We still get Printweek at work, as well as a few other publications. I think that due to its nature, it is logical that news moved to the internet. There are some fights that simply cannot be won.

Weird thing during my searches: a few years back I always ended up finding stuff on US sites, nowadays that is no longer true and for example Australia seems to have a healthier print community.

I just finished work on my overview of the main 2014 prepress and printing news. From that page you can jump back  one year at a time, all the way to 1984. Enjoy the trip down memory lane, a fun thing to do if things are a bit slow at work!

Minor rant: I noticed that it gets harder and harder to actually collect this information at the end of each year. It are not just the graphic arts trade magazines that are disappearing, I even have the impression that the number of related web sites is decreasing. If I forgot some major news, please add a comment.

I have all the outgoing emails from an application also being sent to an internal email address in BCC. Now I am looking for some kind of a mail client that can automatically process those BCC emails and sent digest messages to various people. Some examples:
- If we sent out an order confirmation email to customer X, sent an email notification to sales person Y about this.
- If someone rejects an order (which also triggers an email), inform person Z that this happened.
- If we sent out account creation confirmations, send a daily or weekly digest to an admin on how many new users were added - with the email addresses of the new users in the body

I guess any email client with support for rules can do the easy stuff - like automatic forwarding. I am not aware of a mail client that has rules that can do some kind of digests. Since the mail client would only have to process mail based on rules, I can also imagine that there are systems that are better at managing a large set of rules or have more sophisticated rule sets. Anyone out there doing email processing like this? What tool do you use for it?

Quote from: Sabrina The Turd Polisher on May 07, 2013, 10:34:38 AMIs anyone using the "cloud" here on B4P?

If you define the 'cloud' as the 'use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet)' - like Wikipedia does - then the majority of printers are already using the cloud. Most of them have a web site which they don't host themselves on their own systems - that is a cloud service! Many also use cloud services for their FTP-server or e-mail or something like Apogee StoreFront web-to-print (a shameless plug, I know, but I am supposed to do such things  :wink: ).

I think Adobe calling their software suite a cloud service is more a reflection of their long term ambitions than an actual reality. Right now they use the cloud for providing access to software downloads, licensing, updates, some collaboration tools, etc.  InDesign or Photoshop are still installed on your local computer. Some day however that software or a part of it may run as a full cloud service. I think it would be great if some of the PDF corrrections you can do in Acrobat would be available on the web on a monthly basis - for those people that only need this once a year or so.

Quote from: Farabomb on January 07, 2013, 01:26:08 PMBNC token ring networking connector.

It is a BNC connector, but for Ethernet, not for Token Ring. When I looked up the image I originally also did not recognize it any longer, even though I've plugged in a million of these. I do still remember thinking 'What idiot now decided to use a slightly wider modem cable' when they introduced the current type of plug. I think I still have an ethernet terminator lying around here somewhere. Yup, in those days even the network had a terminator, just like good old SCSI.

.... and talking of desktop publishers: I dusted off a page that had been in my DRAFT folder for far too long: a picture guide to 25 years of prepress

Ah, the memories 

Thanks, I did read that report about disappearing jobs but assumed it was older. It must have been the term 'desktop publishers' that fooled me.

I added a page about 2012 to the 'history of prepress & printing' section of my site. Besides a lot of take-overs and mergers, nothing much seems to have happened - especially not on the software front. Did I miss something?

I went to the presentation which was pretty impressive - even standing outside on their booth and watching it on a big video screen. I took a picture that I quite like - 'Bored by Benny'

Quote from: gnubler on January 03, 2012, 01:49:15 PMDoomed.

No, just looking for its new place in the spotlights. No longer center stage but still among the stars on the first row.

PrintWeek in the UK did a series of interviews about the state of our industry. I liked Martin Bailey's point of view.

Best wishes for 2012!

I just finished a page about the prepress, printing and publishing news of 2011. I cannot recall any major software releases in the past year but there was lots of other news. Steve Jobs may have dominated the headlines but I think manroland filing for bankruptcy is THE biggest event for our industry. Any thoughts on the major events of 2011 or are there maybe things I overlooked?

I've set up a poll on my Prepressure site asking visitors which prepress workflow they use. So far Prinergy seems to be the most popular, closely followed by Apogee and Prinect. If you haven't voted yet, please do so - then head back here to discuss your vote and somehow relate it to some obscure 70's TV show (or so)  :grin:

Now that the Cheers references have shown up, I just have to ask: who of the 20 regulars here is the neurotic waitress?

Quote from: gnubler on July 18, 2011, 11:58:12 AM

Quote from: Sabrina The Turd Polisher on July 18, 2011, 11:52:44 AMHey Joe, been meaning to ask, who complains?

[REDACTED]  :laugh:

And some guy who said we're all 12 year olds.

I complained about it two year ago or so - but hey, at least I wasn't the one who called everyone 12 year olds. 

A bit of background: two years before that, Joe, Jezza and I stuck our heads together to see if we couldn't collaborate so that b4print as a forum and prepressure.com as a site could benefit from each other. As a result the 'forum' link on Prepressure redirects to this forum. I posted a list of interesting B4print threads on the main page and used b4print for discussions about the polls on the site. We were going to look on how the collaboration could evolve but then b4print started to change from being an informal forum into a very informal one. Nearly every thread went off-topic at some point, much like this one. From the point of view of being a small community of regulars, there is obviously nothing much wrong with that. Stuff like this off-topic Ayn Rand discussion is OK for me as a member since I am interested in the book. When looking at b4print as a kind of 'extension' for my site however, I wasn't and am not too happy about this. I've stopped linking to interesting b4print threads on prepressure.com - because topics don't stay relevant for very long. I had a link to this thread for my poll about keeping up-to-date but I have now removed it. What point is there in telling visitors to discuss it in this thread if the discussion virtually immediately goes into a completely different direction?

I won't complain about this any more though - b4print has simply evolved and is perfectly fine in its own corner. I'll stop by from time to time to check things out and maybe ask the occasional question. The first 2 replies typically really are spot-on and as for the remainder...... I do still need to figure out if Ayn Rand is more of a summer or a winter type of reading experience.

Even though the rate of change seems to have slowed down in our industry, it can still be a challenge to keep up-to-date. I've made a poll about this at prepressure.com and hope you will cast your vote.

Personally I am relying more and more on the web to keep up to date - a few web sites for the news and a personal subscription to Lynda.com for web-based training. There are a few prepress/printing related magazines floating around at work but most don't seem capable of offering more than the news that can be also found on the web. I go to the occasional seminar or trade show and still find that very useful - often nothing beats a one-to-one discussion when you want to learn more about a particular topic. I've noticed that I spend less time on work-related forums such as this one - likely because so much time is already spent looking at other sources of news, like various blogs and Twitter.

Compared to years ago, I think my learning has moved from in-depth types of training (classroom training, manuals, books,..) to me continuously picking up small details left and right. Is that me showing my age or is that just the way things are nowadays?