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Do you want to know a secret?

by Nik Rawlinson on 9 December 2010 in Editorial
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The Beatles on iTunes. Is it such a big deal? Actually, it is. Now, I’m no Beatles fan, as anyone on the MacUser team will tell you. I’ve never understood the fascination, never enjoyed classics such as Hey Jude and We Can Work It Out, never really comprehended why anyone is still going on (and on and on) about them 50 years after they formed and 40 years after they called it a day. The Beatles leave me cold.

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The trials and tribulations of PDF to ePub conversion

by Tom Gorham on 6 December 2010 in iWork
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I think last week must have been my lucky week. It was only a month ago, thanks to an update to Pages, that I was discovering for the first time the joys of exporting documents to the ePub format. Talk about timely. Just the other day, I was asked for the first time to create an ePub document for an organisation. At least I knew what they were talking about.

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Go global by adding subtitles to reach an international audience

by Will Head on 3 December 2010 in Video
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If you want to increase the accessibility of your video productions or make them viewable to people who don’t have speakers or headphones to hand, then adding subtitles lets the viewer read any speech without having to actually hear it. This isn’t a complicated process, but it can be quite time consuming, as you need to create a subtitle for every spoken word in your finished production.

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Falling out of love with Flickr

by Dave Stevenson on 2 December 2010 in Photography
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This month, I said goodbye to a companion that’s been by my side since I started taking digital photographs. It was there through thick and thin, and despite its nominal status as a service for amateurs, I continued to use it well after I started to get paid for photography. It hosted my images when I wrote a blog about travelling the world, and, at last glance, more than 10,000 of my beloved images were there. Its name is Flickr, and I’ll never use it again.

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Creating interesting new characters for your font

by Keith Martin on 1 December 2010 in Design for Print
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Of all the design discipline specialities, typeface design is probably the most monastic. Creating a new font takes skill, serious attention to detail and a perseverance that a medieval monk would respect. Not only do you have to consider the aesthetics of stroke weight, overall form and the effect that has on the ‘colour’ of text on a page, you need to get the technical details right so everything Just Works no matter what combination of characters someone tries.

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Your flexible friend: will bendy screens be the next big thing?

by Alex Watson on 29 November 2010 in Mac to the future
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When the iPhone first appeared, it looked unlike any other mobile phone. Three years later, most high-end phones look like the iPhone, glossy black slates completely dominated by their display

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