Archive for the ‘Acrobat’ Category

Adobe launches subscription-based Creative Cloud in Singapore

Monday, January 21st, 2013

The Adobe Creative Cloud is a membership-based service that provides unlimited access to download and install all Creative Suite desktop applications, and other selected Adobe programs.

Creative Cloud for teams (US$840 per user per year), the first of the Creative Cloud membership options available in Singapore, is tailored for small and medium businesses.

Creative Cloud for Teams is now available in Singapore.

Creative Cloud for Teams is now available in Singapore.

First released in the US in April 2012, Adobe Creative Cloud includes unlimited access to download and install all Creative Suite desktop applications, plus Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Muse, Adobe Edge tools and services; game developer tools and integration with Photoshop Touch apps.

(more…)

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Acrobat, Adobe, After Effects, Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Launch, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Prices, Software | 2 Comments »

Adobe CS6 is available now

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

Adobe has announced the immediate availability of Adobe Creative Suite 6.

Adobe CS6 is available now.

Adobe CS6 is available now.

Launched globally two weeks ago, Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) comprises some 14 software for photo and video editing, graphics design and and web development, Flash/HTML and app building tools, as well as desktop publishing.

Suite Price
Master Collection S$3,925
Production Premium S$2,868
Design & Web Premium S$2,868
Design & Web Standard S$1,963

These software include Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, InDesign and Flash.

The component software have been packaged in into four suites, depending on the needs of the customer.

A subscription-based version of CS6 (Creative Cloud: US$600 per year) is also available in the US although it is not available in Singapore and some other parts of the world.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Acrobat, Adobe, After Effects, Availability, Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Prices, Software, Specifications | No Comments »

Adobe introduces Creative Suite 5.5

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Adobe’s major mid-cycle product release targets enhancements across Flash, HTML5, video, mobile App and digital publishing tools. It also extends workflows to include tablets.

Adobe announced today the new Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 product line, enabling designers and developers to target popular and emerging smartphone and tablet platforms, as the revolution in mobile communications fundamentally changes the way content is distributed and consumed.

Today’s launch marks a significant change to Adobe’s product release strategy for Creative Suite, the design and development software catering for print, video, mobile and online media.

Adobe now plans to have milestone Creative Suite product introductions at 24-month intervals and – starting with Creative Suite 5.5 – major mid-cycle releases between the milestone versions.

Product lineup and pricing

The new Creative Suite product lineup is headlined by Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection, which includes, in a single package, all of Adobe’s industry-defining creative tools, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.

These products are available separately or as components of one or more of the five Creative Suite editions.

The complete Creative Suite 5.5 lineup and their estimated street prices are tabulated below, and is scheduled to ship within 30 days. Upgrade pricing, volume licensing and education pricing are also available.

Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection: US$3159
Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium: US$2309
Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium: US$2185
Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium: US$2065
Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard: US$1579

Key enhancements

The new Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium suite sees enhancements in HTML5 and Adobe Flash authoring tools, allowing users to create, deliver and monetize rich content and applications for virtually any screen.

This release helps enable designers and developers to deliver mobile applications on Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS, iOS and other platforms; create rich browser-based content across screens using HTML5; and leverage Flash Player to deliver premium video content, casual games and rich Internet applications.

Tablet devices are now included in the creative workflow, going beyond the desktop computer. A new scripting engine in Adobe Photoshop and an enhanced Photoshop Software Development Kit (SDK) enable developers to build tablet applications that interact with Photoshop from Android, BlackBerry and iOS devices.

Adobe also announced three new iPad applications that demonstrate the creative possibilities of using tablets to drive common Photoshop workflows – Adobe Color Lava for Photoshop, Adobe Eazel for Photoshop and Adobe Nav for Photoshop.

With the launch of Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 – available as part of the Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium suite – and the Flex 4.5 framework, developers can easily develop and deploy mobile applications to the over 200 million Android, BlackBerry Playbook and iOS devices anticipated to be in market by the end of 2011.

With more than 131 million smartphones expected to have Flash Player installed by the end of the year, Adobe Flash makes it possible to bring rich content to desktops and devices inside the browser.

Flash Player is supported on Android, HP webOS and Google TV today. BlackBerry Tablet OS, upcoming versions of Windows Phone, Samsung SmartTVs and others are expected to support Flash Player in the near future.

For video and audio professionals, Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium suite promises breakthrough performance, workflow improvements, creative innovations, and powerful new audio editing capabilities.

The powerful Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, introduced in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, broadens its graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware support to include laptops and more supported cards, allowing users to open projects faster, get real-time feedback and work more smoothly at higher resolutions.

Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium suite includes Adobe’s recent product innovations in digital publishing to create slick digital editions for tablet devices. Using InDesign CS5.5, in combination with the integrated Folio Producer toolset, designers can add new levels of interactivity to their page layouts targeted to tablet devices.

Documents can include video, audio, panoramic views, 360-degree object rotation, pan and zoom of images, integration of HTML and HTML5 content and other interactive overlays. Leading to a much more robust and engaging reading experience.

