While Story’s screenwriting capabilities are in line with other comparable applications, it’s perhaps what Story does after you're done writing that makes it so powerful. If you export your script as an Adobe Story ASTX file, metadata (in this case, all the elements that make up your script) will automatically embed in the script information. Then, you import the ASTX file into Adobe OnLocation, and it automatically creates shot placeholders based on your script, giving the director a pre-made shot list that coincides with the source material. This has the potential to save not only time, but prevent the editing-room lament, “Why isn’t there enough coverage for this scene!”
During production, if you’re using a tapeless workflow (sorry HDV loyalists), you can drag your recorded movie clips to their respective placeholders in OnLocation. This ties all the metadata from your script to its corresponding video clip. So when you import the OnLocation project into Premiere Pro, the metadata follows. With Premiere’s “Analyze Content” feature, you’ll sync up the script with the footage and now you’re ready to search all media related to your project using Premiere’s “Speech Search” function. Now, you can search for a specific snippet of dialogue (remember, it’s all in the metadata) the same as you'd search for a word or phrase in a text-based document!
BrowserLab
As anyone who develops Web sites knows, not everyone is using the latest version of Internet Explorer. And while IE is still the dominant browser globally, many are turning to alternatives like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and, for Mac users, of course, Safari. Despite the W3C’s best efforts to standardize the web through technologies like CSS and XHTML (and the forthcoming HTML 5), you’re all but guaranteed that your site won’t appear exactly the same across all browsers. With BrowserLab, Adobe has created an online testing lab that helps Web designers and developers make sure their site visitors are getting a consistent experience, regardless of the browser they’re using.
If you are using Dreamweaver, you can send an HTML file to BrowserLab in pretty much the same way you did with CS Review. But rather than the file opening in a shared workspace, it is previewed using one of three possible browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari). It also lets you choose from several different versions of each browser. Firefox is the only browser testable in both Windows and OS X environments. You can create customized views too, choosing which browsers you’d like to include whenever you load a new page into BrowserLab. You can preview a single page, or use a split-screen, side-by-side mode. There's even a nifty onion-skin mode that lets you lay one browser on top of another one and change the transparency of the top layer to identify differences. For those who don’t use Dreamweaver, you can type the URL of any page into the built-in address bar located at the top of the BrowserLab window and test any page you are working on, even if you’re using Notepad as your HTML editor of choice. Just upload the page to your server, punch the URL into BrowserLab, and test away.
SiteCatalyst® Net Averages
And if you'd like to track the latest Internet trends, SiteCatalyst® Net Averages is for you. With a super simple interface that runs in Flash player, a series of concentric rings sits on the right of the screen. A series of tags mark the rings and each highlights as you pass your mouse over them. By clicking on a ring's tag, an informational dialog pops up, displaying a pie chart that shows the percentage of people using a particular technology. It provides data about operating systems, browser types and versions, JavaScript versions, screen resolutions and more. You can click on a piece of the pie and another, more granular bar chart appears. It shows monthly and yearly trends, either up or down, and you can subscribe to email alerts that notify you whenever the metrics change. The data in SiteCatalyst® Net Averages is updated automatically, so it can be trusted as a real-time marketing solution.
