Articles about Adobe

The first quarter of 2009 was, as predicted two weeks ago, soggy for Adobe Systems, which on Tuesday reported revenue of $786.4 million for the period ending February 27. That's under the company's original Q1 estimate of $800-$850 million, but a shade above the revised prediction of $783-$786 million.

According to president and CEO Shantanu Narayen, demand for CS4 continues weak, though awareness and interest in the product family is still high. (Random fact: Suites account for 68% of CS4 revenues.) To attempt to convert that interest to sales, the company said it will extend its introductory pricing on CS4 until April 30.

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What a great world we'd live in if legitimate businesses were as eager to save us trouble as toil as the malware guys are, right? A critical zero-day flaw in Adobe Reader and Acrobat can be used to attack a Windows machine without even opening the infected file -- the height of convenience indeed.

A buffer-overflow flaw is news to nobody familiar with Windows, but the service targeted, the Windows Indexing Service, may not be familiar to all. That service provides an index of files on the system -- it's how you can see the title and author and so forth for a PDF document in Windows Explorer, or how you view thumbnails if that's your Explorer preference.

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Adobe on Wednesday released preliminary earnings information indicating that it won't make its revenue targets for the first quarter of 2009, which ended for the company on February 27. The company will, however, deliver earnings per share within -- though at the low end of -- its target range.

Based on what the company knows right now, Adobe should report revenue of between $783 million and $786 million, below its target range of $800 million to $850 million. Operating margins are expected to be between 26% and 26.5% on a GAAP basis, which falls within the predicted 26-28% range for Q1; likewise, non-GAAP operating margins are in the ballpark, coming in between 37% and 37.5% compared to the 37-38% target.

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Adobe has released an update (11.0.1) to Photoshop CS4 which includes a handful of significant fixes. Performance issues have been tweaked, the pen barrel rotation feature on Wacom tablets has been fixed, 3D textures edited by plug-ins are now properly recognized, and the quality of Stacked (auto blend) images has been improved. Also, attempting to paste formatted text, or open a corrupt font no longer result in a CS4 crash.

The update is available directly from Adobe.

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An independent security research firm is warning of a non-ingenious JavaScript buffer overflow ploy that modern Web browsers would probably filter out, but which impacts recent versions of Adobe Reader for PDF files.

The surprise about the latest Adobe Acrobat issue is that there doesn't seem to be much new about it, at least in terms of methodology. A group called the Shadowserver Foundation announced yesterday that it was aware of an active ploy using malformed PDF files. Embedded JavaScript in those files can trigger a kind of managed buffer overflow, the group said, which leaves the heap full of shellcode that can be executed without the need for privilege.

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Timed with the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday, Palm announced it is joining the Open Screen Project spearheaded by Adobe, which aims to bring applications and web experiences to TVs, PCs and mobile devices using Flash. Specifically, Palm plans to integrate Flash into its upcoming Pre smartphone and future devices running webOS -- something Apple has yet to do with the iPhone.

"We're excited that our customers will benefit from the creativity and broad range of Flash content and applications created by the millions of designers and developers using Adobe's popular tools and technologies," remarked Pam Deziel, vice president of software product management at Palm. Whether it will be as simple as downloading a Flash app onto the Pre is not yet known.

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Addressing attendees at a tech-and-telecom conference on Tuesday, Adobe EVP and CFO Mark Garrett spoke of the challenges ahead. Microsoft's software doesn't appear to be one of them.

Speaking at a fireside-chat style event at Thomas Weisel Partners Technology & Telecom Conference 2009, Garrett noted that "if you set the economy aside, there are a lot of tailwinds" acting to boost Adobe's reach online. Those tailwinds are coming from many sources, including the warm front centered around the fever for online video (the company estimates that four-fifths of all video online plays through its software) and the hard, cold drive to digitize information stored in printed media.

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At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen spoke yet again of the company's continuing interest in porting Flash to the iPhone.

"It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating," Narayen said to Bloomberg Television, "The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver."

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Although Apple's Macintosh environment has long been touted by its fans as "more secure" than Windows, a Trojan enabling remote control of Mac machines struck a second time this week.

Earlier found only in illegal copies of Apple's iWork Suite, the Trojan has now turned up in pirated copies of Adobe Photoshop for Mac OS X. Actually, the Trojan doesn't even exploit any OS vulnerability. Instead, it disguises itself as part of the installer package for the application, so it is installed along with the application. Once installed, the malware launches a back door program, thereby allowing an attacker to remotely conduct misdeeds such as copying data.

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Yesterday at a conference in Japan, Adobe announced it has received an independent assessment of the worldwide installed base for its Web platforms. A Millward Brown survey estimates that Flash has been installed on 99% of the world's Internet-enabled PCs, leading Adobe to estimate that Flash Player 10 by itself will break the 80% penetration mark by the end of Q2 2009.

Some 100 million PCs are believed to have successfully installed Adobe's AIR runtime platform -- and by "successfully," the company means, it's running and active and without trouble. That's based on the company's own statistics about downloads.

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Adobe Labs has made Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 and Photoshop Camera Raw 5.3 release candidates available for download. Both release candidates provide additional raw file support for the Nikon D3X and Olympus E-30 cameras. Lightroom 2.3 also fixes a memory leak that was discovered in the 2.2 release.

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Dan Rosensweig, who was Yahoo's chief operating officer until sweeping organizational changes in late 2006, will take a seat on Adobe's executive board.

Rosensweig departed Yahoo "to ensure a smooth transition," into a re-organized Yahoo. Not long after Rosensweig's departure, CEO Terry Semel was replaced by interim CEO Jerry Yang.

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The software manufacturer reported record revenue for 4Q 2008 and a sixth consecutive year of double-digit growth, making Tuesday's earnings call much more upbeat than the announcement earlier this month of layoffs.

Adobe registered fourth-quarter revenue of $915.3 million, up $4.1 million from Q4 2007 and up $23.9 million from last quarter. Net revenue was $245.9 million, working out to 46 cents / share. Annual revenues were also record-breaking -- $3.580 billion, for 13% year-over-year growth. That's in line with the company's targets at the start of the year.

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Download Appcelerator Titanium Preview Release 0.1 for Windows from FileForum now.

Titanium -- a desktop, mobile, and Web development environment which enters public preview today -- is designed as a open source alternative for Windows, Mac and Linux developers to Adobe's AIR.

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Today, Adobe is joining the passing parade of corporations everywhere -- not just in technology -- shedding headcount to save expenses. But a check of its numbers may make some ask why so drastic a move.

That Adobe isn't seeing the level of revenue it would have liked to see from its fiscal fourth quarter thus far, should not be a surprise to anyone. So this morning's filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, stating it plans to shed 600 workers, was certainly sad but maybe not shocking.

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