We’ve just released an update to the APID ToolAssistant plug-in – version 1.0.47.

This plug-in has no end-user features; it is mainly an invisible, yet critical component of many popular InDesign plug-ins, both developed by us or by other software developers.

As such, APID ToolAssistant provides support for many of our popular tools, like TextExporter, StoryParker, MagnetoGuides, FrameReporter…

If you are using any tools that rely on APID ToolAssistant, please update to the latest and greatest. In the 1.0.47 release, we’ve concentrated on performance and stability. The few new features we’ve added are mainly of interest to software developers who use APID ToolAssistant as a component for their tools.

In our own range of tools, especially FrameReporter benefits from using the latest APID ToolAssistant – the little info-labels now remain better ‘attached’ to the associated frame, even when rotated or stretched, and APID ToolAssistant now avoids drawing information ‘upside-down’.

Click here for more info about APID ToolAssistant.

I thought I’d share some failures with the world – this might save someone some headache and hassle, who knows.

Here’s the deal: I had Windows Vista installed on a BootCamp partition on my MacBook Pro. I am pretty religous about backups, and I had made a number of consecutive backups – some recent ones made with Acronis True Image Home, which I purchased recently, and some with Image For Windows, which I had been using before that.

For the Mac side of things, I use Carbon Copy Cloner – Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! are two ‘imaging’ softwares for Mac, and to me the single most important feature they have is their ‘restore’ functionality – there is none!

You don’t need restore – the backups you make with those two programs are ‘good to go’: they are bootable, as-is, so they slot right in as a replacement of the broken drive.

Most backup softwares, especially on PC, are good at making backups, but in my experience, they stink at restoring: it’s an endless hassle of fiddling with boot disks, partition tables, formats and so on. If a PC drive dies on me, I know from experience that it’ll take me 2-3 days to rebuild the system back to usability. If a Mac drive dies on me, I can be back in business in an hour or so.

The reason why I switched to Acronis True Image Home is that I was hoping it would give me some functionality somewhat close to what Carbon Copy Cloner does – i.e. in case of disaster, I was hoping to reboot off some CD, put in the backup, and have it restore the hard drive to its original self.

So, disaster struck, and the 500GB hard drive in my trusty MacBook Pro gave up – click-click-click… forever, just the day before I had to leave overseas. The drive was partitioned into one 320GB partition for Mac, and then the remainder used as a BootCamp with Vista.

Not to worry – I simply opened the machine, and replaced the internal hard drive with the backup drive I made with Carbon Copy Cloner. Within the hour I was back in business with all my Mac stuff back where it was supposed to go, except for the changes of the last few days. Those remaining files I got off my Time Machine. Saved!

However, the BootCamp partition was a different story; I did not look into it immediately, as I had no immediate need for it. A few months go by, and a few days ago, I decided to try and rebuild my BootCamp setup – easy peasy, I had backups aplenty, right?

Wrong, it turned out. The backup drive had an empty, unused Mac partition the same size as my BootCamp setup – the idea being that when ‘restore time’ came around I would repurpose that partition as ‘BootCamp’ and tell Acronis to put the BootCamp stuff there.

But it turned out I could find no easy way to tell the Mac that I wanted to ‘convert’ the Mac partition for use by BootCamp/Windows. The BootCamp utility insists on starting from one big Mac-only partition, and then shrinking it down to allow room for a BootCamp partition.

The way I got around that was by Carbon Copy cloning all my stuff off the Mac, repartition the drive as a single, large partition, then Carbon Copy cloning all my stuff back onto the Mac. Total time needed for this little back-and-forth escapade: about 12 hours. Great.

Morale: don’t ‘save’ room for a BootCamp partition on your clone-to backup drive. Instead, make your backup drive one big Mac partition.

Ok, that was one hard lesson. I now told the BootCamp utility to get me going with BootCamp. Booted into Windows, installed a basic copy of Vista. Installed the BootCamp drivers. Didn’t work. Grmm. After some head-scratching I realized I’d used the BootCamp drivers from a generic Mac OS X install disk – instead, I should have used the Mac OS X install disk that came with the MacBook Pro.

Morale: use your Mac’s install disk to install the BootCamp drivers on Windows.

Onwards, ever onwards. I now installed Acronis into Vista, and got to a point where I was ready to restore my BootCamp partition: I made an Acronis boot disk on a CD, rebooted the Mac off the Acronis boot disk, and… no way to do the restore: the Acronis software simply has no idea how to read the partition tables on my Mac’s drive, and it simply told me to go away. Bummer.

