Adobe gets into advertising biz, teams up with Gigya

Filed under: Business, Developer, Adobe

After Adobe's recent acquisition of analytics giant Omniture for $1.8 billion, there was a lot of speculation that Adobe was beginning a foray into the advertising. Now we've got some more clues, since Adobe's partnering with Gigya, a company that distributes widgets and advertising. Now, Adobe's got its fingers in every part of the process, from content creation to ads to analytics.

Adobe's new Distribution Manager lets developers share their Flash widgets on 70 sites, tracks traffic for the widgets, and serves ads. Destinations include Facebook, MySpace and iGoogle, amongst others. It also supports mobile devices, including Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. The iPhone is also (sort of) supported, but without Flash, the widgets have to be part of approved app store apps. Developers can follow their traffic and ads with - what else? - an Adobe Air app.

[via Techcrunch]

Adobe gets into advertising biz, teams up with Gigya originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe Story offers web-based script (as in movie) writing and collaboration

Filed under: Adobe, Beta, Web

Somewhere in the depths of my mind, there's a burning desire to one day write a screenplay. It probably has as much to do with my disbelief at some of the crap that actually gets made into Hollywood movies as my own creative desire, but it is what it is.

So when I woke up this morning and checked on Adobe Labs, my curiosity was piqued by Story, a new web-based script authoring app that is now available to test on Adobe Labs.

Obviously Story isn't for everyone. I can, however, easily see this become a terrific compliment for animation studios who use Adobe products like Flash to produce their cartoons. Since it's web based, Story provides anywhere (with net access)/any time access to your writing tools and documents - critical, because you never know when a flash of brilliance will strike.

Story is tailored to the script-writing process, making it easy to hack together character bios, drop links to web pages you want to reference, and, of course, compose your masterpiece. There's even a full screen option for distraction-free writing.

Aspiring creatives, give Story a try and tell us what you think in the comments! Story recommends IE6 or later, Firefox 2.0+, and Safari 3.x. Other browsers will receive a warning message, but you can click through and try your luck -- Chrome 4 worked just fine for me.

Adobe Story offers web-based script (as in movie) writing and collaboration originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe releases Photoshop Elements 8

Filed under: Photo, Windows, Macintosh, Adobe, Commercial, Windows x64

Yesterday Adobe announced the latest version of Photoshop Elements, their slightly-lighterweight consumer-oriented photo editing application. New features in the Windows release include Photomerge Exposure which combines differently-exposed shots of the same scene to create uniformly-exposed shots (similar to High Dynamic Range photos), improved Online Sharing, and people recognition (much like Picasa).

For Photoshop Elements 8 on the Mac (which ships in October), there's Bridge CS4 for image management, scene cleaning - to remove objects like people or cars across multiple photos - and TouchUp brushes to easily improve your snaps.

Photoshop Elements costs US$99 for the Mac or Windows edition - and Windows users can also pick up Photoshop Elements 8 and Premiere Elements 8 in a bundle for US$149. Windows users can also download a trial version of Photoshop Elements from the Adobe website.

If you're not convinced by Elements, we've covered a few alternatives recently on Download Squad: Paint.NET and GIMP 2.8 for Windows, and Pixelmator and Acorn for Mac OS X.

Adobe releases Photoshop Elements 8 originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Opacity lets you create great screen graphics

Filed under: Macintosh, Productivity, Adobe, Apple, Shareware

We've covered a bucketload of image editors here at Download Squad recently: from Photoshop Elements, to stylish OS X apps to great Windows image manipulators. But if you're someone who works with icons and screen graphics, you're probably using something other than Photoshop Elements to create your stunning vector icons and glyphs.

Sure, there's the brawn of Illustrator if you want to spend big - or already own Creative Suite - and there's free & open-source Inkscape if you're looking for something that's also cross-platform. But if you're on a Mac, there's also another choice: Opacity. Unlike most vector drawing apps, Opacity is specifically designed to help you create resolution-independent icons and glyphs.

There's a tonne of presets available - from iPhone icons to desktop app icons - and perhaps most impressively, there's an option to export the vector drawing as - get this - Objective-C code that you bring straight over to Xcode and build for the iPhone and OS X platforms.

Sure, it's pretty specialised - but if you're creating icons and the like then you simply have to give Opacity a go. A licence costs US$89.99, with a free demo available - as well as a slimmer Opacity Express for US$39.99.

Opacity lets you create great screen graphics originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Flash Player 10.1 to support smartphones, NVIDIA powered netbooks... next year

Filed under: Video, Adobe, Mobile, Web

Adobe Flash has become the standard protocol for web video over the last few years. And while Flash is capable of some pretty excellent video quality, it's not exactly light on system resources. In fact, it's kind of a CPU-hog, which is why some computers with slower processors (and most netbooks) struggle to play high quality of high definition video from YouTube, Hulu, and other online video sites.

But that's about toe change. Kind of. Adobe has announced that Flash 10.1 will support GPU acceleration for NVIDIA graphics, which means that if you've got a computer with NVIDIA GeForce, ION, or Tegra graphics in it, you should be able to watch high definition Flash video in fullscreen mode even if you have a slow processor like an Intel Atom or ARM-based chip.

What's more, Adobe is going to bring Flash 10.1 to Smartphones, ending the separate but unequal era of Flash Lite. Flash 10.1 will be available for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Google Android, Palm WebOS, and Symbian phones. The iPhone's not on that list because Adobe still hasn't worked out an arrangement with Apple to add support for Flash 10.1 to the iPhone's Safari web browser, but that could still happen.

