Illustrator crashes when saving anything!
Well, my copy of Illustrator running on Windows Vista would not save for the past few days. At first I assumed it was a corrupted or funky file problem specific to the one file and found a work around file for Photoshop. A few days later I needed to use Illustrator to copy a vector into Photopshop and convert to a smart object. Every time I cut and pasted Illustrator would hang and then eventually crash and nothing would be pasted into Photoshop. Okay, so I decide I’ll save the Illustrator file and then place it in Photoshop via File / Place. Still no joy, the second I went to save, it crashed. Just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy I created a blank canvas, typed something on it and go to save it, again Illustrator crashes with the message “Adobe Illustrator CS3 has stopped working”. Wonderful, so helpful, and the “Check online for a solution” wasn’t even working for me, but to this date even when it has worked in other programs it rarely provides a useful solution.
Time for some Google power. After doing a few searches I realize that this is not an isolated issue, and could be one of many problems. One post on a forum stands out though. Illustrator CS3, at least on Vista, requires that your Print Spooler be running. Well, this is another issue I have not solved yet. I have a randomly crashing Print Spooler. Anyway, I start up the print spooler and sure enough, Illustrator now saves. Why the print spooler is even needed I don’t know, but I think it would be helpful if when this happens illustrator could recognize it’s not running and say “Hey, your Print Spooler is not running, Illustrator requires it to be on, please start it up”, or something along those lines.
Here’s how you can check your print spooler.
Go to your start menu. In the search box type services. Your services dialog will open. Scroll down to Print Spooler. If it is running already then this might not be your problem, but try restarting it just in case. By the results of my Google search there are many other reasons why Illustrator might not be saving, but hopefully this helps some people out.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, Capcom, and other annoyances
I bought the Xbox Live arcade game Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo the other night. I have wanted a Tetris like Live game for awhile now, but everything I have tried to date did not satisfy me. As soon as I started playing the demo, I knew I wanted it. It’s charged with a whole lot of fun and I would recommend it to anyone who likes Tetris and wants a good multi-player puzzle game. As far as puzzle games go, this one is really geared toward competitive play, and I like that.
That said, Capcom has done what they do so often, and that is make a great game and then introduce some of the most annoying little peeves that serve one purpose only and that is to hinder the player from actually playing the game. Dead Rising was famous for this, a fantastic 360 game, probably one of my favourite games and yet most annoying to date. The save system was horrid, the font size was too small, and the game just ends when the time runs out after hours and hours of game play. I’m playing the game, I’m enjoying it, I’m smashing Zombies, I’m having so much fun, … I’m booted out of the game and told it’s over. WHY?
Super Puzzle fighter has nothing quite that bad, but it does have its fair share of annoyances. I should also mention that Backbone Entertainment actually developed the game.
The first problem is one that seems to be a growing trend lately that I have seen in other games. Why am I forced to watch screen after screen of every company that was involved in developing the game, okay, I understand receiving credit, but at least allow me to skip it. After seeing an intro screen saying company XYZ made this for the one hundredth time I think I get the point. Capcom actually goes one step further in Super Puzzle Fighter. When you finish a game, which does not take too long, you are forced to watch the credits. I say forced, because you literally cannot skip them and start playing again. When I finish a game I now do a force quite and restart the game only to see the long intro text.
My third rant about this game is the voice system. Every game I have ever played on Live allows you to talk to your friends by simply picking up a head set, putting it on, and talking. How could you screw this up? Simple, just add another step, in Super Puzzle Fighter you have to hold the right trigger to talk. You will constantly hear the other gamer’s voice cutting off as they release the trigger before they are done talking. Maybe I’m missing something here; maybe there is some reason for this, but I cannot for the life of me see what that could be.
But I digress, even knowing everything I have outlined above I would still buy this game, and that probably says a lot. It’s a whole lot of fun, and hopefully patches come out to address some of the above issues.
Vista knows when you should reboot
This is nothing new, and there are literally thousands of posts and articles on this subject, but I want to add more fuel to the fire.
