Articles tagged Adobe.

Adobe customers could previously upgrade their Creative Suite from three versions back. So customers could upgrade to Create Suite(CS) 5, from CS 4, CS 3, and CS 2. Many customers either can't afford or don't want to spend the extra cash to upgrade every version. These customers usually upgrade CS every other or every third update. That will all change with Creative Suite 6.

Apple changed the way users purchased Mac applications when they created the Mac App Store at the beginning of the year. Even though it still does not have all the biggest software titles for the Mac, it still is the first place to look for new applications. Can anyone else compete with it?

Amazon is set to find out by creating their own app store for the Mac called Mac Software Downloads. Is there enough room for two stores and can they compete? Lets take a look at the Amazon store experience and see how it compares with the Mac App Store.

I've been a Photoshop user since 1992 starting with Photoshop 2 (that's "2" not "CS2"). I worked in technical support for a color printer manufacturer and we needed to use and learn Photoshop because our customers were using it to print to our printers. Sometimes customers would send their files so we could troubleshoot them and figure out why they weren't printing the way the customer expected. This type of troubleshooting required research, working with Adobe and a lot of trial and error. With all that experimenting I became pretty adept at using Photoshop. Over time there were other titles that came and went, like CorelDraw and Painter, but nothing ever seemed to hold a candle to Photoshop, but then I encountered a game changer.

Whack! No, that wasn't Apple's Steve Jobs laying some open letter smack down on Adobe. This time the hammer on Flash comes from some former Apple engineering employees (according to 9to5mac.com). HTML5 is claimed to be converted on-the-fly from Flash, with no need for additional coding requirements via a new product called HYPE 1.0.

Conversion of Flash to HTML5 is a wonderful thing, but I wouldn't call this a Flash killer (at least not yet). The product allows for the lazy use of Flash to continue as a baseline authoring tool, being converted upon output for iOS and other HTML5-loving devices. But at some point the question will become (if it hasn't already) "Why can't I just design in an HTML5 authoring tool from the get-go, instead of designing in Flash and converting?"

Adobe released version 10.3 of their Flash Player this week. The key areas of improvement are auto-update notification and security control. Both of these features are welcome additions to the Flash Player for Mac users. Does this new version have any new performance enhancements?

As with the last major release 10.2, it is time to run Flash Player 10.3 through its paces to see if there are any performance improvements for Mac users. The tests below were conducted on the same machine and webpages as our previous tests. The latest versions of Safari and Firefox were used to compare Flash Player 10.2.152 with Flash Player 10.3.181 on the chart below.

Today's computers need a Portable Document Format (PDF) viewer as much as a Browser. This read only file format, which stores text, images, and vector graphics also meets secure legal document requirements. Printing to PDF is a great way to save web pages from the internet as it can be viewed on most platforms with a free viewer. Fortunately, Mac users have two free popular options for a PDF viewer: Adobe's Reader and Apple's Preview.

Adobe created the PDF document standard in 1993. Since then, they have provided a reader for many platforms including the Mac. This would seem the obvious choice for a PDF viewer, except Apple's own application Preview comes standard with OS X. Is it worth the effort to install Reader, or is it better to just use Apple's default Preview? Lets find out.

This past February we talked about Final Cut Pro 8's forthcoming release and set of capabilities. The new name, Final Cut Pro X (FCP X), turned out to be different than anticipated, but the changes within the application went well beyond the surprise "X". The latest version of FCP was a bold move by Apple, which – before the official launch – was what Larry Jordan described as "jaw dropping".

But FCP X may have left us with more questions than answers. What exactly is FCP X? Who is its target audience? Will FCP 7 live on? What about the rest of the suite? Along the way to the sneak-peek, Apple gave us some clues with their pro direction.

The talk of the town is Apple's big iPhone 4 deal with Verizon, but Google also came to the table yesterday with a little announcement of their own. Google delivered an under-the-radar announcement, stating they will be dropping support for the h.264 codec in favor of their open source WebM codec.

Google claims their Chrome browser dropping h.264 is about supporting open standards. If Google were truly concerned with supporting open standards, why does the proprietary Flash still ship with Chrome as a preinstalled plug-in? As John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out, the hypocrisy is thick.

Apple's launch of the Mac OS X App Store appears to be an instant success. Apple was on center stage Thursday with their iWork apps ready for download, but one application made available today from Apple caught everyone off guard —Aperture.

The arrival of Aperture on the App Store isn't a just a shot across Adobe's bow, that doesn't do Apple's move justice. What Apple did to Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom software is equivalent to hundreds of cannon rounds being fired upon a ship at point blank range. T-GAAP asked Adobe PR if any Adobe apps were heading to Apple's App Store, but we did not receive a response. But it gets worse for Adobe.

Adobe Flash has been the King of the castle for website animation, video and other "hip and cool" things for about a decade. Yet, ever since Apple released the iPhone and then the iPad without Flash support, the future of Flash has been in question.

Monday Apple released iAd Producer — free for Apple developers. iAd Producer helps generate "Beautiful, motion-rich iAd content” using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. This new application should significantly help developers spend more time on their creative tasks and less time on the technical aspects of getting their iAd to work. But what if Apple were to take one more step?