Articles about Adobe

Has your webcam turned on without your permission? You may be the target of a new Flash exploit.

Adobe is scrambling to fix a vulnerability that may allow an attacker to turn on your webcam and microphone to spy on you. Stanford University computer science student Feross Aboukhadijeh discovered the flaw, which is found in every version of Flash and can be exploited in Safari and Firefox on Mac OS X and some browsers within Windows (Chrome appears to be unaffected).

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While iOS has supported Portable Document Format for some time, there has been no official app from the king of the PDF, Adobe. With the release of Adobe Reader for iPhone and iPad, this has now changed. As you would expect, the app provides support for the opening of PDF files that have been created on other platform, including those that have been password-protected, and PDF portfolios.

Lengthy files can be easily navigated using bookmarks and text searching, and a thumbnail preview section at the bottom of the app makes it easy to jump to a specific page without having to scroll through a document in its entirety. It’s good to see that the iPhone and iPad versions of the app are, apart from the differences in screen size, indistinguishable from each other.

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Adobe Flash is a platform that is loved and hated in equal measure. Whether used to deliver video content or interactive games, Flash can be used to deliver a uniform experience across a range of platforms, providing it’s not iOS. The Flash player is a browser plugin that allows for the deployment of this content online and the move to version 11 has a strong focus on performance.

Also updated is Adobe AIR, the company’s solution to freeing Flash, JavaScript and HTML app from the constraints of web browsers. The app has now hit version 3, and both releases offer greatly improved rendering to allow for smooth animations at a high frame rate.

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Android tablets got what can only be described as their greatest endorsement to date, with stunning support from one of the world's largest and most successful software developers. Today at its MAX 2011 conference, Adobe unveiled the suite of six Touch Apps, which will be available for Android tablets in November. There is no ETA for iPad, except announcement planned for 2012. Considering how much better iPad is selling than Android tablets, Adobe's choice can't be meaningfully described. The developer has chosen the lower-volume competitor instead of the overwhelming leader.

Adobe's decision says much about its increasing rivalry with Apple, the sometimes onerous App Store approval process (particularly for competitors) and relative openness of Android compared to iOS. It's perhaps a slap across Apple's face that the marketing photos on Adobe web pages for Touch Apps show Android tablets. There's nothing subtle about that.

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Adobe has debuted a family of six new applications it has developed for mobile tablets called Adobe Touch Apps, which mimic some of the professional creative functions of Creative Suite.

The scene-stealing app is Adobe Photoshop Touch, which gives Android tablet and iPad users the ability to apply popular edits and effects to photos just as they would in the full Photoshop. It adds a new exclusive extraction tool called "scribble selection", which lets users scribble over what they want to keep in the picture while everything else is removed.

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>Watch out Tumblrs and WordPress bloggers, Adobe just announced that it has acquired font-subscription service TypeKit. Is it the end of cheap web fonts?

TypeKit founder and CEO Jeffrey Veen is "thrilled. There honestly is no better place for us to continue building our platform. But perhaps even more significantly, this represents a huge step forward in bringing fonts to the web".

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Adobe has released an update for Photoshop Lightroom, bringing it to version 3.5 and adding support for an increased range of digital cameras. The update supports more high-end cameras' RAW output.

The list of newly supported cameras includes models from Fuji, Nikon, Olympus, Ricoh, Panasonic and more, and the same cameras are now also supported by the Camera Raw plug-in 6.5 for Photoshop. As well as adding new hardware support, Lightroom 3.5 also adds a number of enhancements and fixes bugs.

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Adobe has updated Photoshop Elements to version 10, and there are a huge range of features to enable you to view, organize, manage and edit your digital photos. For many people, using a photo editing package is all about adding special effects to images, and there are dozens of new effects to choose from here.

If you’re having trouble using any of the tools you find in the program, Guided Edits are on hand to provide you with assistance. While these may not help you to produce the best possible results, it is a good way to get an introduction to any tools you are not familiar with so you can see just what they are capable of.

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Adobe has been a little slow venturing into the world of iOS software, but the release of Adobe CreatePDF sees it further branching out onto the platform with one of its most well-known services -- the creation of PDF files. iOS is not a platform you would naturally associated with a task such as creating PDFs, but Adobe feels that there is sufficient demand to justify a dedicated app; and quite a pricey one at that.

For $9.99 Adobe CreatePDF offers to create PDF files of the same standard as Adobe Acrobat. This sounds great in theory, even if the price tag is somewhat eye-watering, but there are some issues that need to be borne in mind. Firstly, as the name subtly suggests, this is an app concerned solely with the creation of PDFs. If you are looking to view PDF files you have created or downloaded, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

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Adobe has revealed the first public beta of a new WYSIWYG web design tool, code-named Muse, which allows you to build entire sites without worrying about HTML, scripting or other low-level complexities.

The AIR-based application is a little short on features right now, no surprise for a first release. But as we discovered when we took a closer look at Muse, there's more than enough functionality to get a feel for how the program is going to work.

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Adobe on Monday rolled out the first public preview of Adobe Edge, the company's HTML5 design tool that makes the creation of HTML5 graphics and animations feel like editing a movie.

In the Spring of 2010, the "Flash vs. HTML5" debate went into full battle mode when Apple CEO Steve Jobs published a letter called "Thoughts on Flash," where he said Adobe's Flash platform was a relic of the PC era, and that in the Post-PC era, different tools and standards needed to be used.

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Adobe and Apple used to be partners, with the maker of Photoshop being one of the biggest third-party Mac developers. Then Apple started releasing digital products that competed with its partner, and CEO Steve Jobs came out against Adobe Flash.

Now the companies have quite the overlap in their customer bases and there's still a lot there, but Apple is doing its best to stop that.

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Software company Adobe Systems Inc. has acquired e-signature technology company EchoSign, the two parties announced on Monday. EchoSign's technology will be integrated with Adobe's document solutions including SendNow, FormsCentral, and CreatePDF.

EchoSign's e-signature technology has already been integrated into Salesforce, Google Docs, NetSuite, Oracle CRM on Demand, SugarCRM, and SAP CLM, so Adobe, in addition to gaining the tech for its own document solutions, gains a foothold into document authentication for these major enterprise solutions.

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Adobe has released public betas of the next generation of both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe AIR, highlighting how the essential browser plug-in and cross-platform runtime component share similar code and technologies.

The most notable new feature is found exclusively in Flash Player 11 Beta: support for 64-bit browsers. 64-bit support has been in development since Flash 10.2, but until now has been available only as a limited pre-release build, codenamed Adobe Flash Player "Square". By incorporating it into the Beta release of Flash Player 11, Adobe has signalled its readiness for final release, due later this year.

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Cyberlink has unveiled the final release of PhotoDirector 2011, a photo-editing tool aimed at photo enthusiasts and semi-professional users. It takes a workflow-based approach to organizing and editing images, steering the user through the process of importing, managing, correcting and finally exporting and sharing photos.

PhotoDirector 2011 includes native support for RAW-format images from Canon and Nikon cameras, a non-destructive editing environment allowing users to experiment with different edits before committing to changes, and an online resource for pros called DirectorZone where users can share and download image editing presets.

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