suite

So you got yourself some Adobe CS3 products, but you're still trying to get your workspace organized or iron out your cross-product workflow or how to use the Puppet tool in After Effects? Apparently lots of other people are in the same position according to a case study from EffectiveUI, developers of Adobe's online Video Workshop application built using Adobe Flex. The tutorials have seen more than 5 million plays over its first year.

The video tutorials cover 22 of Adobe's products including all the CS3 components and span 47 topics. The information comes from product experts … Read more

Kitty Kilobyte is off to Europe for her annual vacation abroad. Like many of us, she loves travel but hates flying. When she asked Power Downloader if he had any advice--such as a program that was so boring it would put her to sleep for 10 hours--he came back with an alternative plan.

Instead of boring herself to sleep, Power Downloader suggested Kitty try a brain challenge--an engaging game that would take her mind off the pre-flight horrors of the TSA and the in-flight trauma of getting stuck with the middle seat. Power D's recommendation this week is MahJong Suite 2008. … Read more

As unexotic as it may sound, I really do enjoy a good game of digital solitaire from time to time. But once you've got the basics down, doesn't it get old? Probably not if SolSuite Solitaire is laying down the deck. A list of games nearing 500 tests luck and skill, and ranges from easy to difficult play. The game has a fair amount of customization, as well as automated tutors and ways to look up rules. High scores are also posted from around the globe. SolSuite Solitaire is thick with statistics that track how many points you … Read more

With the arrival of its online office product, Adobe Systems is putting Microsoft and Google on notice that viable alternatives do exist to the industry's reigning hegemons. What sort of impact the new products will have obviously won't be known for months. But the release is intriguing a lot of people who have weighed into the blogosphere conversation today.

This nifty-looking application suite allows users to create word processing documents, share files, convert PDFs, and hold Web conferences. Adobe also took the wraps off Acrobat 9, which includes support for Flash. You can test out the office suite … Read more

Adobe Systems is offering two-day trials of three beta applications from its next Creative Suite package.

The previews of Dreamweaver for Web design, Fireworks for image editing, and Soundbooth for audio editing became available Monday.

Trials expire after 48 hours for most people, but registered CS3 users get to keep using the CS4 betas until the final applications replace them.

Adobe hasn't publicly confirmed its planned shipping date or the name for the next Creative Suite, which we're nicknaming CS4. Adobe Creative Suite 3 was released in March 2007.

We took a quick test drive of the Dreamweaver … Read more

Users of the next Adobe Creative Suite may be able to mix and mash up the applications with online content and third-party tools.

In a bid to make workspaces more nimble, Adobe Systems is considering making parts of Photoshop and other Creative Suite applications available for users to manipulate within Flash widgets, according to a blog post Monday by John Nack, product manager of Photoshop.

The capability to bring tools from the Creative Suite to the desktop or the Web with Flash or Flex could lead to novel ways of exploring Adobe's expensive, hulking software. Users have mashed up … Read more

This weekend I attended a book party in San Francisco for Jonathan Zittrain. His book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, was recently published and received good reviews. I will be interviewing him at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society 10th anniversary conference on the future of the Internet this week.

At the party, I talked for a few minutes with Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison. The book party was hosted by Ellison's novelist wife, Melanie, and HuffPo's Arianna Huffington. It turns out that Zittrain and Melanie Ellison met in junior high school.… Read more

When the visual effects and animation wizards at Industrial Light & Magic started working on Paramount Pictures film Iron Man, their biggest challenge was creating a suit for the title character that was part CGI and part real costumery.

The story is about genius billionaire industrialist Tony Stark, who's also a bit of a jerk and who designs and sells weapons. In the film's opening sequences, Stark is demonstrating one of his weapons and ends up in a scuffle with terrorists that leaves shrapnel lodged near his heart. To make a long story short, Stark ends up making … Read more

Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee's multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.

Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service--hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications. … Read more