We’ve seen sporadic cases of Photoshop, InDesign, or Acrobat that stop working at various design firms, with the dialog box show above.

“Licensing for the product has stopped working. This product has encountered a problem which requires that you start your computer before it can be launched.”

If this happens to your, make note of the error code, and take a look at this handy, exhaustive entry in Adobe’s Knowledge Base:

Adobe: “Licensing for this product has stopped working”

In that article (far too lengthy to summarize), Adobe helpfully explains nine different ways your legally purchased and properly installed Creative Suite products might have licensing failures, and the variety of ways those issues can be addressed.

Source: Creativetechs technician, Jasson Lewellen, has discovered and solved many of these issues firsthand at various studios around Seattle. This issue is also covered this week in our sister technical blog, Make Mac Work: CS4 Licensing Stops Working

Last year we published a tip showing how web designers could test their website designs on Apple’s iPhone Simulator. Here is another, simpler, tip along those lines.

Many companies today are creating special versions of their website that automatically display for iPhone visitors. Some examples include Amazon, Google, Bank of America, and even our Creativetechs Tips blog.

Turn on Safari’s Developer Menu option and you can easily tell Safari to impersonate an iPhone (or other browser types) when visiting different webpages. It isn’t the same as a full iPhone simulator, but this can be pretty useful for web designers testing custom site designs.

Mactracker is a free utility that maintains detailed information on every Apple Macintosh computer ever made. Including items such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. The collection also includes information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, Apple TV, iPhone, Wi-Fi Cards/Base Stations, Newton, and Mac OS versions.

For long-time Mac users, browsing through the history of Mac models can be a fun trip down memory lane. On a practical level, this information can be useful when manually compiling an updated inventory of your studio’s computers.

“How do I copy music from my iPod back to my computer?”

This is one of those common questions we get all the time. Typically a drive fails and the iTunes music library wasn’t properly backed up. Or maybe someone wants an easy way to copy music from a friend’s iPod. This week we’ll take a quick look at a number of tools you can use to move music and videos from your iPod back onto your computer:

» iPodRip ($20)
» TuneAid ($15)
» Backstage ($10)
» YamiPod (Free)

In researching this tip, I found dozens of utilities that do basically the same thing. This is by no means a comprehensive list. But if you need to get your music back onto your Mac or PC, read the full tip for mini-reviews of several utilities that do the trick.

The URL says it all. Here is a free site that monitors up to 20 of your Web sites and notifies you if they go down:

https://aremysitesup.com/

I’ve looked at a dozen similar services over the years, and this one is as straightforward as it gets. You can also upgrade to a paid account at $75/year that checks your sites more frequently, as well as adding additional options to test for specific words or phrases on your site.

One of the best features Apple incorporated into Mac OS X Leopard is their built-in Time Machine backup system. For small studios, or individual designers, Time Machine is one of the best automated backups available.

You can click on the small backup-clock icon in your menu bar to access many Time Machine features: Check the date of your last backup, force an immediate backup, or jump back to search through the recent backups of your computer.

But what if you want to look through the files from another computer? By default, Time Machine’s restore interface only shows you files from your computer. But hold down the Option key and a menu option named “Browse Other Time Machine Disks” will appear in that menu.

Last week, Extensis quietly released an update to their excellent Font Management Best Practices Guide. This is the 5th edition of their font management white paper, and it remains an excellent resource for designers who struggle with how to best manage their huge font libraries.

Managing Fonts in Mac OS X – 5th Edition (January 2009)

Simplifying the complex topic of font management in Mac OS X isn’t an easy job. Extensis does a good job describing the underlying challenges designers face when managing fonts on Mac OS X today. Their solutions are expectedly biased towards their own software (Suitcase Fusion 2, or the new Universal Type Server) but not unfairly so.