This week on Twitter, my friend Jean-Claude Tremblay took the initiative of spending almost a full day posting tweets about Illustrator tips, tricks and techniques under the hash tag #AITTT. There is a treasure trove of useful tips and techniques in there and, if you use Illustrator at all, you owe it to yourself to go through them and learn from his experience. That will save you time in your work and you will discover features you probably didn't know existed in Illustrator.

I've been using Illustrator since 1996 myself and there were many tricks he shared I didn't know about. In a way, this is not surprising for an application with over 2 decades of development and history behind it, so take a few minutes and read through his #AITTT tweets. You'll be glad you did .

In a field filled with self proclaimed gurus, Jean-Claude is a true expert with years of real world experience doing on-site training and support for creative people through his company, Profociografik. He is also an Adobe Certified Expert in Illustrator, Indesign and Photoshop as well as an Adobe Community Professional. But mostly, he's a great guy I'm lucky to call my friend.

Thanks for your generosity Jean-Claude!

Over a year ago, I posted an article describing my Font Management Woes and my search for the perfect font management application on the Windows platform. For many years, that market has been dominated on the Mac side mostly by Extensis Suitcase Fusion and for good reason. Suitcase is a fantastic font management application with both server and client side components and an interface and features set that is just right.

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I could not imagine my creative process without Adobe Fireworks. I have been using that application since version 2.0 sometime in 1999. 10 years ago, Fireworks was not an obvious choice but the workflow advantages over Photoshop were immediately evident to me and my creative process never was the same. Unfortunately, it took almost all those years for Fireworks to be taken seriously in the industry. Being a Fireworks evangelist 5 or 6 years ago felt like preaching in the desert. But not anymore. 

Today, Fireworks is finally thriving. After a couple false starts and dud versions (yes I'm looking at you Fireworks 8 and CS2!), versions CS3 and CS4 have finally brought Fireworks to a level where many industry heavyweights are now paying attention. It is also crossing over into new fields like User Experience and Interaction Design where many practitioners who are not traditional Web designers (read visual/graphic designers) use Fireworks for rapid prototyping and quickly iterating interface and interaction designs.

It is an exciting time for Fireworks which proves that Adobe's decision to keep it alive after acquiring Macromedia was the right one. Not only that but the application itself has finally started to really improve again after stagnating for a few years under Macromedia's watch. There are new books being written about it or with chapters about it, new (and not so new) Web sites covering how to use it or who is using it. Can't wait to see what's in store in Fireworks' future.

If you have never tried it, do yourself a favor and do so. If you are coming from Photoshop, leave your pixel pushing Photoshop mindset at the door and embrace Fireworks vector based workflow. Regardless of Fireworks' very capable bitmap editing tools, its real strength lies in its hybrid workflow based on a vector based core. Until you really give it a try, you will never know how much difference working in a vector based environment does for any kind of layout work.

The new version 5.5 of Axure RP Pro has been released a couple days ago after being in public beta for a few months. It's a very significant upgrade in terms of new features and is free for existing customers with a current license.

Noteworthy features include the ability to load and create external widget libraries (similar to Visio stencils for exemple) that can be shared with coworkers or other Axure users. The new version ships with a bunch of libraries based on the Yahoo Design Patterns Library.

Other improvements include changes to the design environment like the addition of a size and location panel directly in the UI, a Dynamic Panels manager palette and more. Check the changelog for all the details and download the new version here.