Creative Suite 5.5 is tightly integrated with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to support publication, sale and analysis of content on an array of tablet devices.

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 products integrate with Adobe CS Live, a set of online services that accelerate key aspects of the creative workflow and enable designers to focus on creating their best work. CS Live online services include: Adobe BrowserLab; Adobe CS Review; Acrobat.com; Adobe Story; and Adobe SiteCatalyst NetAverages powered by Omniture. Adobe CS Live is free until April 12,2012.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Acrobat, Adobe, Events, Flash, Launch, Photoshop, Prices, Software, Tablets, Tech news | 1 Comment »

Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium and Design Standard suites

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium comprises new versions of Adobe InDesign, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Flash Professional and Adobe Flash Catalyst, as well as Adobe Acrobat X Pro, Adobe Illustrator CS5, Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended and Adobe Fireworks CS5.

Estimated street price for the Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium suite is US$2309 while that of the Design Standard suite is US$1579. Both are part of five suite editions of the Creative Suite 5.5 line of software and will ship within 30 days.

The software in the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium suite enables designers to produce content faster and deliver immersive, visually rich experiences to screens of all shapes and sizes. New features in Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium bolster the many timesaving features that were introduced in Creative Suite 5 to improve efficiency of everyday tasks.

Design for both Tablets and Smartphones

With Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium, designers can create immersive digital magazines, e-books with accompanying video and audio, websites based on HTML5 and CSS3 standards, and interactive mobile applications built with familiar Flash tools that display consistently across Android, BlackBerry Playbook and iOS devices.

Updates to Dreamweaver CS5.5 (including the Live View mode, CSS panel and Multiscreen Preview panel) streamline the design of websites that need to be optimized for viewing on multiple devices, and let designers preview desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers side-by-side.

With the new Folio Producer tools in InDesign, which work in conjunction with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, creative professionals can design interactive, rich media digital magazines, newspapers, corporate publications and advertising for reading on tablet devices such as Apple iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook and a wide variety of Android tablets.

Using InDesign CS5.5 in combination with the integrated Folio Producer toolset, designers can add new levels of interactivity to their page layouts. Documents targeted to tablet devices can include video, audio, panoramic views, 360-degree rotation of objects, pan and zoom of images, integration of HTML5 content and other interactive overlays.

Designers can also easily test how their content will look and feel on a broad array of tablet devices directly from within InDesign. Once content authoring is completed in InDesign, tight integration with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite allows users with a Digital Publishing Suite account (available separately) to efficiently produce, distribute, optimize and monetize content for tablet devices.

A number of features in InDesign have also been enhanced to improve reading experiences on e-book devices, such as Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony Reader and Apple iPad.

Designers can now add refined typography, images that resize automatically to fit virtually any screen, and video and audio for e-book reader applications that support HTML5 video and audio tags.

New capabilities in Flash Professional CS5.5 let designers and developers build mobile applications that run on iPhone, iPad, Android devices and BlackBerry Playbook. The apps can be easily deployed through the application markets such as Apple’s iTunes App Store, Android Market and BlackBerry AppWorld.

Beyond the Desktop

Adobe is continuing to extend productivity with cloud services and new tablet apps.

Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium works with new tablet applications for Photoshop (available separately) that enhance the creative workflow and extend the design experience beyond the desktop.

A new scripting engine in Adobe Photoshop and an enhanced Photoshop Software Development Kit (SDK) enable developers to build tablet applications that interact with Photoshop from Android, BlackBerry and iOS devices.

Adobe has used the new SDK to deliver three iPad applications that demonstrate the creative possibilities of using tablets to drive common Photoshop workflows – Adobe Color Lava for Photoshop, Adobe Eazel for Photoshop and Adobe Nav for Photoshop.

Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium also integrates with CS Live, a set of hosted services that accelerate key project workflows such as shared reviews. CS Live online services are free until April 12, 2012.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Acrobat, Adobe, Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Launch, Photoshop, Prices, Software, Specifications, Tablets | 1 Comment »

Adobe launches PDF Guild.

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

In a bid to drum up interest in a staid workhorse product, and get consumers to look beyond its ubiquitous role as a document reader, Adobe has embarked upon an innovative campaign to convince people that Acrobat X is more than just a reader, or a document archiver.

Acrobat X contains a complete suite of modules to facilitate “sharing and collaboration of digital documents amongst co-worders”.

What is Acrobat?

To the man in the street, Acrobat brings immediately to mind Acrobat Reader, the ubiquitous free browser plug-in that enables the opening and viewing of documents saved in the equally ubiquitous PDF format.

Nothing exciting. In fact, many third party software publishe PDF reading software that promises to be smaller and faster than the original.

The other half of Acrobat comprises other modules that facilitate document archival via conversion of documents from proprietary formats to the universal PDF format. It enhances document collaboration by tracking and managing comments and amendments that co-workers can add – even simultaneously – and then reconcile into a neatly compiled working document.

