Adobe announced back in December that it would be renaming Flash Professional as Animate CC in recognition of the fact that HTML 5 has now taken over from Flash as the main form of web animation. It has now done so, adding in a “seriously long list” of new features at the same time.
The new features range from new vector art brushes to a rotating stage whose contents scale proportionally to the size – and the company is providing live demos on its Twitch.tv channel …
A class action lawsuit against Apple, Google and other tech companies for agreeing not to poach each other’s employees has finally been settled. Steve Jobs, Google’s Eric Schmidt and others had agreed in emails not to offer higher salaries to each other’s employees in order to reduce the risk of losing valuable employees. When the emails came to light, the 64,000 employees affected successfully argued that this had limited their earning potential.
After Apple’s originally settlement offers were rejected by Judge Lucy Koh as inadequate, the company increased its offer to $415M, which the judge agreed was fair. Reuters reports that Koh has now granted final approval of this sum.
Koh did, however, reject the $81M cut the lawyers in the case had demanded … Expand Expanding Close
Alongside the updates to its mobile apps yesterday, Adobe has also updated its entire suite of Creative Cloud desktop apps and launched a new Adobe Stock images service integrated within those apps – something the company says “radically simplifies” the process of buying and using stock images.
“Adobe Stock extends Creative Cloud’s value as a vibrant global marketplace,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Digital Media, Adobe. “Eighty-five percent of customers who purchase stock images use Adobe creative tools. The deep integration with our latest Creative Cloud desktop apps, including Photoshop and InDesign, makes buying and using stock photos incredibly easy. At the same time, our customers – the best photographers and designers on the planet – will have the opportunity to contribute millions of new photos and images to Adobe Stock. This is really going to raise the bar in the world of stock content.”
Single images cost $9.99 for existing Creative Cloud subscribers, but Adobe offers two volume subscriptions offering significantly better deals … Expand Expanding Close
Adobe is today celebrating the 25th anniversary of Photoshop, which first launched as a Mac-only app on 19th February 1990.
What went on to become the industry standard image editing app started life in 1987, when Thomas Knoll, a computer vision doctorate student at the University of Michigan, began developing it on his Mac Plus. Known then as Display, the app was designed to do nothing more than display grayscale images on the Macintosh’s black-and-white monitor. As Adobe showcases in the video below, the app has come rather a long way since then … Expand Expanding Close
Aperture users worried about transitioning to Lightroom following Apple’s decision to cease support for its full-featured photo editing software will now find life a little easier. The latest version of Lightroom includes a built-in migration tool to import both photos and associated metadata from both Aperture and iPhoto.
Star ratings, keywords, color labels, face tags, GPS data, stacks, hidden files and rejects are all transferred into Lightroom to make the transition as painless as possible.
Apple announced back in June that it was ceasing development on Aperture in favor of a more basic Photos app launching next year – leaving pros and enthusiasts out in the cold. Adobe responded initially with a transition guide followed by a plugin migration tool. With Lightroom 5.7 (a free update for existing users), the migration tool is built-in.
Adobe also release DNG Converter 8.7, with support for 24 new cameras.
Alongside a string of updates to both the mobile and desktop Creative Cloud software suites, Adobe today launched a trio of new services at its annual MAX conference. First up, and most critical to the updates on the software side of the story, is the new Creative Profile content synchronization service. Blending nicely with the existing Creative Cloud sync service, Creative Profile takes ubiquity of files to new heights by allowing synchronization of more aspects of documents:
This Creative Cloud release includes a new Creative Profile that connects creatives to their work, to the assets they use to create, and the communities that matter to them – no matter where they are. Files, photos, colors, brushes, shapes, fonts, textstyles, graphics, and any other assets are always at their fingertips. This new Creative Profile moves with creatives from app-to-app, and device-to-device, so assets automatically appear when they need them, in the right context.
