iLEMONed

I know it's late. The reason I hesitated to publish this post is that... I can't figure out a way to do the pre-serialization. CS4 won't respect an application.xml.override like CS3 did, unless you have a volume license (according to the official CS4 deployment manual). So this time I can only share with you the customization part.

Please be noticed, I myself am not 100% satisfied with what I've figured out, but the hacks have been working absolutely fine for over 2 months on my XP SP3 and Vista SP1. And as always, you do this at your own risk. Read on if we understand each other.

Photoshop CS4 (Extended)

1. Navigate to /Adobe CS4/payloads/.
2. Open /AdobeBridge3All/AdobeBridge3All.proxy.xml with a text editor.
3. Search for <Dependencies>.
4. Delete everything within <Dependencies>, except two blocks with type="critical", make it look exactly like screenshot #1.
5. Open /AdobePhotoshop11-Core/AdobePhotoshop11-Core.proxy.xml, repeat step 3-4, make it look exactly like screenshot #2.
6. Save both files. Oh did I tell you to backup first?
7. Run setup and wave goodbye to craps.

Illustrator CS4

If you already edited AdobeBridge3All.proxy.xml in a previous Photoshop installation and successfully got rid of Adobe Bridge, you won't need to touch the one in Illustrator. Otherwise, treat it the same way (step 1-4 of the Photoshop section above).

Then, yes, /AdobeIllustrator14mul/AdobeIllustrator14mul.proxy.xml, and here's screenshot #3 for your referrence.

Design Premium CS4

Files you need to edit are:

• /AdobeBridge3All/AdobeBridge3All.proxy.xml
• /AdobeDreamweaver10-mul/AdobeDreamweaver10-mul.proxy.xml
• /AdobeFireworks10All/AdobeFireworks10All.proxy.xml
• /AdobeFlash10-mul/AdobeFlash10-mul.proxy.xml
• /AdobeIllustrator14mul/AdobeIllustrator14mul.proxy.xml
• /AdobeInDesign6AppBase-mul/AdobeInDesign6AppBase-mul.proxy.xml
• /AdobePhotoshop11-Core/AdobePhotoshop11-Core.proxy.xml
• /AdobeVersionCue4All/AdobeVersionCue4All.proxy.xml

Edit how? You've already learned that.

One tip is, if you kept, let's say "Adobe XMP Panels CS4" in one of the xml files, you can delete it when you see it else wheres.

I don't use anything other than Photoshop and Illustrator, so I'm unable to tell you which components are required by other products included in a Creative Suite. Sorry.

Miscellaneous

I'm not gonna guide you through Dreamweaver or Web Premium or anything else neither. Hopefully you can draw inferences about other cases from the above examples.

You're gonna have to trust Adobe this time, what's been tagged as "critical" in the xml files are indeed critical. Sky falls down if you remove them. Here are my understandings (some are just superficial) to several important components. They are required by the CS4 apps or recommended by me:

• Adobe Anchor Service CS4
  The Lord that rules.
• Adobe CSI CS4
  The infrastructure that rules, too. I guess the VersionCue Client service which enables the "Open File" dialogs is also included in here.
• Adobe Type Support CS4
  Support for layers with texts/fonts.
• Adobe XMP Panels CS4
  Support for the "File Info" dialogs.
• Adobe CMaps CS4 / Adobe ALM CS4
  Required by Illustrator (?)
• Adobe Color - Photoshop Specific CS4
• Adobe Color NA Recommended Settings CS4
• Adobe Color CommonSetRGB
• Adobe Color CommonSetCMYK

At last, my apologies again for I didn't have time and energy to present a more detailed and refined tutorial. Hope as many folks as possible can benefit from this post. Merry Christmas.

I don't wanna say much about Nero. We don't install a huge piece of crap just to burn some discs.

ImgBurn has always been the perfect replacement. It's free, it's compact and it's powerful. I will also recommend to you the open source InfraRecorder. Ok, I won't go too far.

The official component (or say "plugin") foo_burninate.dll enables foobar2000 of burning discs, but it needs to invoke the Nero API, which means Nero is required to be installed. Canar from hydrogenaudio forum provided an alternative, yet it didn't satisfy me.

Let me get this straight: You want to burn discs using foobar2000 but don't want to keep Nero. You take all necessary files from Nero, then wipe it off your hard drive, and you cheat foobar2000 into thinking that Nero is still present.

I've been doing this for like 3 years, treated a ton of lossless stuff, and it's proved to be fairly reliable. Read on if you wanna know how, but you hack at your own risk.

1. Get Nero Burning ROM v6.6.1.15c, install it. I picked this version because it's relatively small. I haven't tested this with 7.x or greater.

2. Copy these 10 files from where Nero has been installed, put them to (for example) "D:\foobar2000\nero\".

CDROM.CFG / CDROM.dll / Generatr.dll / image.dll / MMC.dll / Nero.txt / neroAPI.dll / neroErr.dll / neRSDB.dll / newtrf.dll

3. Open notepad and ctrl c/v the following codes, save it as nero.reg, then merge them into Windows registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ahead\shared]
"NeroAPI"="D:\\foobar2000\\nero"

4. If there's a 4th step, it's only supposed to be the uninstallation of Nero. Happy burning with foobar2000!

Updated: I seem to remember that you can open the Nero6 installer with WinRAR and extract the necessary files without installing for even once. It's been years since I last used Nero, thanks znix for reminding me!

What do you use for enhancing the navigation in your admin center? The ancient thing, Admin Drop Down Menu by Ozh, has always been my choice. This plugin is simple yet very useful, it saves you a lot of clicks! But the plugin was designed for WordPress 1.x, and is too old to get along well with others nowadays.

For instance, if I activate too many plugins that have option pages under the "Options" tab, the "tail" of sub-menu items annoyingly protrudes from the left border (see screenshot). And the CSS style doesn't suit the updated menu in WordPress 2.x (see screenshot). I fixed the errors mentioned above, now it looks beautiful in my admin center (see screenshot). If you also want a copy of my fixed version, you can download it here. But please note this is not an official release.

A couple days ago I discovered Admin Supermenu by Chris Messina, a jQuery version of Admin Drop Down Menu, but it is still buggy. I think until Chris fixes the bug under the post-editing page and implement some more improvements, I will not switch to his jQuery version.

btw I already tried Admin Drop Down Menus, but it wasn't what I expected, though it exactly says the word "drop-down".