Adobe is making big strides these days with authoring and publishing tools for tablets (ala Apple iPad) and Dave has covered alot of that space below. As an aside, I'm curious if and how Adobe will take advantage of Apples lapse in the professional video editing market (Final Cut X) with further advances in their Adobe Premiere Pro editing software. We'll keep our eye on video developments, but in the meantime for those who rely on Adobe products or simply enjoy using them, please read Dave's report below:
Adobe Creative Cloud
There were a number of announcements made during the keynote,
starting with the “Adobe Creative Cloud” in parallel with a new set of “Adobe
Touch Apps” for content creation on tablet devices. These apps bring
professional-level creativity to millions of tablet users – both consumers and
professionals – and utilize hosted cloud-based services to share files, view
them across devices or transfer work into various Adobe software for further
refinement. Collaboration was a big focus on Adobe’s move to expand their
toolset into a cloud-based framework. When the product rolls out in 2012 it
will include 20GB of cloud storage for each user.
"Adobe Creative Cloud reinvents creative expression by
enabling a new generation of services for creativity and publishing, that
embrace touch interaction to re-imagine how individuals interact with creative
tools and build deeper social connections between creatives around the world,”
said Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer at Adobe. "The move to the
Creative Cloud is a major component in the transformation of Adobe.”
Adobe Creative Cloud will include the following:
•
Applications –
Access to the portfolio of Adobe Creative Suite tools as well as the six newly
announced Adobe Touch Apps. The
offering will include industry-leading desktop tools such as Photoshop,
InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro, After Effects and innovative
new tools such as Adobe Edge and Muse.
•
Services – Key
Adobe Digital Publishing Suite technologies, for delivering interactive
publications on tablets; a tier of Adobe Business Catalyst, for building and
managing websites; and new design services, such as the ability to use
cloud-based fonts for website design, via technology acquired by Adobe through
its newly announced acquisition of Typekit Inc.
•
Community –
Capabilities that enable users to present and share their work and ideas with
peers around the world and a forum for feedback and inspiration that will
foster connections between creative people.
Adobe Creative Cloud will become a focal point during the creative
process.
Adobe Touch Apps
“Adobe
Touch Apps deliver high-impact creative expression to anyone who has a tablet,”
said Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer, Adobe. “With Adobe imaging magic
coming to tablet devices, new apps like Photoshop Touch will open your mind
about the potential of the touch interface for creativity and demonstrate that
tablets are an essential part of anyone’s creative arsenal.”
Anticipating
the way people are integrating tablets into their everyday lives, the new
family of Adobe Touch Apps will allow users to create content on tablet devices
freeing them from the desktop or laptop computer. The new Adobe Touch Apps
include:
•
Adobe
Collage A
collaboration tool which lets creative types mix images, text and graphics and
immediately transfer to the cloud, providing easy access in Photoshop or
sharing with others. Features include importing of images, customizable pen
types for drawing, adding text, and applying color themes. The canvas grows
automatically to accommodate the space needed as assets are added.
•
Adobe
Debut allows the presentation of design ideas to, well virtually
anywhere. The app opens tablet-compatible versions of Creative Suite files for
convenient viewing on the tablet, including Photoshop layers and Illustrator
art boards. Feedback can be provided using a markup pen tool to add annotations
on top of the work.
•
Adobe
Ideas is a vector-based drawing tool. Using a stylus or finger,
strokes appear smooth at any zoom level. Starting with a blank canvas, users
can choose color themes, and pull in tablet-compatible image files that can be
controlled as separate layers. Finished results are easily accessed in Adobe
Illustrator or Photoshop via their cloud integration.
•
Adobe Kuler makes it easy to generate color
themes which can be exported as color swatches for Adobe Creative Suite
projects. Social engagement in the community is enhanced by rating and
commenting on themes.
•
Adobe Photoshop Touch contains core Photoshop
features. With simple finger gestures, users can combine multiple photos into
layered images, make popular edits and apply professional effects. The
tablet-exclusive Scribble Selection Tool allows users to easily extract objects
in an image by simply scribbling on what to keep and then what to remove.
Additionally, the app helps users quickly find images, share creations, and
view comments through integration with Facebook and Google Search. Using the
syncing capabilities that are a component of Adobe Creative Cloud, files can be
opened in Adobe Photoshop.
•
Adobe
Proto enables the development of interactive wireframes and
prototypes for websites and mobile apps on a tablet. Ideas are communicated and
shared with teams and clients using a touch-based interface. Gestures quickly
express a design concept, explain website structure or demonstrate
interactivity. The wireframe or prototype then can be exported as industry
standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and shared in popular browsers for immediate
review and approval.
Adobe
Touch Apps build on the launch of Adobe Carousel, which provides access to your
entire photo library across your tablets, smartphones and desktops.
Digital
Publishing Suite — Single Edition
Now small design studios and freelance designers can leverage
Adobe’s DPS and publish their content to the iPad for a one-time fee of $395.