Most critically, it is optimized for the new desktop and mobile apps so new content created with Adobe’s latest products can be easily synchronized. The Creative Profile service launches today, and it is a free addition for customers with existing Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions…
Touch support on Windows 8 devices for key design applications; new 3D print features and enhanced Mercury Graphics Engine performance for Photoshop CC; a new Curvature tool in Illustrator CC; interactive EPUB support in InDesign CC; SVG and Synchronized Text support in Muse CC; GPU-optimized playback for viewing high resolution 4K and UltraHD footage in Premiere Pro CC; and HiDPI and new 3D support in After Effects CC.
Perhaps more interesting on the desktop side of today’s news are some fresh services. Here’s Adobe’s explainer on the new Cloud Market, Cloud Libraries, and Cloud Extract products:
Creative Cloud Market is a collection of high-quality, curated content that’s freely accessible to Creative Cloud members. Access and use thousands of professionally crafted files, including user interfaces, patterns, icons, brushes and vector shapes, to speed through desktop and mobile projects.
Creative Cloud Libraries is a powerful asset management service that lets creatives easily access and create with colors, brushes, text styles, and vector images through Creative Cloud desktop, mobile apps and services. Creative Cloud Libraries connects desktop tools like Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC to each other — and to companion mobile apps.
Creative Cloud Extract is a cloud-based service that reinvents the Photoshop CC comp-to-code workflow for web designers and developers, letting them share and unlock vital design information from a PSD file (such as colors, fonts and CSS) to use when coding mobile and desktop designs.
The Cloud Market feature could give services like Getty Images a run for its money, while Cloud Libraries is the iCloud-like solution that ties all of Adobe’s supported platforms together. Cloud Extract is an advanced cloud-based solution that allows designers and developers working on Photoshop projects together to share data on an asset-by-asset or feature-by-feature basis.
Ahead of its annual MAX Conference kicking off today, Adobe has launched an entirely new suite of apps that are now available on the iPhone and iPad App Store. This year, Adobe is focusing on simplifying its mobile software lineup into four categories that sync with desktop counterparts: Illustration, Imaging, Video, and a new platform called Creative Cloud Capture Apps. Each of the apps within the four categories are either brand new or have been enhanced.
Adobe has announced its next major upgrades to its popular Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements applications, with each being bumped up to version 13.
Both apps add new editing features, such as “photomerge compose” for lifting subjects from one photo and quickly moving them into another with proper lighting and other effects. New cropping tools allow you to automatically compose perfectly cropped by detecting faces and other details and determining how to best frame them in the shot.
The anti-poaching case rumbles on … After an antitrust class-action suit last year accused Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe of secretly agreeing not to poach staff from each other, the case appeared to be all over back in April when the parties reached a $324M settlement.
Settlements have to be signed-off by a court, however, to ensure that it is considered fair to all parties. Earlier this month, Judge Lucy Koh rejected the settlement, saying the amount should have been $380M.
Two days ago, the parties resumed settlement talks with the help of a retired judge, but it appears these are not going well: Reuters now reports that Apple and Google has asked an appeals court to overturn Judge Koh’s decision.
In a court filing late on Thursday, the companies asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule Koh’s decision.
Koh “committed clear legal error” and “impermissibly substituted the court’s assessment of the value of the case for that of the parties who have been litigating the case for more than three years,” they wrote.
Judge Koh had earlier said that Steve Jobs “was a, if not the, central figure in the alleged conspiracy.”
Approximately a month after Apple announced it is discontinuing Aperture and iPhoto in favor of the new Photos app on OS X Yosemite and iOS 8, Adobe is today taking advantage of the Apple shift with a couple of key announcements. First, Adobe has published a new website detailing the advantages of Lightroom over Aperture. More importantly, Adobe has released a comprehensive, step-by-step transition guide for moving from Aperture to Lightroom. The guide also includes some answers to frequently asked questions.
