CMYK Thoughts

When it comes to taking an object out of a background there are countless techniques. Some make more sense for certain situations and not so much for other situations. I find when I’m in a rush I like to use a wand, but sometimes it will leave behind artifacts and debris only a pixel or so in size. How do I find them? I put a large red stroke on the layer, erase the junk then just take off the stroke to move on with the project.

The Red Stroke finds the hard to find pixels

So my little hack, which I’m still proud of and I will be contributing to the cause, soon, is being discussed on other sites. Not just with me getting credit, of course, there were others who freely came up with the same solution. I am excited because I want to see what others come up with replacement art, tho. So here are a few others discussing the hack.

Flickr

5/8ers

iLounge

MacThemes

This has been causing me a bit of strife for the past few months and every time I get an opportunity to stop and think about it, I have forgotten about it. Well no more.

The problem? I’m using InDesign on a Mac and we have a community server running windows. We store and work off the server. It allows us to all have access so if someone works on something everyone else won’t have to hunt thru the first person’s computer. It really works.

But the thing that wasn’t working was on occasion I would open up an indd file and when I was done, I’d TRY to save over it. I’d get a warning.

Cannot save the document. It may be opened by other applications. Close applications and try again. You may also use saveas to save it into a new document.

Well this would mean each time I was saving the file to my desktop and then replacing the old file, and then trashing this file. Believe me this adds up, especially when you have a stack of important wienerschnitzels and Kentucky Frieds piling up.

Well today I noticed when I opened an indd it said “Read-Only” and the working temp file that InDesign makes disappeared. It seems that when you open a file too quick and Finder is still working on the “Preview” it is technically opening the file. Which means if you open it too quick it will become a Read-Only and you cannot save over it. So wait until Finder makes it’s preview next time.

Okay, I’m pretty stoked with myself. I figured this one out all by myself and it worked. It doesn’t take long, and maybe I’ll post some of the images I use when I get the rest done, or if anyone else comes up with some images let me know. But what am I talking about? The new iTunes 8 has some cool features that I’m really digging and one is to group according to genre. When I looked in my movies I was to find a little surprise. I saw on the top a feature to group according to genre. But then a mess. Apple only made artwork for so many genres and I like a bit more organization than the next guy. So how could I add some? Simple.
First, here is what you see:

i need a war genre

So first let’s design a new one. I’m not going to go too much into depth on this, if you have a design skill use it, otherwise when I make mine available take those or if anyone else offers new art and I’m sure I won’t be the only one to figure this out, hopefully there will be others.

So to get the art I right click the iTunes.app and hit “show package contents”

second one down is the Show Package Contents

and navigate to Contents/Resources inside we find the jpgs we will use and the plist we need to edit. First the art. Open that image in an image editor, I prefer Photoshop. and do as you please. Here is my new War Genre.

Now save out the new jpg with the naming convention used, so I named mine genre-militaryM.jpg (the large M is for Movie, i noticed different sizes for music.)

and then place that file into the folder we found the other jpgs. Open the genres.plist in a property list editor. I just copied one of the previous genres and changed as I need it. Save it. (I would save a copy backedup somewhere in case my hack destroys the program in which case I’m NOT responsible. This works fine so far on my machine but it’s your decision to go thru a program and add code and what not. Don’t blame me. okay, disclaimer is done.)

And viola you have your own genre art.

War Genre is added.

Edited (For further clarification):

I kinda rushed this thing as soon as I got home from work. I know what it’s like when it seems something is missing, so let me help you guys out. When I right clicked the “genres.plist” i was given the option of opening it in “Property List Editor (default)”. It’s a part of the developer kit from apple. but you can open it in a text editor as well.

In the text editor you will see a bunch of code, but it’s real easy to add to it. What we want is something that matches either the square or movies string depending on which type of art we are messing with. In my example I wanted to add the Military string, so I’ll just take one of the other movie strings and copy/paste it in.

matchStringromance
resourceFilegenre-romanceM.jpg
kindmovie

Make sure you have it from the dict to end dict parts. So all I need to do is in the copied part, I replace the key parts I need. The first string (Match String) is looking for the first word. And the second is our image. The third, which is only on the movies I think, is if it’s a movie. So I put in:

matchStringmilitary
resourceFilegenre-militaryM.jpg
kindmovie

and it’s done. I hope that helps, if not just let me know. This is the my first time sharing one of my little hacks, so sometimes it’s easy to overlook something. Also, one more time, ENSURE YOU BACK UP THE PLIST. It also might be a good idea to keep a back up of your new plist and images in case a future iTunes overwrites them.

Enjoy.