InDesign CS5.5 plug-ins now released
As promised (and explained), we’re happy to announce the release of all our plug-ins for InDesign CS5.5 in concert with our current CS4/CS5 releases.
When you download any of our plug-ins, and double-click the .zxp installer file in the Plug-ins for InDesign CS5 folder, Adobe’s Extension Manager will install the appropriate CS5 or CS5.5 plugin, depending on your most-recently installed version of InDesign. If you have both InDesign CS5 and CS5.5 installed, and would like to install the plug-in for use in CS5, you will need to manually start Extension Manager CS5 and use its File > Install Extension to select the plug-in’s .zxp installer file.
Thanks for your patience, if you were waiting!
Updated plugins coming for InDesign CS5.5
Adobe recently released an InDesign 7.5.1 version (first minor version of CS5.5) which fixed the “bug” that CS5 plugins worked with CS5.5. Apparently, Adobe needed to require new CS5.5-specific versions of all plugins due to internal changes, but we somehow didn’t get the message ahead of time.
The result is that, if you do an auto-update of CS5.5 to the latest 7.5.1, InDesign will complain that there is a plug-in conflict with any one of our plugins.
We’re scrambling to release new versions of all our plugins that will work with CS5.5 specifically, and hope to have them sometime later this week. This is effectively a whole new release, even if it means no code changes, so we have a lot of repackaging, re-versioning, rebuilding, and re-releasing to do across all 4 plugins for MacOS and Windows.
We apologize for this mishap.
Print and ePublishing Conference 2011 (PePCon) report
Joe Mathia and I (Chris Ryland) provided Em’s presence at the (now apparently annual) InDesign Secrets Live! Print and ePublishing Conference designed and implemented by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción. David and Anne-Marie are just plain great people, and were wonderful hosts for the conference. (They (and other speakers) very kindly pointed people to us several times in general and specific sessions.)
We had a couple of tables in the registration / eating area of the conference (upstairs at the Westin Alexandria, Virginia) with some signs and a couple of large monitors to show off our software. (That’s Joe holding one of our brochures.)
The two days were pretty intense, and we met a whole bunch of great people. Many of them have been using our software for years, and more than one even expressed a desire to find more work involving our tools because they’re such fun to use! Many hadn’t seen the tools before and were excited to see them demonstrated on real projects. (Joe has a great collection of demos that we’re planning to add to our showcase listings.)
I was showing DocsFlow, our new Google Docs live linking InDesign plug-in, and we had a phenomenal response, with a lot of enthusiastic requests to join our public beta. DocsFlow’s ability to merge editorial changes on the Google Docs side with editorial and formatting changes on the InDesign side is what really caught people’s attention. Additionally, we discovered that Google Docs usage in the publishing business is exploding, so there’s a huge amount of interest in connecting InDesign. (The fact that the per-editorial-seat cost of Google Docs is $0 doesn’t hurt. Though we did change our screen signage from “the poor man’s editorial solution” to “the cost-effective editorial solution” at Chris Kitchener’s suggestion.)
(Meanwhile, back at home, Chris Roueche and John Whitney were madly debugging and fixing things in DocsFlow as we went along, since the software had just started working a few days before. It was great to have their support and virtual presence.)
As we told people at the show, we hope to have a public beta of DocsFlow starting in a couple of weeks; the demo was working quite well, and we just need to work on packaging, documentation, and edge cases.
If we saw you there, thanks for stopping by! It’s always great to meet you in person, and we hope to do more of these kinds of shows.
David and Anne-Marie, and all the good folks involved with the show, thanks again!
Em exhibiting at the Print and E-Publishing Conference, May 23-24
We’re happy to announce we’ll be exhibiting at the InDesign Secrets Live Print and E-Publishing Conference, May 23rd and 24th, at the Westin Alexandria.
InDesign Secret’s own David Blatner gives an overview of the developer attendees and says kind things about Em.
If you’re an Em product user and will be at the conference, we’d love to talk and find out how you’re using our products and how we could make them better. If you’re not using them, we’d be glad to show them to you in person.
We hope to be showing an entirely new product as well that may be a killer solution for editorial workflow.
So do stop by our table–we’d love to see you!
Fall 2010 newsletter
We’ve just sent our Fall 2010 newsletter with the latest news of InDesign CS5 upgrades for Xtags and EmData.
You can view it online at Em Fall 2010 Newsletter, if you didn’t receive a copy as a customer or subscriber.
You can subscribe to the newsletter for future very occasional news, or, for all your options, visit our information about keeping in touch.
Keeping in touch
We’ve fleshed out our support page about “keeping in touch” quite a bit.
We’re trying to make it easy for you to keep up with our progress on the products and on the web site (new and updated tutorials, documentation, etc.) that are coming in the future.
In particular, you can subscribe to our news using RSS (e.g., in a news reader like NetNewsWire or Google Reader), via email, via Twitter updates, and via our very occasional company email newsletter.
We intend to use Twitter both to update you when any new articles appear, and when there are non-trivial changes to the more static parts of the site. And, we’re happy to interact over Twitter for quick back-and-forth kinds of communications.
We’re also going to provide more specific news/email news feeds, for things like following the progress of a single product, or a group of related products.
So, if you’re interested in staying in touch, we urge you to try one of these methods. Go
And please let us know how we could improve in this effort, via email to webmaster@emsoftware.com. Thank you!
Welcome
Welcome to our new site!
We’ll be building it out over time with FAQs, tutorials, screen casts, online manuals, new products, etc., but we first had to convert our creaky old site to a new, solid foundation for future expansion.
If you have any questions about or problems with the site, or suggestions for how we might improve it to better serve you, please contact us via email to webmaster@emsoftware.com. In particular, we’d love to hear about anything you find confusing or missing.
Product group names
One thing that’s potentially confusing is that we now group the cross-platform products under one name: e.g., InData/Xdata are called collectively EmData, etc. The actual product names haven’t changed; just how we present them as a single “virtual” product has changed. This avoids a lot of duplication, since they function nearly identically, just on different “motherships.”
Thanks!