It can be accessed here. Adobe has also announced that it working on software to bring a more automated transition experience:
At Adobe, we’re working on a migration tool to help you bring your photos into Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® from Aperture, but if you’re eager to switch before the tool is ready, this guide can help ease your transition. We recognize that this migration may be a challenging process and offer the following resources and methodology to help get you up to speed with Lightroom and provide a road map for successfully migrating your photos.
The first challenge is that the terminology, layout, and controls of the two applications are different. It’s a good idea to start processing photos in Lightroom and become familiar with it before you migrate your photos from Aperture. You can do so by taking some new photos, importing them into Lightroom, and then using Lightroom.
If you’ve ever been frustrated by visiting a website on your iPhone or iPad and finding it won’t work because it uses Flash, you’ll welcome the latest Google initiative: it is now flagging Flash content in its search results, warning that the site may not work on your device.
Starting today, we will indicate to searchers when our algorithms detect pages that may not work on their devices. For example, Adobe Flash is not supported on iOS devices or on Android versions 4.1 and higher, and a page whose contents are mostly Flash may be noted
As Google notes, Android has now also abandoned Flash support due to the same reliability, security and performance concerns that Steve Jobs expressed in his famous open letter to Adobe back in 2010. Adobe has been forced to issue a succession of security updates to Flash, the most recent being two emergency updates earlier this year.
Google says it hopes the move, coupled to Web Fundamentals and Web Starter Kit initiatives for developers will encourage the use of HTML5 in place of Flash.
Today, Apple announced they will no longer be developing Aperture in light of their new photography app for OS X. If you are an Aperture or iPhoto customer looking for change, check out our new Creative Cloud Photography plan announced last week, or our standalone Lightroom app for your desktop as alternatives.
Adobe also says that it is “doubling down” on those products and that a “rich roadmap” is ahead for the coming weeks, months and years:
As part of a totally revamped Creative Cloud Photography Plan, Adobe today launched both Lightroom for iPhone, a companion app to the desktop version and twin of the recently launched iPad version, as well as Adobe Mix, a completely new iPad app that brings down many powerful features previously only available on the desktop versions of Photoshop.
Corresponding with these new iOS apps, Adobe has launched new versions of 14 of its Creative Cloud desktop apps. Let’s take a closer look at the new iOS offerings from Adobe.
Alongside a minor update to the app, Adobe Revel has changed their business model slightly. Before, free accounts were limited to uploading just 50 photos every month. Going forward, free accounts get 2 GB of fixed storage for uploads.
Less than three weeks ago, Adobe released a critical security update for its Flash Player plug-in fixing an exploit that allowed machines to be accessed remotely by attackers.
Yet another security update is out today (and strongly recommended). The new build (Version 12.0.0.70) intends to address a vulnerability that allowed attackers to target at least three nonprofit websites according to security firm FireEye and reported by ArsTechnica…
Adobe will soon make the iPad an even more viable solution for mobile content creation: the company will soon unleash a version of its popular Lightroom photo editing suite that is optimized for tablets. References to Lightroom for Mobile appeared on Adobe’s official website earlier this week, but they were immediately removed when we contacted Adobe for comment on the yet-to-be-announced product.
Adobe’s tagline for the product is “Take Lightroom anywhere,” but we were unable to locate screenshots of the application on Adobe’s website. The website also does not specifically note iPad support, but a chat representative from Adobe was able to pull up details about Lightroom for Mobile from Adobe’s systems and said that it is built for iPad.
The representative further indicated that the mobile version would largely lineup with the desktop version in terms of features…
Printing from Photoshop CC is no longer limited to two dimensions, as Adobe has added support for 3D printing to the latest release for Creative Cloud subscribers.
