Articles about Adobe

Adobe’s Creative Suite has reached its third iteration, and CS3 brings with it quite a few changes - some minor and some remarkable. This review will cover the new editions of both Photoshop and Illustrator, the two programs I use the most frequently.

I (Karl Kwasny) am the lead designer for BetaNews (new site is coming soon!) and primarily an illustrator by trade, so I hope that my somewhat unconventional perspective (that is to say, I am not a photographer) might give a fresh angle to the reviews already out there.

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Adobe this week fixed critical vulnerabilities within its Flash Player that could allow an attacker to take control of an affected system. According to a company advisory, all current versions of Flash 9, 8 and 7 are affected by the problem, which relates to not validating certain input.

As a result, Adobe has released new versions of Flash for all platforms. 9.0.47.0 is the newest release for Windows and Mac, while 9.0.48.0 is available for Linux. 8.0.35.0 has also been released for Flash 8 users, in addition to a patch for users who cannot upgrade from Flash 7. More information and upgrade instructions are available from Adobe's Web site.

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Although it began shipping Creative Suite 3 in mid-April, only on Monday did Adobe officially complete the suite, shipping the pricey Production Premium and Master Collection packages. Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects took longer to finish than the company's other CS3 applications.

Priced at $1,699 USD, Production Premium includes both Premiere Pro and After Effects, along with Adobe Soundbooth, Encore and standard CS3 applications Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop Extended. The Master Collection, which runs $2,499, includes all 17 CS3 applications Adobe offers. Amazon has a ship date of July 12 for both packages.

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Adobe on Wednesday rolled out version 1.1 of its Photoshop Lightroom application, the company's image processing application for professional photographers. The update brings support for Windows Vista, a new image management system, improved noise reduction and sharpening, and additional RAW file support.

"Although the beta period has ended, we are happy to say that Photoshop Lightroom continues to incorporate user feedback with this latest update," remarked Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty. Adobe's goal with Lightroom is to offer consumers the simplest such tool for managing RAW files, and the company says it has no plans to compete with Apple's Aperture feature-wise. The update, for Mac and Windows, is free to existing customers. Photoshop Lightroom is priced at $299 USD.

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Adobe took the wraps off of AIR on Monday, its cross-operating system platform that allows developers to use Web-centric programming languages and environments to create desktop applications.

AIR, formerly code-named "Apollo," works hand-in-hand with with Flex, Adobe's framework for creating rich Internet applications. Together, "the masses would be able to create applications," senior product manager for Adobe AIR Louis Polanco told BetaNews.

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Adobe on Tuesday released the first major update to both Acrobat and Reader 8.0, adding support for Windows Vista and remote printing capabilities through a partnership with FedEx Kinko's. Version 8.1 (download from FileForum) also brings integration with Microsoft Office 2007.

Acrobat users can now export Office documents to PDF files by right clicking, as well as preview multi-page PDF files from without Outlook 2007. Adobe has additionally added Flash movie playback for Mac users, removing the need to use QuickTime. The new "Send to FedEx Kinko's" toolbar button quickly sends a document to the company's remote printing service, primarily designed for business users when traveling.

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FROM MIX 07 Microsoft on Monday officially began shipping Expression Studio, the company's new product suite for building what it calls "next-generation user experiences" for Windows as well as the Web. Expression targets the new breed of designer that is also part developer.

Expression was largely created to help companies build applications that take advantage of the new Windows Presentation Foundation found in Windows Vista. Microsoft hoped the rich application capabilities would draw users to Vista, but developers have been slow to build such experiences.

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Taking the next step to even the stakes in the emerging platform battle in rich Internet application development, Adobe announced this morning it would be releasing its Flex development environment for Flash applications to the open source community, through the Mozilla Foundation.

The move comes as Google and Microsoft step up their separate efforts to boost enthusiasm around Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX). While Adobe is not typically known for being a development tools supplier, in some respects, it had nothing to lose by letting go of the reins of Flex, and certainly a lot to gain by building a broader community around Flash.

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Adobe on Monday offered visitors of the NAB 2007 conference in Las Vegas a peek at its new Media Player desktop application, designed to play Flash video content without requiring a Web browser. The program, formerly code-named "Philo," will enter beta testing this spring.

Although named as such, Adobe Media Player takes a different approach from that found in Windows Media Player and iTunes. Instead of focusing on existing, local content, the application relies on RSS feeds to receive Flash video. Adobe will essentially provide a virtual storefront, where users can discover new content and subscribe to it.

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Although Adobe today began shipping the Design and Premium SKUs of its Creative Suite 3, Production Premium and Master Collection are awaiting the final new versions of After Effects and Premiere. Both of those products were released publicly in beta form Monday.

Interested video producers can download Adobe After Effects Pro CS3 and Premiere Pro CS3 from the Adobe Labs Web site. Windows and Mac versions are available for both products, but users must have previous versions of the software to activate the beta. Adobe offered a similar preview of Photoshop CS3 in December, enabling Mac users to try out the new Intel-compatible release.

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Adobe's highly-anticipated new Creative Suite release hit store shelves Monday morning, although two of the four editions won't arrive until the third quarter. Both Premium and Standard iterations of CS3 Design and CS3 Web are available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

Prices range from $999 USD to $1799 USD. CS3 Production Premium and CS3 Master Collection will follow. Available for individual purchase are Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended, InDesign CS3, Illustrator CS3, Flash CS3 Professional, Dreamweaver CS3, Fireworks CS3 and Contribute CS3. The releases coincide with the start of NAB 2007 in Las Vegas.

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Calling it the largest software release in the company's 25-year history, Adobe on Tuesday took the wraps off Creative Suite 3, an impressive catalog of 13 standalone applications available in six different configurations.

Adobe's latest release answers the call of many of its users who use the Mac OS X platform by making CS3 a Universal Binary - meaning it is compatible with Apple computers utilizing an Intel processor. In addition, the suite will take advantage of Windows Vista as well.

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Since the advent of the Web, network applications designers have been using HTTP to create a viable Internet applications platform. The relative success of these projects has varied, from the historic missteps of Microsoft's ActiveX, to Sun's incrementally more satisfactory Java, to Macromedia's resplendent - though often unresolved - Flash, to the more hopeful and practical AJAX, to Microsoft's more ambitious - and far more sensible - XAML. But through it all, the general consensus over whether the browser should play an active role has been on again-off again, drifting like a sine wave.

With Adobe's move today to evolve the Flash platform it acquired in the Macromedia takeover, the company is gambling on "off again." Still code-named "Apollo" (its final brand name has yet to be announced), the new Adobe runtime environment was made available to the general public this morning.

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Although it won't officially announce Creative Suite 3 until March 27, Adobe said Thursday that it will deliver not one, but two editions of Photoshop CS3, the company's tool for professional graphic and Web designers.

The standard Photoshop CS3, which has been available in beta for Macintosh users since December, will be joined by Photoshop CS3 Extended. The new edition brings integration of 3-D and motion graphics, image measurement and analysis. It also adds new workflow capabilities designed for professionals in architecture, engineering, medical and science.

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Adobe is bringing its video editing tools online through multimedia storage site Photobucket, which would make them available for free. The application would be based on technologies used in Adobe's Premiere product, it said.

The San Jose, Calif. company plans to announce additional partnerships with other Web properties in the future. Adobe hopes that by using the free Web-based versions of its software, users would be enticed to upgrade to pay versions of its Photoshop and Premiere products.

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