Other Announcements
Adobe has acquired Typekit, a service that allows you to choose
from, and easily incorporate, hundreds of fonts into your web projects. This
service will be included in Adobe Creative Cloud. This could add
significant design enhancements to web sites and digital publications.
Adobe announced their plans to acquire PhoneGap,
a development platform which lets you build mobile applications in standard web
technologies yet leverage access to native APIs across various devices and
platforms.
Adobe also announced that the WoodWing publishing system would
be using the DPS platform going forward (to date Woodwing has developed it’s
own method for publishing content to tablet devices). WoodWing will integrate
their workflows and standardize on Adobe’s DPS tools and also become a reseller
for Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.
HTML
Adobe has been busy in
the HTML space -- writing some specs for “CSS Regions” and “Exclusions” which
they have proposed to the WSC, as well as contributing code to the WebKit
browser engine which is used in Safari and Chrome:
Key highlights of CSS
Regions and Exclusions include:
•
Story threading — allows content to flow in multiple disjointed boxes expressed
in CSS and HTML, making it possible to express more complex, magazine-style
threaded layouts, including pull quotes and sidebars.
•
Region styling — allows content to be styled based on the region it flows
into. For example, the first few lines that fit into the first region of an
article may be displayed with a different color or font, or headers flowing in
a particular region may have a different background color or size. Region
styling is not currently implemented in the CSS Regions prototype.
•
Arbitrary content shapes and exclusions — allows content to fit
into arbitrary shapes (not just rectangular boxes) or to flow around complex
shapes.
Flash
The new releases of Adobe Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3 enable
the next generation of immersive application experiences for gaming, rich
media, and data-driven apps. There were several demos of advances in
rendering which allow rich gaming experiences which were previously confined to
the console now moving to the browser.
Adobe AIR
Native extensions for Adobe AIR provide developers with easy access to
device-specific libraries and features. Upcoming Flex 4.6 and Flash Builder 4.6
releases will provide new components, access to the latest platform and device
capabilities, and native install experiences.
Adobe Digital
Enterprise Platform (ADEP)
ADEP
software (formerly Adobe LiveCycle and CRX) is a “composite content
application” platform. Much of the underlying technology is not new, but has
been assembled in a collection of components which together form the building
blocks which can be assembled in various ways based on the solution needed.
One of
the key components is CRX which is an object-based data store and content
repository based on the JCR 2.0 specs. Combined with CQ5, which contains a
workflow engine, this platform offers a robust and extensible solution to many
document management and publishing needs. The platform includes the following
standard interfaces:
•
Java Content Repository API
1.0 (JSR-170) and 2.0 (JSR-283)
•
Content Management
Interoperability Services (CMIS)
•
WebDAV, including
versioning, access control, and search
•
Common Internet File System
(CIFS) and Server Message Block (SMB) to act as network file share
•
RESTful web API to build
JavaScript-based content applications
•
LDAP and JAAS for user
provisioning
•
Remoting with RMI and HTTP
over DavEx
•
Mounted content from
third-party repositories via the native interface, for example, Microsoft
SharePoint
Sneak Peeks
Adobe
revealed several new technologies being developed in their labs -- these
features may or may not ever be included in shipping software, but they give
some insight into the talent at work within their engineering group.
•
Local Layer Ordering: A Photoshop plug-in
which provides a pointer to specify which part of an image should be layered
above/below another portion of the image.
•
DeBlurring: Another plug-in took blurred photos,
calculated the motion of the camera movement and “reversed” the motion,
resulting in a crystal clear photo.
•
RubbaDub: A developer from Japan created a bit of syncing
software that lets you re-voice someone, and then automatically syncs it with
the actors lip movements.
•
Another plugin took crowd-sourced video
footage from various cell phones, YouTube, etc. and automatically synced up all
the tracks, no matter the quality or length of the track.
•
Monocle: A sophisticated profiling application
which provides telemetry data for Flex
applications, so developers can quickly identify performance issues with their
applications.
•
Liquid Layout: This comes
from InDesign and will likely be part of the Digital Publishing Suite. It
provides for a layout to automatically resize and reflow based on the size of
the container, which could be a viable solution for publishing the same
document to various tablet devices of different sizes.
•
Smart Debugging (aka “How
did my code get here?”). This is a debugging tool based on a recorded trace,
letting you step backwards as well as forwards through code.
•
Near-field Communications
for AIR. This demo showed near-field communications for Adobe AIR for mobile.
We are most familiar with this for applications like payments, where you wave
your mobile at a sensor, but it has plenty of potential for other scenarios,
such as looking up product details without having to scan a barcode.
•
Pixel Nuggets: The
idea of this one is to identify “like” images by analyzing a collection of
photos and searching for commonality. For example, you could select a color or
shape and it will find all images which match that color and/or shape. It does
a pretty good job of recognizing faces as well.
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