While Photoshop wouldn’t be the obvious tool in which to create 3D objects from scratch, objects can be imported from a 3D scanner, from a modelling tool or from a downloaded file, refined in Photoshop using the new automated mesh repair and support structure generation tools. Once the model is ready to print, it can be sent direct to any of the most popular 3D printers, including the Makerbot Replicator … Expand Expanding Close
Adobe stock climbed 10 percent to just under $60 in opening trading after announcing Q4 earnings in line with expectations, and strong growth in subscriptions as the company transitions away from one-time purchase licences.
While year-on-year numbers were poor, revenue down almost 10 percent and earnings almost halved, Adobe has been at pains to point out this was expected as it shifted to subscription-based sales.
As Adobe customers migrate from a legacy Creative Suite perpetual licensing model to new Creative Cloud subscriptions, revenue is recognized over time as opposed to at the time of purchase.
See below for a cool infographic of Adobe by the numbers … Expand Expanding Close
Adobe today announced a pretty solid Black Friday deal. Adobe initially launched the Photoshop Photography Program in September to support the needs and workflow of photographers who use CS3 or later. Now, for a limited time, Adobe it is extending this offer to ALL photographers for $9.99/month as an annual subscription – valid from Nov. 20 (9:00 a.m. PST) through Dec. 2, 2013 (11:59 p.m. PST) on Adobe.com… Expand Expanding Close
Safari 7, introduced with OS X Mavericks, is now better protected against malware and poorly-written Flash code as Flash is finally sandboxed.
Sandboxing means that OS X restricts what the code can do, stopping a badly-written app from crashing the entire browser and preventing malware from getting access to any other part of your Mac. Flash has been sandboxed for some time in Chrome, Firefox and even Internet Explorer.
In an Adobe blog post, Platform Security Strategist Peleus Uhley wrote:
For the technically minded, this means that there is a specific com.macromedia.Flash Player.plugin.sb file defining the security permissions for Flash Player when it runs within the sandboxed plugin process. As you might expect, Flash Player’s capabilities to read and write files will be limited to only those locations it needs to function properly. The sandbox also limits Flash Player’s local connections to device resources and inter-process communication (IPC) channels. Finally, the sandbox limits Flash Player’s networking privileges to prevent unnecessary connection capabilities.
Safari users on OS X Mavericks can view Flash Player content while benefiting from these added security protections. We’d like to thank the Apple security team for working with us to deliver this solution.
Evernote, Adobe, even Apple … just a few of the companies who have found their user data compromised by hackers in recent times. The possibility of a hacker being able to access one of your web accounts is worrying enough – but if you use the same email address and password for almost all the websites you use, the risk becomes huge.
The first thing a hacker does when they get hold of a list of usernames and passwords is to use automated software to fire them at a whole bunch of popular websites. That means your online security is only as good as the most vulnerable of the websites you visit. Not good.
The answer, of course, is to use a unique – and strong – password for each website you access. But that creates its own hassles. Strong passwords aren’t easily memorised. Sure, we can ask our browsers to store logins for us, but when you might use several different computers, an iPhone and an iPad, you’d have to login once from each device as soon as you chose the password so it gets stored before you forget it. Not very convenient.
Which is where password managers come in. When you see the instructions, it’ll look like a long process, but it in fact takes only 10-20 mins if you have two or three devices … Expand Expanding Close
Adobe is currently testing a new presentation app for the iPad similar in purpose to PowerPoint and Keynote, via CNET. The project is currently called Ginger. Although details are sparse, it seems to be focused on the creation of sales pitches and what Adobe calls “explainer videos”. Adobe has said that the app is in the beta stage of development, but is yet to confirm whether the app will ever be publicly released.
On Ginger’s minisite, there are a few demos of what the app could create. One example presentation is embedded below …
Pixelmator quotes a 2x performance improvement when saving documents, as a result of a move to a new file format. For instance, when saving to iCloud, Pixelmator can now push small deltas of what has changed between saves, rather than saving the entire image every time. This speed up is noticeable in use, with projects saving nearly instantaneously on a Retina Macbook Pro.
