Exploring interface tweaks

Let's gently enter the world of InDesign CS6 by a very interesting little video that just shows some of the subtle interface tweaks that the Adobe team has done with our friend, InDesign. If you're a longtime InDesign user, I think that as soon as you open CS6, the first thing you're going to notice is the upper and lower case of the panels. Look at that! Yay! It no longer says Pages, Layers, in all uppercase, yelling at you. So I'm really happy to see that. Also notice a couple of other interesting features about the panel dock.

If I click on the Pages tab to open it, now I can actually come here to the Pages tab again to close it. This is something that we had a couple versions ago, but then starting in CS5, they turned that off, and the only way that you could collapse a panel was by clicking the double arrows. So now, you can still do that, but it was just a natural thing to click the tab to close it as well. You'll see also we have a little grab bar at the top of each Panel group, so you can drag the Panel group by that drag bar. There you go! And we can put it back.

And when we open up a panel, we see another little grabber bar at the bottom of the panel, making it easier to enlarge. You don't have to come over here and try and get your cursor right over this grow bar here; you can just get this guy right here. What they forgot to do though was add one on the side, so it's still kind of a pain to get your cursor in the right exact place here. Ahh! There you go! I'll bring it out. But that's progress, right? While we're over here on the right- hand side, let me close this up and talk about the Application bar. The Application bar is the same as before except that they removed CS Live, which was a service that they dropped, that they announced a while ago.

And in the workspaces, we still have the same workspace switcher, but we are missing the workspace that was called Interactive. We still have Interactive for PDF, but the Interactive by itself workspace has been renamed to Digital Publishing. So Digital Publishing is the workspace that you would use to create tablet apps, like putting wired on the iPad or something. If you switch to Digital Publishing, you'll see that there are a whole bunch of the interactive panels here, but also the ones specifically having to do with digital publishing, or DPS, Digital Publishing Suite.

Now, you may not have both of these panels. You actually have to install a separate download called the DPS Update. When you go to Digital Publishing, you probably will only have Folio Builder and then you'll have a little link that says, "Please download the latest version," because they're still not installing it by default with InDesign. I've already gone ahead and installed this, and I'll be talking about this a little bit more in the next video when I talk about new tools and new panels. We are going to switch back to Essentials for now. Ooh, wait, let me show you one more thing about workspaces.

Here under Essentials, if you choose New in CS6, which is always a good way to learn the new features, and you start looking at the menus, you'll notice that some are in blue and some are in purple. What's that about? Well, this is actually something they started last version. The items in blue all have something new in CS6. The items in purple were from the previous version, CS5. So if you skipped an update, if you went directly CS5 to CS6 and you missed CS5.5, these things were modified in the last version, in 5.5.

I thought that was nice and helpful for them to do. I'll go back to Essentials here. Then let's go all the way over to the left and look at the toolbar. We have a couple of new tools that I'll be talking about in the next video, but the main reason I want to put your attention here is that if you happen to have an earlier version of InDesign installed, you should start it up and look at what they've done to the toolbar. It's very subtle, but they have redesigned it somewhat so that all of the tools, they are in a line. They all point the same way.

They used to point different directions. I think the Line tool used to go the other way, which I thought was kind of funny. They didn't tilt the Scissors tool for some reason. I am not sure about that one. Also, you might notice, because you're a graphic designer and you have an eye for these things, that as you move your cursor over the tools, we have lost the color overlay that used to appear, indicating which tool your cursor was on top of. It used to be subtle but very elegant. And I don't know why they dropped that. Maybe the person quit who was in charge of designing that; I am not sure. But that's gone.

Another tiny, little tweak is that the X in the title bar for closing the document used to be larger, with a circle around it, and apparently they had people complain about it, because now they've made it even harder to find, and it's a tiny little X to close the document. Now, in the document itself--and here I've just opened up one from the exercise files. You can open up any document, but open up one that has a placed image in it, because we also have another little interface change, and that is we have another icon or badge or adornment or affordance or whatever it is that you'd like to call the little doohickey that is sitting on top of a frame, we have a new one.

It's this little link icon. It will appear on any placed object in your layout. So anything that has an entry in the Links panel will have this little Link icon. And you can see from the tooltip-- let me put the cursor over it again-- that if you hold down the Alt key on a PC, or the Option key on a Mac, and click this, it will open up its entry in the Links panel. So I'll hold down the Option key and click, and boom, there is the link. So I thought that was kind of cool. Now, if you don't like all these little declarations on your frames, you can come up here to the View menu, go down to Extras, and choose Hide Link Badge, and that will make them all go away, and then they will just be normal. They're still placed.

They're still links of course, but you don't have to look at the cute little link icon anymore. But I'm going to turn it back on because I kind of like that. One final subtle little change has to do with the anchored object indicator that you see on different frames. Now, this was added in CS5.5. It's a little square at the upper right-hand side of most objects that lets you drag and drop to anchor this object in a text flow. And in CS5.5, when it was added, this was always blue; and in CS6, now it has been updated so that it matches the color of the frame. And the frame, as you know, is an indicator of which layer this object is on.

So if I look at the Layers panel, this is on the callout layer, which is colored orange, and that is why it's an orange frame. And now our little anchored object indicator is also orange. These are just little, tiny tweaks that I find interesting as a designer. What did the designers do at Adobe? So let's look at some of the other little bit more significant new features in InDesign in upcoming videos.