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.