Have you tried circulating minutes to members of a meeting and manually compiling spurious comments that come in from those members suggesting amendments? An Acrobat-based workflow can alleviate much of those grunt work and save everybody’s time and effort.

The price of such rigorous sharing is security, and this is implemented via document encryption and password-based access and rights.

Another form of document collaboration involves the interaction between the publishers and readers, and this is managed by the form authoring and editing module in Acrobat.

As for content, in addition to just plain text documents, Acrobat can add sound, video and graphics to the text. The latest PDF Portfolio module assembles the source files of multi-media elements together into a single multi-document portfolio packaged in slick Flash-based presentations (Unfortunately, there’s no HTML5 versions available – pity!).

Users don’t have to track multiple files manually to put them together outside of Acrobat.

Adobe PDF Guild

No wonder the folks at Adobe believe they have a product that does magic. They are aware, however, that general awareness of Acrobat’s full capabilities beyond that of the Reader is sorely lacking.

That’s why Adobe has launched the PDF Guild. Based on a metaphor of magic and wizardry, the PDF Guild seeks to build a community of Acrobat users that shares the knowledge and expertise of its members in the software rigorously with each other.

For starters, Adobe has built a simple self-paced computer-based learning package in the guise of a simple RPG (role-playing game) “adventure” to entice people to try out Acrobat and experience for themselves how easy to accomplish the tasks that Acrobat boasts it can achieve.

Five “quests” challenge the curious who signs up to complete assignments and quiz questions on “Document Conversion”, “Document Collaboration”, “Document Security”, “Dynamic Forms” and “Rich Documents”.

I’ve cleared all five quests and found that the hands-on experience did provide a clearer understanding how to do stuff in Acrobat.

To participate, visit www.adobepdfguild.com. Participants who don’t yet own a copy of Acrobat X can download and install a 30-day trial version. You’ll need a Facebook account too to participate.

Everything you need to complete the assigned tasks are provided, right down to working documents that you can download, work with in Acrobat and then save. The result is than uploaded from within www.adobepdfguild.com. Stumped along the way? Hints are available to make the road a little less difficult.

The magic? You start out as an the sorcerer’s apprentice and as you accomplish points, you get promoted to high ranks of wizardry, like Sorcerer, Mage and ultimately Wizard.

Goodies? The points earned can be used to redeem stuff from Adobe, from notepads and thumbdrives to free copies of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 and Adobe Premiere Elements 9. Additional ways of earning points include introducing friends via email or Facebook, and participating in discussions at the Guild’s Facebook page.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Acrobat, Adobe, Software, Tech news | No Comments »

Launch of Adobe Acrobat X

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

Acrobat X aspires to be the Swiss knife of multi-media communications – facilitating the sharing and collaboration of digital documents amongst co-workers.

Box shots of Pro and Suite versions of Adobe Acrobat X

Adobe Acrobat X

The newly launched Version 10 sees its continued evolution – from its original inception as a standardised document viewer – into a vehicle for sharing compilations (Adobe calls them Portfolios) of text and graphics-embellished documents, voice and video presentations, as well as Flash animations.

Together with the free Acrobat Reader X, tighter collaboration among co-workers is enhanced with features like the ability to leave and consolidate comments amongst multiple recipients of a PDF document, as well as integration with Microsoft SharePoint and Office suite 2010.

Other features include the ability to automate routine, multi-step tasks with scripted Actions that do stuff like removing private meta data prior to publication and sharing of documents. User interface has also been made more ergonomical with the ability to display the most commonly used tools into one pane. Enterprise-wide deployment of the software is also made easier for IT administrators.

The software ships 30 days from today. Between now and the shipping date, buyers of the previous version Acrobat 9 will get a free upgrade to Acrobat X when the latter ships. There are three versions of Acrobat X available:

The detailed feature list of the three versions can be found here. The main difference between the Standard and Pro versions is in the inclusion of Adobe LiveCycle® Designer Enterprise Suite 2 in the latter. The Suite version sees the inclusion of image-editor Photoshop CS5, presentation converter Presenter 7, user-interface capture and presenter Captivate 5, and video converter Media Encoder CS5.

Adobe Acrobat X works in conjunction with the free Acrobat Reader X and online service Acrobat.com.

Reader X expands PDF access to mobile devices for Android, Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry Tablet OS. Apple iOS platforms as well as Windows Phone 7 phones – which do not support Flash – will not be able to access Portfolios since Portfolios requires Flash support.

Acrobat.com sees the introduction of Adobe SendNow, a new document exchange service that enables users to send and receive large files and track them with proof of receipt, avoid problems arising from email gateway, complicated FTP servers, and costs of expensive overnight mail. Adobe CreatePDF enables easy conversion of files to professional PDF documents from within Adobe Reader X or any Web browser.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Acrobat, Adobe, Events, Software, Tech news | 1 Comment »