Tag Archives | Adobe

Adobe Teaches Photoshop to Talk to Tablets

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 10, 2011 at 9:51 pm

A couple of weeks ago, Adobe demoed an ambitious experimental version of Photoshop for the iPad. The company isn’t saying when it might turn into a shipping product. But it is rolling out an intriguing new technology that involves both Photoshop and the iPad. It’s the Photoshop Touch Software Development Kit, an interface that allows apps on the iPad, Android tablets, and the BlackBerry PlayBook to shuttle information back and forth with Photoshop running on a Windows PC or a Mac via Wi-Fi. The Touch SDK can turn a tablet into an extension of the Photoshop interface or let a tablet app move images into Photoshop with one tap–and it’s a neat idea with loads of promise.

Adobe is announcing the Touch SDK as part of an extravaganza of Creative Suite news tonight that includes the announcement of Creative Suite 5.5 (an interim upgrade due within the next month with a bunch of new features, many of them focused on creating Flash and HTML 5 content and apps) and the introduction of subscription plans that will let users opt to pay monthly fees for ongoing access to the latest versions of the Creative Suite apps rather than buying them the traditional way (prices range from $35 a month for one app, such as Photoshop, to $129 a month for the Master Collection, which includes everything). Creative Suite 5.5’s version of Photoshop will support the SDK, but you won’t need to upgrade to it to use Photoshop-enabled tablet apps: Adobe will make a free update available for Photoshop 5.5 on May 3rd, the company says.

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The Xoom Gets Flash. But Don’t Get Too Excited

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 18, 2011 at 11:22 pm

When Motorola’s Xoom hit Verizon stores last month, it was missing some of the features that promised to make it the iPad’s first formidable rival–including its much-touted support for Adobe’s Flash Player. That got fixed today when Adobe released Flash Player 10.2 for Android, a version which supports phones and tablets running versions of Android dating back to last year’s 2.2 Froyo.

I installed the new Flash on the Xoom and started trolling the Web for Flash content to try. My experience was mixed.  Adobe doesn’t claim that this is a finished piece of software: The Honeycomb version of Flash Player is billed as a beta, and according to Engadget’s Sean Hollister, it doesn’t yet support hardware acceleration. (Apparently, the First Law of Mobile Flash–the version you want is always not quite here yet–still holds.)

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Adobe’s Better Mobile Flash: Coming March 18th

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 11, 2011 at 8:16 am

Adobe has announced that Flash Player 10.2 for Android–the first version that supports the tablet-friendly Android 3.0 Honeycomb and which supports the performance-boosting, power-minimizing Stage Video feature–will be available on March 18th. One way or another, Its arrival will surely restart the whole “Should iOS users be distraught over Apple’s refusal to permit Flash?” debate…

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Adobe Helps Turn Flash Into HTML5

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 7, 2011 at 9:01 pm

Flash vs. HTML5. HTML5 vs. Flash. Whatever your take on the respective merits of the two high-profile technologies for creating splashy Web content, you can’t deny that the rivalry between Adobe’s venerable Flash and the assortment of evolving open-source standards collectively known as HTML5 is intense.

But what if Flash could become HTML5?

Starting now–in certain limited instances–it can. First demoed at Adobe’s MAX conference last October, Wallaby is a free new app from Adobe using its AIR platform that sucks in Flash content created with the Flash Professional authoring software, then spits out an HTML5 version designed to work well in WebKit browsers.

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Adobe to Bring a Better Flash to Mobile Gadgets

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 14, 2011 at 10:53 am

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona–which I’m not attending this year–Adobe has announced that it’s planning to bring Stage Video, the FlashPlayer 10.2 feature that permits fast video playback that doesn’t kill the battery–to mobile devices. It’ll be available on Android and for RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet; the Android version will require Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which means it’ll work on tablets such as the Xoom but not on any currently-available Android smartphones.

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From Flash to HTML5

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 29, 2010 at 9:34 am

At Adobe’s MAX conference this week, the company had a tech demo of a neat idea: a Flash-to-HTML5 converter.

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Flash on Macs: Birthright? Curse? Something Else?

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 22, 2010 at 11:54 am

I’ve been using a new MacBook Air which Apple loaned me for review–thoughts coming soon–and it didn’t take me very long to discover that it didn’t have Adobe’s FlashPlayer preinstalled. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether there was anything noteworthy about that–I couldn’t remember whether any Mac I’d ever used came with Flash, or whether I’d just installed it myself. In this case I did the latter (although–odd coincidence–going to the Flash download page got me an error message at first, and I had to come back later).

But as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes, the lack of Flash is a new twist in the Apple-Adobe squabble. Apple says that it’s still cheerfully supporting Flash, and that downloading it from Adobe is the best way to get the safest, most current version. Others, of course, may draw more conspiratorial conclusions. (The timing is probably a coincidence, but it’s an interesting one: The news is hitting right before Adobe’s big, news-filled conference MAX kicks off.)

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