Flash 10.1 is due to hit the streets in the first half of 2010. But there should be beta versions available before the end of 2009.

You can check out videos of Flash Player 10.1 on the Palm Pre and Toshiba TG01 at Adobe Labs.

Flash Player 10.1 to support smartphones, NVIDIA powered netbooks... next year originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe Flash CS5 converts Flash to iPhone apps

Filed under: Developer, Games, Adobe

Flash is coming to the iPhone! Well, sort of. Adobe is showing off a new feature of Flash CS5 Professional that will convert Flash/Actionscript into iPhone apps. The public beta of CS5 with Flash Platform is due out later this year, but for now, you can test out some iPhone games that were created with the new system. For comparison, check out the puzzle game Chroma Circuit on the web and then on the iPhone.

This is good news for Flash developers who want to get their games into the App Store without having to write iPhone-native apps themselves, especially because it allows them to reuse the same code on the web or on Flash-friendly mobile platforms. This might mean that we'll see some of our favorite Flash time-wasters on the iPhone, too. There's also the possibility that the App Store will be flooded with the same awful Flash games that plague the web now. Developing a lame Flash game for the web doesn't have the same $99 pricetag that signing up for the iPhone developer program does, though, so that might keep the quality of iPhone game offerings from taking a huge dive.

Adobe Flash CS5 converts Flash to iPhone apps originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Eolas v. Everyone you've ever heard of

Filed under: Business, Developer, Web services, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, web 2.0

Tireless patent troll Intellectual Property holder Eolas has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against, well.. nearly everyone. The issue at hand deals with two patents in Eolas' possession -- the first of which was the subject of a successful lawsuit against Microsoft back in 2004.

The second patent, what Eolas refers to as "a continuation of the '906 patent" claims to hold as the sole intellectual property of Eolas, "fully-interactive embedded applications [...] through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques." The second patent is so far untested in court -- and ostensibly covers more popular websites than you can shake a knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag at.

I haven't had time to delve into the language of the patent, but this reeks of utter nonsense to me so far. In my layman's oppinion, Eolas may have made a crucial mistake however, taking aim at so many large targets at once -- with one untested patent, and another which Microsoft already came rather close to beating.

Take the leap to read the whole extortion demand press release, and see the enormous list of publicly traded web firms included.

Continue reading Eolas v. Everyone you've ever heard of

Eolas v. Everyone you've ever heard of originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe releases ultra-light iPhone version of Photoshop

Filed under: Photo, Adobe, iPhone

Photoshop has come to the iPhone in the form of Adobe's new Photoshop.com app. As someone with a lot of experience using Photoshop on the desktop, and a little bit of practice with Photoshop.com, I was surprised to find that the iPhone version is incredibly light. There are no layers, no brushes, and no levels ... just a lot of filters. You can touch up the exposure and saturation on your photos, add borders and vignettes, and apply a tint or a number of preset color effects. When you're done, you can save your work on your phone or upload directly to a photoshop.com account.

Honestly, I think Adobe got this one right. It would be cool to do some serious photo editing on the iPhone, but even the 3GS doesn't have the specs for the more resource-heavy features we've come to expect from Adobe's Creative Suite apps. iPhone users mostly just want to make their photos look a little better, and it's not like they're shooting with some kind of 12 megapixel DSLR. The Photoshop app delivers: just throw a little soft focus on there, fix up the colors, and you're good to go. The app also seems to be a promotional effort to get people to sign up for photoshop.com accounts, but it's not much harder to save your images and then upload them to Flickr or another photo sharing site you like.

Adobe releases ultra-light iPhone version of Photoshop originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Keeping your OS patched isn't enough

Filed under: Security, Adobe, Microsoft

The prevailing wisdom is that if you keep your operating system up to date with the latest security patches, and you run antivirus software, you're probably safe from malware. Unfortunately, that's just not true.

Consider yesterday's news that Trend Micro has discovered a new zero-day exploit in Adobe Reader. Who doesn't have Adobe Reader on their machine? If you have it, how careful are you about keeping it up to date? To be fair, the likelihood that you are going to try to open an infected PDF file is probably fairly small, but on the other hand, Adobe Reader is only one of probably hundreds of applications on your machine. As Mozilla recently discovered, thousands of Firefox users have potentially vulnerable older versions of Flash running on their machines.

So what's a responsible computer user to do? It's a difficult problem. Some software vendors are very responsible about pushing out updates to their software when needed. Others leave it in the user's hands. There are tools that will scan your machine and let you know when updates are available, but I'm not a big fan of these; I think users should know just what is changing on their system.

The best you can do is to be vigilant and consider your software at the same level you do the operating system when ensuring your machine is up to date. Obviously web-facing software or software that interacts with downloaded files are the biggest concern, and anything that is ubiquitous or incredibly popular, like Microsoft Office or your favorite browser.

What do you do to make sure your machine is as secure as you can make it?

[via InSecurity Complex]

Keeping your OS patched isn't enough originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook is a full-blown Facebook app

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Adobe, Freeware, Social Software

Adobe has released an Adobe AIR based client for Facebook called Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook. As Digital Inspiration notes, it's better than Facebook's official app.

Photo Uploader for Facebook offers most of Facebook's functionality, with uploading photos being only a small part of it, though it does make uploading photos much better than using Facebook's web interface. The app offers various views including a rich media version and a plain text version, as well as offering a slide show mode.

Adobe is really selling this app short by naming it Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook, given the full functionality of the app. Maybe they don't want to step on any toes, but it seems that with an app this powerful, they'd want to pitch it as an AIR version of the Facebook experience.

Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook is a full-blown Facebook app originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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