30 Jan

Are you an Adobe Illustrator drudge?

Automator actions for Adobe Illustrator

If you’re a regular user of Adobe Illustrator then you probably find yourself doing more than your fair share of drudge work. Here’s a way of avoiding some of it…

Drudge work comes in many forms, for example gathering all those linked images together ready to send your files for printing. Or opening a large number of files, saving each one as a PDF and uploading them to an FTP site. The sort of stuff you never really signed up for when you decided to become a graphic designer or artworker.

Of course, you could teach yourself AppleScript and write your own scripts to automate your workflow. But who’s got time to learn AppleScript? Or you could hire an AppleScript expert. Or you could invest in technologies like Automation Engine from ESKO, but the price tag puts those options beyond the budget of many freelancers and many small businesses.

This is where our product Ai Actions comes in. It adds support for Adobe Illustrator to Apple’s workflow software, Automator. If you can drag and drop then you can create your own automatic workflows to automate Illustrator and integrate with other apps too such as Mail, Preview etc. You can even save your workflows as apps.

A sample action fro Ai Actions
Click here to see how to use Ai Actions to create a simple workflow in Automator.

If you want to try your hand at automating Adobe Illustrator then why not download the demo version of Ai Actions from here:

Ai Actions DEMO

…the demo version contains a small selection of the actions available in the full version which contains over 20 useful actions and is available from the Mac App Store.

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29 Jan

Scan barcodes from your Mac’s screen

We’ve relaunched an old favourite app, Onscreen Barcode Scanner this month with an update for macOS Sierra and High Sierra.

Onscreen Barcode Scanner allows you to scan barcodes displayed on your Mac’s screen and see the number they encode. Using it is as easy as taking a screen shot! It makes a ideal partner to our flagship barcode product Barcode Basics.

Onscreen Barcode Scanner’s main use is in packaging artwork so designers can check that the bars on the code actually match the displayed digits. It’s a great way of catching hard to spot barcode errors.

We’d had to take Onscreen Barcode Scanner offline to do some work on it to make it compatible and it took longer than we thought. Apologies for that. It’s now back up and running, and the update is free through the Mac App Store for existing users. Hope you find it useful!


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