this post may become a bit of a hodge-podge of a couple of different things, but the main message for today is …

if you have not already ‘upgraded’ to InDesign CC
— DON’T DO IT.

the CC version of InDesign is proving to be a real dog — it sporadically suffers from serious time lags for even the most mundane tasks (eg. selecting text) and is clunky in a bunch of other ways (the UI is simply grotesque — quite windows-like — click to enlarge) :

we’ve already looked at solving one speed issue that’s been with us since CS4 — the live preflight ‘feature’ — way back in InDesign tip : #09.

upgrading your operating system to OS X 10.9 does help the CC time lag issue significantly, but does not completely resolve the problem. so, you need a couple of other workarounds to help speed things up. these are NOT optimum solutions because they take away some handy functionality which many of us have come to rely upon — but they will help to save you from punching yourself in your own head.

with CC, the speed issue seems to become noticeable once you’ve imported a bunch of high res images (anything more than about half a dozen appears to unsettle the poor blossom). so here are two things to change to get things rolling again (somewhat).

the Pages panel generally looks something like this (screen grabs have been taken from CS6, but most versions are similar) :

click on the little icon in the top right corner and you’ll get a dropdown menu — select Panel Options … :

then you can uncheck the thumbnails checkbox :

and all you get is blank page previews :

then do the same with the Links panel :

while you’re in the links panel options dialog, you may want to have a bit of a look at the other things you can display in the columns (top section of links panel) and the link info (bottom section). you may find there’s stuff here which is specific for your workflow :

the columns of the links panel can be resized (click and drag the little black line between column headings) and rearranged (click and drag the column heading itself).

you may even find it helpful to set up different versions of the links panel for different workspaces (see tip #08 if you have not yet discovered the benefits of workspaces). for example, some people find it handy to have a basic setup (similar to above) for standard work, but a more extensive set of choices for a separate prepress workspace :

as mentioned, this is not an ideal workaround, but if you’re stuck with InDesign CC and you find the time-lag issue excruciating, then give this a go, at least until Adobe get their act together and restore InDesign to its former glory.