Let's get this out of the way first: if you're looking for updates to Photoshop, move along, there's nothing to see here. Ditto for Illustrator and Fireworks. While there's a lot going on in Adobe's bump to Creative Suite 5.5, those products will retain the CS5 moniker. As for the rest of the crew, the updates to the applications fall into 4 categories: single source, multiple target workflow enhancements; improved interapplication integration; performance boosts and interface tweaks; and broader support for a variety of formats. I'm not going to list all the various new features and tools--that's a great way to lose the forest for the trees--and instead hit some of the highlights. If you're looking for detailed information on any particular product, you can find it on Adobe's site.

So what's new? InDesign makes the ePub format contort in ways it was never intended to; that is, rather than output basic text documents, you can now do fancy-schmancy multimedia stuff like embed video and audio, determine article flow and dynamically resize images. If you're a big publisher and use the Digital Publishing Suite, you can create .folio files with interactive image overlays that support audio, video, slideshows and hyperlinks. To me, though, the most noteworthy addition is mapping styles to HTML, ePub, and PDF tags, as well as the ability to add CSS class names and custom tags.

Flash Pro and Catalyst have improved roundtripping with each other. Catalyst has some interface tweaks, including a new common Library panel. (I'm not a Flash user, but I have to say--Adobe's just adding an Align panel now?) You can also define projects as resizable with parametric scaling. Flash Pro has been updated to support the latest versions of the Player and AIR, with source-level debugging on AIR devices. There's enhanced layer handling (including copy/paste and duplicate), parametric object scaling relative to stage size, and symbol rasterizing to improve playback performance.

On the video side, Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition all seem to play better with each other, and incorporate interface tweaks and performance boosts. Adobe boosted the selection of GPUs supported by Premiere Pro's Mercury Playback Engine, as well as upped the variety of operations which take advantage of it. There seem to be improvements in handling RED workflows and Canon XF video, as well as a new Merge Clips feature for syncing that pesky timecode-free audio that comes from dSLR shooting. Media Encoder has new presets for rendering to a variety of screen sizes. After Effects incorporates the Warp Stabilizer image-stabilization feature about which Adobe released video previews recently. There's also a set of depth-of-field tools to make your video look like it was shot with a dSLR, along with its artistic anti-particle, 3D stereoscopic editing. Audition now runs natively on the Mac OS, and supports native 5.1 surround editing.

Finally, as you'd expect, Dreamweaver beefs up its HTML5 and CSS3 implementations with an enhanced CSS panel and CSS3 code hinting, and updated Live View to support CSS3 attributes. For multiplatform coders, Adobe improved the Multiscreen Preview panel. Now you can see how your beautiful designs will render on all sorts of tiny device screens simultaneously!

Originally posted at Crave

Adobe Systems is something of an industry punching bag in some circles for offering software wedded to a personal computer era we're supposedly outgrowing.

It's time to update that corporate image.

As part of the debut of Creative Suite 5.5, the company today announced a collection of new software that includes three iPad applications; Flash tools better at creating content that reaches devices beyond PCs; and developer tools that bring some of Adobe's strength in design tools to the Web standards world of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

It's not going to be enough to placate critics who dislike the toll the Flash Player takes on their laptops' battery life (never mind that Web standards doing the same thing bring a similar penalty). But it should be enough to convince rational people that Adobe doesn't just see the world through Flash-colored glasses.

Adobe's iPhone, iPad, and Android software so far has been anemic--Photoshop Express is fine as far as it goes, but that's not that far right now. The new applications, due to arrive in May, show more promise and indicate that Adobe isn't blind to the possibilities that tablets hold for the creative set.

Eazel, for $5, is a finger-painting app that uses a clever multitouch interface to bypass menus. Color Lava, for $3, lets people mix colors on a palette and export them to Photoshop. Least assuming but potentially most interesting is Nav, a $2 app that acts as a remote control for Photoshop running on a Wi-Fi connected computer.

The reason Nav is interesting is because it uses a new ability in a free update to Photoshop CS5 that will let other devices control the software. That means others can write their own apps--for example tutorials that actually integrate with the software.

In Web development, the Web design package Dreamweaver CS5.5 draws on standards including HTML5 and CSS3, and it folds in two outside development projects, jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap for handling mobile devices.

Of course, Adobe isn't ditching Flash. New Flash programming tools are geared for reaching mobile devices better, either through Flash directly or with Adobe's indirect repackaging route to reach Apple's iOS devices, and for making development and testing easier. Adobe estimates 131 million smartphones and 69 million tablets will have the Flash Player installed by the end of 2011.

Adobe has plenty of challenges yet. But it's adapting to a new order with more programming environments than personal computers and more cross-platform programming foundations than Flash.

Originally posted at Deep Tech