Last night I had several large Photoshop mockups open. I was working late and figured I might as well leave them open and continue in the morning. I do this a lot at home, although I do save before leaving. I know leaving your computer on can pose a security risk, but I like living on the edge.
Anyway, I walk in this morning and of course I have a login screen. Log in and nothing is open. Windows Vista has performed an update. Although you are prompted with a countdown to cancel, which in itself can become annoying as it keeps popping up even after you have postponed it, I think this is a crazy default. What if I was crunching some numbers over night, running network connections, or took a bathroom break with unsaved work on the screen. Well Vista would think that it’s time to force reboot and I would lose whatever important things I was doing.
Here is how you can disable this silly default.
- In your start menu search field type gpedit.msc
- Click your way to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update.
- Double click “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations.
- Click Enable .
There are some other interesting settings in here and you can read their descriptions on the left hand side when you click on them. You will need to reboot in order for this to take effect of course.
Adobe Photoshop CS3 and no Image Ready? No animated GIF’s either?
We recently installed Adobe CS3 at work. Everything was looking great until one of us needed Image Ready. Where is it? Turns out it is no longer part of Photoshop. The good news is that most of it is incorporated into Photoshop. Problem solved, we then proceeded to open an animated GIF, only to be told that it would only open the first frame. Wow, we can make animated GIF’s in Photoshop, but we can no longer open them. I immediately started digging for some answers only to find at first, many frustrated users. At the time I looked, Adobe’s official solution was to buy Fireworks, really no solution at all, considering that Photoshop via Image Ready has had this functionality for years. After some more digging on the Adobe forums I found what I was looking for.
Go to File / Import / Video Frames to Layers…
You will get a dialog that shows MOV, AVI, MPG, and MPEG files. So what use is this to you? Well, it is posted on the Adobe forums that this is an oversight by them. If you type in *.* in the File name: field this will show you all files. You can now open animated GIF’s and they will display in the animation window and layers pallet.
Hopefully Adobe will fix this in a future patch. All they need to add is the .GIF filter to there import dialog. I had actually tried this before searching, but of course did not see GIF as an option.
(update) See my newest entry on how to create animated GIF’s in Photoshop CS3 “Adobe Photoshop CS3 and no Image Ready? Animated GIF’s Part II”
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Vista and Office woes
So I have been using Microsoft’s Vista for a few months now. After using a Mac for over two years at work, I figured the switch would be a nice change and of course the change was not completely my choice anyway. I am not a fan boy of any OS and my favourite OS doesn’t exist yet. Anyway, the transition has not been fun, Vista is not ready for prime time, although it is finally pretty looking. Not only is Vista not ready, but neither is MS Office, and this is where my rant begins.
How much does Office cost? I guess that depends on which of the nine hundred versions you have, let’s just say it’s a lot. I think I have the ultimate enterprise business bloat edition. I guess one would expect at least all of the previous functions to work almost flawlessly would they not? Well, you would be wrong if you did. The new office does look new though, in fact so new that anyone using if for the first time probably won’t know how to open or save a document. Don’t look for file or any kind of obvious standard menu, look for the big bubble with the office icon on it. I’m sure the new interface will catch on eventually though, and I guess Microsoft has to change something.
Anyway, yesterday was the day that I had to install Open Office so that I could cut and paste text. Yes that’s right, I had a tight deadline, and I needed to cut and paste text from a work document for a mock-up I was building. Every-time I did this the entire application would crash. Eventually a message popped up telling me that Office was crashing a lot and that I should run a diagnosis wizard that would take approximately 15 minutes. Okay, so maybe this would fix it.
I ran the wizard, and it found nothing, although it wasn‘t able to check one file since it did not have permission and told me I should change the security settings on that file. If I had done this I’m sure the next thing it would have warned me of are the dangers of changing my security settings. This is when I realized that in the past 30 minutes of farting around I could have downloaded Open Office. I did that, installed Writer, loaded the document and began copying and pasting my text with no problems. This is a day in the life of Vista and Office, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
