Ideas Conference Roundup: Graphics art vendors announce new products as Adobe takes the wraps off of Creative Suite 2.
Coinciding with Adobe Systems Inc.'s announcement of Creative Suite 2 in New York Monday, several third-party vendors involved with the Ideas conference announced new product and service offerings.
Ideas conference exhibitor Wacom Technology Corp. released its new 6D Art Pen, a cordless pen with a rectangular-shaped nib that allows users to rotate it in a realistic paintbrush fashion. Wacom was able to achieve this functionality by adding a second coil that determines how the pen is rotated around its center, said Mark Mehall, senior project manager at Wacom.
The 6D Art Pen works on Wacom's Intuos3 series of tablets and on its Cintiq 21UX interactive flat-screen monitor. It retails for $69.95. According to the company, several software companies, such as Synthetk, Maxon and Kyma, have designed their graphics software to work with the 6D, with more software expected to support the pen in the near future.
In conjunction with Wacom's announcement, Corel Corp. announced Monday that it has released its new Corel Painter IX Art Pen Brush Pack. The new Brush Pack comes with five new brushes designed to take advantage of the 6D's capabilities: a Grainy Calligraphy Brush, a Thin Smooth Calligraphy Brush, a Tapered Gouache Brush, a Square Grainy Pastel Brush and a Soft Flat Oils Brush.
Click here to read about Adobe's Creative Suite 2.
These new brushes are available as a free download to registered users of Painter IX. Sean Young, product manager of Corel Painter IX, said that Painter IX has support built in for the 6D because Wacom informed the company ahead of time about its development plans. According to Young, over 95 percent of Painter customers use a Wacom tablet in their work with Painter.
Meanwhile, NAPP (The National Association of Photoshop Professionals) announced Monday that it has launched the Photoshop CS2 Learning Center. The new center offers a downloadable CS2 overview and discussion forum, along with free online news, reviews, articles and videos.
"This is clearly the most significant update to Photoshop in years. If you're a photographer, it's absolutely going to make your jaw drop," NAPP President Scott Kelby said.
Conference vendor Creo Inc. announced Monday that in celebration of selling its 25,000th copy of its Preps digital imposition software, it has released Preps Version 5.1. The new version offers increased JDF integration as well as new language support in Italian and Simplified Chinese, along with improved Japanese language support.
Preps 5.1 comes with a new JDF (Job Description Format) import feature that enables users to connect estimating and prepress departments. The tool allows Preps to import the JDF files from an MIS (Management Information System) and tries to match imposition details the MIS has specified with available Preps templates.
Two other Ideas Conference vendors, Iowa City-based MetaCommunications and Foster City, Calif.-based EFI both announced major software upgrades last week. MetaCommunications came out with Version 6.1 of its Virtual Ticket production platform, which includes tighter integration with Mac OS 10.3, including the capacity to view digital assets in list mode and font smoothing. The Virtual Ticket base package retails at $999, while upgrades from Virtual Ticket 6.0 are free.
On Tuesday, EFI released an upgrade of its Prograph publication planning application. According to the company, the enhanced features include a new Press Optimizer tool that helps with computer-driven press planning and a more intuitive user interface.
Finally, perhaps coincidentally, Quark Inc. announced Monday that it is offering promotional pricing for full product versions and upgrades of QuarkXpress 6.5. The $199 upgrade cost is applicable to all previous versions of Xpress, while new versions of the publishing software will retail at $699.
The promotional pricing will remain in effect through June 30, 2005. For the record, Quark was not an attendee at Adobe's Idea Conference, and Xpress, once the overwhelming choice of professionals, has faced increased competition from Adobe's InDesign application in recent years.
Graphics Tools 
