easily-indesign-scripts

The folks over at Layers Magazine published their 100 Hot Tips for Adobe CS4. It includes tips for Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects, and Premier Pro. That really runs the gamut of Adobe products. You can check it out at http://www.layersmagazine.com/fourth-annual-layers-100-wicked-tips.html

Many thanks to Bob over at InDesign Docs. He had this and some others in his Best Links in May post.

I know I’ve mentioned CreativeTech’s before. They’re a Seattle company that provided Mac support, mostly to design firms. However they also offer some great training! I mentioned before in this post a series of web-based sessions on Photoshop. Well they’ve added 3 more series, Illustrator, InDesign, and Flash. Again all of these are free and a great resource.  Like the last series, they have 1,000 spots available and are hoping to have it completely full.

Check it out and sign up at http://creativetechs.com/training/

The InDesign series started on May 14th, so I’m not sure if you can get in or not. But it never hurts to try!

We go over changing your vertical alignment for your text in the InDesign training here at NPower. It’s a handy command if you want your text centered in your frame. However one of the things that has frustrated me over the years is that InDesign will change your alignment back to Top if you have a non-rectangle frame.

This means any custom frame shape, corner effects, etc. Well the folks over at the InDesign Docs blog had a great post on getting around this. Turns out if you increase the Inset Spacing enough, it’s revert back to your vertical alignment setting. This is due to the inset spacing having enough room to revert back to a rectangle shape. Unfortunately this means it only works if you’re using corner effects, not custom shapes like an ellipse.

Their other recommendation is to create 2 frames, one rectangle and one custom. The rectangle would contain your text and have vertical alignment applied but no stroke. Apply your stroke to the custom frame or shape and place it on top of the text frame. Then Group them.

While it works, I think it’s a pain. I might as well be back to using PageMaker. Oh well, maybe CS10 will address this.

Need some tips for that Annual Report? Or your next newsletter? The folks over at the Graphic Mac had a great post outlining some simple tips you can use to make your document less foreboding. Now while the article applies mostly to documents created with InDesign, you can accomplish most of these in Word too.

You can check it out over at the Graphic Mac blog.

Now I’ve posted before about Acrobat 9.0 and the Acrobat.com website. It has lots of cool features, one of which is the ability to conference with up to 3 people for free.

Well it turns out that Adobe put this feature into InDesign. If you have an Adobe ID (and you should sign up for one if you don’t), then you can initiate a “screen share” with up to 2 other people through InDesign. Many thanks to the folks over at InDesign Secrets for bringing this to my attention. You can read more about it over on their blog.

Recently I had a student ask about combining 2 documents together. I quickly fired off a couple of options that could do the trick. But they probably weren’t the best ones around. And sure enough, just today they had a post over at the Creative Mentor blog that went one stop better.

Turns out their is a command in the Pages panel that allows you to move or copy pages. I always thought of this as just within the document, again I wasn’t paying that close of attention. So I missed the little drop down for where I wanted to move them. The default is Current Document, but if you have multiple documents open you can chose a different document to move or copy those pages too. And it’ll keep important information such as margins, bleeds, master pages and more.

Check out the post on the Creative Mentor blog, they’ve included a link to a tutorial video too.

So here at NPower, in both our Photoshop & InDesign classes, we talk about such lofty things as Resolutionwhen it comes to printing. Now that’s if you’re using your desktop printer or sending to a commercial printer. And we cover creating PDF’s or saving for the web.

Now because we don’t want to bore you to tears and because we only have so much time to cover all of the materials in those classes, we don’t really dive deep into the whole Resolution thing. So I’m going to point you to a great post that has been buried in my inbox for the last month. Barrie Smith over at the Digital Photography School website goes deep about Resolution, Dots Per Inch vs. Pixels Per Inch, how you monitor displays images and a whole lot more. You can check it out at http://digital-photography-school.com/upscale-and-out-of-res