Articles about Adobe

The Flash manufacturer's move at taking content-protected video off of the browser and moving it onto its AIR platform, no longer has the luxury of being able to excuse any remaining bugs.

It could soon become one of the most ubiquitous examples of the AIR platform in popular use: Adobe today formally published its Adobe Media Player 1.0 software, which is designed to be both a delivery system and stand-alone console for Flash video, including high-resolution media.

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"You grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue...from [Your] Content" read its original Terms of Service, which apparently didn't go over well.

Maybe the company didn't expect anyone to actually read the Terms of Service word-for-word, or maybe it didn't actually read the text itself after "boilerplating" it from some other product. But last Friday, Adobe said it has altered the Terms with regard to its online Photoshop Express product, so that it doesn't appear the company will claim the right to open a service on the side that resells users' own photos.

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In a total reversal of what Windows and Macintosh users might expect, Adobe Creative Suite 4 will include 64-bit support for the Windows platform, but not for Mac.

Mac OS X users probably won't get 64-bit support until CS5, the subsequent release of the graphics editing software, according to John Nack, Adobe's Photoshop product manager.

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Adobe today released a beta version of Lightroom 2.0, the company's photo management and editing toolkit, which adds non-destructive localized editing and a slew of other new features.

Photographers have had a lot of updates to deal with in recent weeks, with Apple's Aperture receiving the ability to employ third-party plug-ins, Adobe releasing its Web-based version of Photoshop, after having to pull the Lightroom 1.4 update due to EXIF Timestamp Errors, DNG conversion errors in Windows, and Olympus JPEG conversion errors.

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Is Adobe playing catch-up in the open source development field? Or is the open source community not giving it enough of that valuable feedback it's so well-known for. This morning, Adobe's giving the community an extra chance.

The stated goal of Adobe since 2006 has been to build an operating environment using its Flash technologies, that is truly cross-platform and that can run offline. To accomplish that for real, Adobe needed to embrace more platforms outside the traditional box than just Macintosh; so today, even if the current build isn't ready for prime time, the company released what it's describing as a feature-incomplete version of the AIR platform for Linux.

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Though it was expected before year-end 2007, Adobe has opened the public beta of Photoshop Express, a Web-based version of its photo editing tool.

Users of Photoshop Express can upload photos directly or import their libraries from Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa. Yahoo's Flickr is notably absent, as the popular photo sharing site is partnered with Picnik for its editing features.

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Is Flash coming to the iPhone or not? For two consecutive days now, Adobe has said it wants to make that possible. But the way it's handling the issue has the press parsing every participle for latent meaning.

A statement from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen during the Q&A session of his company's quarterly earnings call last Tuesday appeared to indicate his company was actively pursuing the production of a Flash component for the Apple iPhone. That's how quite a few press sources reported the story, including BetaNews.

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Despite a heated exchange with Apple, Adobe seems to be pressing forward with plans to bring Flash to the iPhone.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs started the battle in the media with comments to investors at a shareholders' meeting earlier this month. Essentially, his position was that the current version of Flash for mobile phones is not good enough for the device, and the standard version runs too slowly.

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What wasn't good enough for Steve Jobs seems just fine for Microsoft, as it takes this opportunity to embed a version of Adobe's streaming video technology into its future mobile Web browsers, right alongside Adobe's rival Silverlight.

More and more, Microsoft is making a very visible effort to play nice, or at least nicer, by making room for its rivals alongside its own technology. This morning, it let Adobe hail the latest move rather than horde the megaphone, announcing that Adobe is licensing its Flash Lite mobile graphics platform to Microsoft for use, apparently, in a future mobile Web browser.

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John Brennan, the executive in charge of PDF, Flash, and other platform technologies at Adobe, has resigned to join Silver Lake, a private equirty firm that has previously hired away the likes of Michael Capellas from HP and Ed Zander from Sun.

Brennan, who was previously senior VP of Adobe's Platform Division, is now a managing director at Silver Lake Sumeru, a new business which will invest in medium-sized technology companies.

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Searchme is a new visually-oriented search engine which gives its results in the form of a viewable "stack" of page snapshots. The graphical flow of those snapshots may give Web developers a clue as to what's possible with Flex.

Anyone who's used iTunes will immediately see the similarity between Searchme's results page and iTunes' "Cover Flow" view. The two are practically identical. However, the search engine isn't merely aping an existing method of categorization, but is showing off what can be done in Adobe's new Flex 3 open source framework. The free SDK was released at the end of February with Adobe's AIR runtime and SDK.

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The challenge before the big development tools vendors is to build a Web applications platform that's as "open" as is feasible, up to the point where the vendor needs to monetize it to make its investment pay off. Today, it's Adobe's turn.

The race is "on," to borrow the watchword from Adobe's marketing campaign launched this morning, between Adobe and Microsoft to determine whether a graphical, boundary-crossing runtime platform is preferable for delivering applications over the Internet to a Web browser. Microsoft's entry in this field is Silverlight, which leverages the graphical library already in Windows. Adobe's entry is AIR, which has its own leverage -- the near ubiquity of Flash video on the Web.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is taking Adobe to task for including DRM in Flash Media Server 3 and Flash Player 9. But does Adobe really have much choice, now that social networking sites such as YouTube are under pressure from content providers to implement DRM?

In an article posted today on its Web site, the EFF is now arguing, among things, that Adobe is using DRM as a revenue vehicle, by charging more for the latest edition of its Flash server.

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The company silently slipped in a fix for a critical vulnerability that prevents PDF files from being used in code execution attacks, eWEEK reports.

Immunity confirmed the fix by reverse-engineering the patch, and discovered a fix for a stack overflow issue, normally afforded a "highly critical rating" by Adobe.

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In an announcement late Tuesday, Adobe said it is promoting its current senior vice president and chief software architect, Kevin Lynch, to what appears to be a new post with higher level of seniority.

Kevin Lynch was the Chief Software Architect of Adobe Systems, having joined the company through its 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, where he was seen as the co-creator of the Dreamweaver Web site development environment. Now it appears he'll be taking on new responsibilities there.

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