Flash 10.1: Developing for Desktop and Device

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Yesterday Adobe made the beta of its new Flash 10.1 player available for desktop testing via Adobe Labs. The fact that it’s only a point release suggests that it’s a relatively trivial update but that’s not the case. In fact 10.1 is one of the most significant releases in the history of Flash.

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PowerPoint and Silverlight: a perfect match?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

With its place at the heart of the Microsoft Office suite, PowerPoint is the overwhelmingly dominant presentation software for business. However it has a fundamental flaw – it still doesn’t offer an in-built route for efficient, cross-platform, screen-based web delivery. For a program whose whole purpose is to help users get their message over, this is quite astonishing and unforgivable as we approach 2010.

Microsoft might not provide its own solution but there are plenty of third-party applications which fill the gap such as Adobe’s Captivate and Presenter, the bargain Flair from WildFX and my personal favourite Articulate Presenter. The major embarrassment for Microsoft is that these all rely on the Adobe Flash format.

It’s an embarrassment that is made considerably worse by the fact that Microsoft is currently busily touting its own cross-platform web format, Silverlight, as a direct alternative to Flash. It’s clear that PowerPoint and Silverlight should make a perfect match and native Silverlight export would certainly go a long way to explaining (if not excusing) PowerPoint’s lack of support for Flash.

So where is the ability to convert PowerPoint to Silverlight?

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Adobe Photoshop Elements 8: First Look

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Earlier today Adobe announced the latest version of its best-selling consumer-oriented photo-editing and organization package Photoshop Elements 8. This has become something of a yearly event and the previous version 7 release clearly suffered from the tight turnaround in a Creative Suite year. By comparison, version 8 is packed with new power and has a strong focus: building on Adobe’s state-of-the-art image analysis to bring the best out of images and to make life easier for the end user.

Editing highlights include the new Photo Merge mode that automatically picks out and combines the best exposed areas of bracketed shots to produce a best-lit composite image and the Image Recompose feature that automatically preserves foreground objects while removing unwanting backgrounds as you resize your image – in real time.

Elements’ editing power remains unchallenged in the consumer arena but, for most users, serious editing images is a relatively rare requirement compared to the regular chore of getting on top of your images through tagging. Here Adobe’s image analysis expertise promises even more, holding out the prospect of automatically tagging images based on quality and – through automatic face recognition – even subject.

It sounds great on paper and works brilliantly with the sample images included in the pre-release press pack, but how does it work in practice with real images?

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Recommended software at recommended prices

Monday, July 27th, 2009

Two money-saving opportunities have come to my attention today for software that I have recently reviewed and recommended. As they just might save you £1,500, I thought I should pass them on…

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Microsoft’s Office Web Apps dilemma

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Microsoft finds itself in between a hard place and a particularly large chunk of stone with the impending launch of its Office 2010 Web Applications.

Make them too good, and Microsoft risks slaughtering one of its two biggest cash cows (Office and Windows being the products that keep Steve Ballmer in sharp suits). Water them down too much, however, and Microsoft runs the risk of powerful rivals such as Google or Adobe making vast improvements to their own online Apps and stealing Microsoft’s lunch.

It’s a problem Microsoft is clearly conscious off. It’s bravely decided to give consumers and small businesses free access to the Office Web Applications via Windows Live, even if they haven’t bought a copy of the client software.

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The future for Acrobat.com – and for the office?

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Those with a long memory may well remember Adobe’s first attempt to conquer the business market with the launch of Acrobat Exchange and its promise of the “paperless office” built around the round-robin swapping of PDFs. The arrival of the internet largely put paid to that original all-encompassing vision but now, sixteen years later, Adobe is back for a second bite at the cherry with the announcement of the official out-of-beta launch of Acrobat.com.

So is Adobe likely to be any more successful this time around? The recent press briefing, given by product manager Eric Larsen and hosted within Acrobat.com itself, was certainly interesting…

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Adobe rips off / the wraps on Catalyst

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Two announcements from Adobe today. 

First the bad news…

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Silverlight 3 – First Thoughts

Friday, May 1st, 2009

If, like me, you didn’t make it to the MIX 09 jamboree you can always catch up via the videos posted over at visitmix.com - and you don’t have to go to Vegas. As expected, the major new announcement was the launch of a new Silverlight 3 runtime (though as a beta with no “go-live” licensing it’s only for developers).

Essentially Silverlight is designed to port Windows’ core WPF technology into a cross-platform  browser-based player like Flash. So what will the new version offer?

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A nice chat with Adobe about Dreamweaver

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Following my recent post, I’m Sorry but Dreamweaver is Dying and the ensuing online discussions/abuse, I was summoned for a chat with the headmaster – Devin Fernandez, senior product manager for the web products at Adobe.

Based on my core argument – that the future of web design lies with content management systems (cms) rather than Dreamweaver – I was expecting an uncomfortable time. Thankfully Devin is far too nice for that. More than that he seemed genuinely pleased to have had a debate opened up and a chance to hear what the community is thinking about Dreamweaver and the future of web design…

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I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

I’ve received a number of very kind emails regarding my last digital design column, but I have to admit that a couple made me feel slightly uncomfortable.

These were the emails from designers thanking me for pointing them in the direction of Dreamweaver when they were making the transition from print to web design. It was a decision that they had come to appreciate greatly over the years, providing them with the best possible platform for their web design careers.

The problem is that Dreamweaver is dying…

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