Happy Holidays from the Wizards at Magicomm

A trip down Memory Lane...

Hey, here is the dealio (yes, it is official, it is a word now)

I have been working with a customer who has an online application that enables "photo album" and "digital scrapbook page design" functionality, and was interested in having as many people as possible register and try the tool - we are looking for honest, candid feedback - positive or negative

To register and try it, ---> click here <---

Thanks in advance!

BTW - If you build a 20 page book full of pictures, we will process, print, bind and ship it for 1/2 the normal price for a limited time - send one to your Mom, she misses you !

Okay, some of you ARE moms, or your Moms are no longer able to receive analog type gifts because their carbon based unit is no longer functional, but just make one anyway, and then think of her when you marvel at the quality!

- my designs are manly men like - please don't hold that against me !

Oh, if you like the Cowboy Up! stuff, feel free to steal it from here

- I made it for a birthday party - needed a design to 'document' the event - well, that lil' 2 year old pardner had them there a dress up party and everyone was a cowpoke or a rootin' tootin' cowgirl.

Michael Jahn

Photoalbum.com
1824 North Garvin Avenue
Simi Valley
California 93065
Cell: (805) 217 6741
Office: (805) 527 8130
Email: jahn@photoalbum.com
Web: www.Photoalbum.com

Try this slide show

Looking at the sun, it was RED.

This morning we had clear sky's but watched the news as fires were burning near Malibu & Malibu canyon Road - it was crazy windy outside, trees knocked down all over. About 2:00pm, it became strangely dark, and I went outside to see the sky filled with smoke.

Joan' new Car !

(click on the image to Zoom In !

A Tungsten Grey Metallic with Black leather interior 2007 Mazda 6 !

Click here to see progress of our work on the house at 1824 Garvin !

We went to Cho Cho San for a birthday dinner with Michael - 24 years old and still not as big a child as Mr. Ja-Han ! Michael's REAL Dad (Michael) and his girl friend Mary were there, as well as his brother Charles, Charles girlfriend Shannon, and my wife Joan ! Much Saki was consumed, many Ninja moves were, well, mostly ignored - but a good time was had by all !

click on the image

My sons Marc and Eric both now work at Main Street Host.

Marc has just finished working on the intro page for a bottling company in Tondawanda NY.



Click here to check it out !



It may not work with Explorer - use Firefox (it is better anyway!)

Wow, things are really heating up in the standards arena in the past two weeks!

I think one of the saddest things I hear in the blogs is that people are thinking that Adobe is suddenly become interested in standards because they are reading about Microsoft XPS and OpenOffice XML (OpenXML) in the news and think Adobe has to somehow respond. The fact is that Adobe has been very active and proactive in this space for many years.

Here is a time line - click over this great graphic (thanks to Adobes Leonard Rosenthol) to review this;

Most people did not pay much attention when Adobe submitted Acrobat version 1.0 (PDF specification 1.0) to the IRS in 1993 - suddenly all Federal IRS forms were PDF, quickly followed by the States. When Big Brother adopts something, it becomes a defacto standard!

In my not too distant past, I worked for Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation (AGFA) as a consultant - AGFA was an Adobe vendor / partner, where we were using and promoting proprietary / secret sauce technology in our “standard” based ICC profiles and our AGFA “value added” PDF files. AGFA (who was owned by BAYER) was much larger than Adobe. It was Adobe that helped us implement PDF/X and helped us toward to embrace standards.

There has been a lot of "XPS vs PDF" noise lately on the blogs. I have recieved a lot of email asking what I think, having held the title "PDF Evangelist" while with AGFA and Enfocus. So - my thoughts - If XPS main thrust was to be a replacement of PDF as an exchangeable digital document file format, one could argue that XPS is irrelevant and unnecessary, as well as point out that Microsoft is too FAR behind PDF deployment wise. However, Microsoft is using this for a spool file and a printer page description language - So Vista will use XPS to print for the three core Microsoft applications (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) thereby eliminating the need for "Adobe anything" when printing to XPS RIPs inside future desktop printer ors network enabled printer. Me, I had always thought this was much less about replacing PDF and more about Microsoft removing Adobe from the document creation and printing equation. As for submitting XPS to a standards body, sorry, but having participated with CGATS, we were more interested in telling a vendor what we needed, and not the least interested in being blind sided by some document that was glad handed to us as the answer to some question we never proposed. Handing XPS to a standards body is like handing Sonny Barger a thong - He won't be interested in it – and it probably won't fit anyway.

Adobe Mars -- Adobe is working on a way to create documents that are made up of files that adhere to industry standards (SVG, XML, etc...) and are 'packaged' as a ZIP archive. So, this may be a more developer friendly XML based PDF like thing - Several people at Adobe are declaring "Mars Attacks" as it may be an "answer" to Microsoft's new XPS file format. Being known as the PDF Evangelist does have it's downside - hopefully it will be painless!

I will be participating on a panel at the Lyra Imaging Symposium on January 30th, 2007 at the Rancho Las Palmas hotel in Rancho Mirage, California (near Palm Springs)