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Adobe Systems opened up Photoshop Express on Thursday, its long-anticipated Web-based image editor aimed at the millions of consumers that want a simple way to touch up, share, and store photos.

Photoshop Express, available for free with 2 gigabytes of storage at www.photoshop.com/express, is a significant departure from Adobe's desktop software business and a big bet that it can make money offering Web services directly to consumers.

The application, which needs Flash Player 9 to run, pushes the limits of browser-based applications and will likely ratchet up the competition on the dozens of free and online … Read more

Mathematica, Wolfram Research's sophisticated software for complicated mathematical calculations and visualization, is going online.

The O'Reilly School of Technology announced Wednesday a licensing deal with Wolfram that will let it create an online version of Mathematica called Hilbert that "will emulate the desktop version of the software with remarkable fidelity."

The software will be available to students in the second half of the year, O'Reilly said. Hilbert will be available through the O'Reilly School of Technology, an online education division of publisher O'Reilly Media.

Going one step further in fulfilling some of the … Read more

Coghead on Monday plans to launch a second version of its hosted application development platform, which the start-up has moved to Adobe Systems' Flex/Flash technology and Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing infrastructure.

The company is one of several targeting what it calls "do-it-yourself developers" at small and midsize businesses.

Such developers are generally tech-savvy enough to write macros in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software or work with scripting languages, but they don't have the same level of training as a professional C++ programmer, for example. The company estimates that there are between 15 … Read more

Doof, says company spokesman Devang Chouhan, is all about "playing games and meeting people" -- in other words: fun. The UK-based "social gaming" start-up aims to mesh aspects of multi-layer online gaming with social networking, providing a highly personalized and visually rich user experience based on the Flex technology.

Liad Shababo, founder of doof, explains: "When we came up with the idea for doof we quickly realised there was nothing like it in the market, and there was a real hunger among social networkers for something new. We have spent months working to perfect the … Read more

In yet another sign that the world's leading software companies are losing their inhibitions around open source, Adobe announced today the launch of the open-source BlazeDS project, high-performance remoting and messaging technology used to "connect back-end data sources to rich Internet applications written with its Flex development tool." This is very cool.

BlazeDS will be made available for free under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Adobe will initially hosts the open-source project and next year plans to create a separate site to host BlazeDS and its Flex developer tool which it intends to open source, said Phil Costa, director of product management for Adobe's Platform Business Unit.

The software is not meant to replace other messaging products, such as enterprise service buses, Costa said. Instead, it can get data from messaging software to move data between databases or enterprise applications and Flash clients, he said. … Read more

I suppose "resurrected" is a bit harsh, since ActiveGrid never really died. More than anything else, ActiveGrid had a hard time explaining just what it was meant to do/be. I'm not very technical, so maybe it was just me, but I heard it explained as an application server and various other things. The true meaning never settled as an easy-to-explain elevator pitch for me.

Now ActiveGrid is back, but this time it's called WaveMaker and its mission is much clearer: help migrate noncompliant client/server applications to the Web. It also has a new CEO/management team, new technology, and a new market: Fortune 2000 developers.

This seems intuitively to be a Very Good Thing (applications are no longer resisting the Web's gravitational pull, and gravity always wins), but it becomes even more so when one considers some blog commentary from WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene:… Read more

We've got a tremendous show for you today, featuring a mall storage room converted into an apartment, using an iPod to whiten your teeth, a look at some controversial new high-tech NYC cabs, a study looking to see how much Roomba owners love their vacs, and keeping clutzes from yanking their cords. Check out today's episode of the Queue.

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[iTunes] Subscribe to our podcast in iTunes

Show Notes:

Mall-partment[Via Boing Boing]

Rock my teeth[Via Apple.ars]

Roomba study

RePlug [Via Geekologie]

Contact us:

TheQueue[… Read more

MMMMmmmm... nothing like the Razr2, a Mercedes-Benz and destruction in Russia to spice up a commute. Plus, we check in on a really easy to use VOIP service and would you pay to download music if you didn't have to? Radiohead hopes you will.

Get The Queue:

[CNET TV] Check out the page on CNET TV

[iTunes] Subscribe to our podcast in iTunes

Show Notes:

RAZR2 marketing stunt[Via Engadget]

NetBank cashes in

High-end media elites

JahJah

Radiohead's "donationware" album

Contact us:

TheQueue[at]CNET.com

Could the end of the next-gen optical format war be on the horizon? While you wait for the shakedown, why not tune in some ambient color for your TV? Plus, organizing meetups with your 700+ Facebook friends, 800 IM contacts and your five real friends isn't an easy task, and we found one service that aims to annoy everyone equally. Lastly, we send Mark the intern out into the streets to see if New Yorkers are scared their workplace computer habits could get them fired. That and more, on today's episode of The Queue.

Get The Queue:

[CNET TV] … Read more