Not to be deterred – I rebooted my Mac under Mac OS X, started VMware Fusion, and ‘grabbed’ the BootCamp partition as a virtual machine.

A VMware-fusion-ed BootCamp has a lot of emulated hardware and so, so I reckoned Acronis might work this time around. I plunked in the Acronis boot disk, fired up BootCamp under VMware Fusion, and hit the F2 key as soon as the screen flickered (so I could get into the virtual machine’s BIOS settings). In the BIOS screen I changed the boot order to boot off CD instead of from the internal hard disk.

Ok – we’re booting off the Acronis CD – great! It recognizes the hard drive – great! It recognizes my backups – great!

Oh, wait – that is way too much success in one go – so I was punished, in a cruel and painful way.

Turns out the Acronis boot disk has its own mouse driver software, and it’s almost impossible to use in a VMware Fusion virtual machine – you can only move the big yellow mouse cursor a wee bit left or right, and then it jumps somewhere else. The mouse cursor had a mind of its own, and I had very little control over its movement.

To make matters even more frustrating, the Acronis software does have some keyboard navigation – but it is not consistent. Some things can only be clicked with the mouse – no keyboard shortcut to it. With persistence, luck, pounding of the keyboard, and lots of frantic mouse skating, I managed to occasionally get the mouse cursor positioned over a button I needed to click.

So, I slowly, slowly waded through the selection screens until I came to a point where I needed to tell it what partition to restore to – and there things locked up. Any further keystroke or mouse click would make the virtual PC emit beeps. Nothing could make it budge. Beep beeperdebeep beep. Grrr.

So, I redid the whole procedure – rebooted, spent another hour flapping my mouse around to get to the same point. Same phenomenon: no way to get past that screen. Total time lost: at least 4 hours. I gave up; Acronis was not going to do it. It’s probably great for ‘real’ PC’s but it is useless with BootCamp.

Morale: don’t bet your life on Acronis True Image Home when you use BootCamp.

All was not lost – I still had some older backups made with Image For Windows. Image For Windows is not good-looking, and it is downright clunky at times – but this thing has a lot of knowledge and experience packed into it. The procedure was similar to Acronis: make a boot CD, boot VMware Fusion off it, connect backup drive.

This time around, it was smooth sailing: the software picked up the NTFS-formatted USB backup drive, and so on, and the restore was underway! … still underway … still underway. About 24 hours!! later, the restore was finally complete – man, that was incredibly s-l-o-w. But it worked! Or did it?

I rebooted BootCamp in VMware fusion – it thought about it long, and hard, and eventually booted right up. We’re in business, we’re in business!

Then I tried rebooting straight off the BootCamp drive. Shattered dreams – some message like ‘a bootable drive cannot be found’. Tried rebooting off a Vista boot disk and doing all kinds of repairs – to no avail; it never saw the hard disk partition. Tried rebooting Bootcamp in VMware Fusion: nope. Dead as a dodo.

I gave up there – I’d been at it for days!

Later on, when the frustration has worn off a bit, I’ll reinstall BootCamp from scratch and forget about the backups – it might be possible to restore them, but it’s just too hard!

Morale: backup just the data stored under BootCamp and be prepared to reinstall Windows under BootCamp from scratch after a disaster, and then pour the data back in after rebuilding the PC side.

So, that’s my sorry tale – I hope this helps someone else avoid the mistakes I’ve made!

Cheers,

Kris

Soxy for Macintosh has some new features.

The latest version knows how to handle InDesign .jsx script files. Instead of stashing your .jsx files into the InDesign Scripts Panel folder, you can now simply tell the Mac Finder to assign the .jsx file name extension to be opened with Soxy.

Soxy then looks inside the .jsx file for any comments that indicate the version of InDesign the script is destined for, and it then runs the .jsx file with that version.

This means that InDesign .jsx files become almost like little stand-alone applications: you can store them wherever you like on your hard disk, and simply double-clicking them will make the script run inside the proper copy of InDesign.

Soxy must be able to guess what version of InDesign needs to be launched – it will scan the beginning of the .jsx script file for comment lines like

// InDesign CS4

or

// InDesign 6.0

or entries like

#target indesign-6

and use these to decide what version of InDesign this script ‘belongs to’. Most script .jsx files have such a comment – and if they don’t you can always open them in a text editor and add such a line at the beginning of the script.

Make way for double-clickable .jsx files!

For more info click here.

Soxy 0.1.3 is available for download, testing and purchase! It’s InDesignProxy on steroids.

If you have a Macintosh with more than one version of applications like Adobe® Illustrator®, Adobe InDesign®, QuarkXPress®… installed, and you want to avoid accidentally resaving, say, an Illustrator CS2 document in Illustrator CS3 format – then Soxy is for you.

Click here for more info, and to download a fully functional time-limited demo version.

Version 0.1.3 is our first beta release. Soxy is a ‘drop-in’ replacement for InDesignProxy - but where InDesignProxy only knows how to handle InDesign files, Soxy offers a whole range of supported document types. Check it out!

More info here…

You have a Macintosh. You handle files from in various formats, created with a range of versions. So you have more than one version of Adobe Illustrator, or more than one version of InDesign, and maybe a few different versions of QuarkXPress installed.

You double-click a file, edit and save. Gaah! You’ve just accidentally saved the document into a newer format. Know the feeling? Then Soxy will be for you.

We’re close to releasing the first beta version of Soxy (short for Son of InDesignProxy).

Soxy does everything InDesignProxy does, and more – in addition to Adobe InDesign, it also supports Adobe Illustrator (so it knows how to launch Illustrator CS3 instead of Illustrator CS4 when double-clicking an Illustrator CS3 document, for example), QuarkXPress, and PDF, and we’ll be gradually adding other formats as time passes.

Simply tell the Finder to open all .pdf, .ai, .indd,… files with Soxy instead of with their ‘native’ app, and Soxy will take care of the rest; it will analyze each file as it is double-clicked, and then automatically forward it to the proper application.

Once Soxy is released, we’ll be selling it for US$19.00. For people who download and test the beta we’ll set a ‘beta price’ of US$14.00.

Watch this space – we’ll announce when the beta is ready for download here!

We’re also trying to gauge demand for ‘Soxy for Windows‘ – if you have a need for this, or any other thoughts or ideas about Soxy, or what additional file formats we should add, let us know at marketing@rorohiko.com

P.S. We’ve also added support for InDesign SDK/C++ software developers who have both debug and release versions of InDesign installed – don’t you hate it when you double click an .indd file and InDesign CS4 Debug launches?

The APIDToolAssistant 1.0.46 has been released. More info can be found here.

Download APID ToolAssistant (version 1.0.46. Includes versions for Mac, Windows, InDesign CS, InDesign CS2, InDesign CS3 and InDesign CS4).

This version is of interest to end-users and scripters alike. It adds a host of features that are of interest to the serious scripter, as well as CS4 compatibility.

For interested scripters, Kris also has made a blog post that highlights one of the new features - scripted page item adornments. Click here to read it on our new Rorohiko Documentation Pool blog.

(Added note 6-Nov-2008: Please check the added notes at the end of the article. Yes, FM 8.x works too, and I’ve also added a way to do the patching much faster)

Recently, I was testing some ideas with various versions of FileMaker, and I found out that Instant Web Publishing with FileMaker 7 Developer on Mac OS X Leopard did not work.

I reinstalled FileMaker 7 Developer, upgraded to 7.0v3, installed the fm_70v3_osx_iwp update from the FileMaker website – and things seemed to work fine.

That is – until I quit and restarted FileMaker

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Ingredients

- Adobe® InDesign® CS or higher (the APIDToolAssistant plug-in is available for InDesign CS, CS2, CS3, CS4, Mac and Windows).

- A licensed copy or a demo version of APIDToolAssistant 1.0.46 or higher. It also works with unlicensed versions, but then the word ‘DEMO’ will be prefixed to or superimposed on all page adornments. Download it from from http://www.rorohiko.com/downloads/APIDToolAssistant.1.0.46.zip

More info about APIDToolAssistant can be found at http://www.rorohiko.com/apidtoolassistant.html. Essentially, it’ll cost you US$25 to unlock the potential of APIDToolAssistant.

- One or more PNG files if you want graphical adornments. Higher-resolution PNG files will result in ‘smoother’ adornments when the InDesign layout window is zoomed in.

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We’ve got version 3.0 of GREPGrokker available – click here to check it out. This one’s main new feature is that it uses a brand new GREP engine we’ve developed, which allows it to emulate InDesign’s GREP functionality much better than the previous versions.

There’s a new GREPGrokker version available – click here to check it out. Main new features: you can now see live text replacements, and there is a new ‘InDesign GREP Dialect’ simulation mode. Click here to try it out.