Loads of news coming out from Adobe this week as they hold their Annual Beanfeast MAX. There was the obligatory Photoshop pixel fairy magic. The one that got people most excited appeared to be the ‘deblur’ tool. Expect this to replace the Content Aware Fill as the killer Photoshop demo to wow your audience.
But beyond the gimmicky and the usual corporate hyperbole their is the distinct feeling that Adobe have rediscovered their mojo and our motoring forward (all be it sometimes via the chequebook) with some very interesting ideas.
Typekit
Adobe have acquired typekit. This I am sure will be give @fontface / web typography an all mighty boot up the backside. The days of the old web safe fonts looked numbered. Of course you could do this yourself through services liked the wonderful font squirrel but Adobe have the nack of making this kind of stuff easy.
I reakon we’ll be seeing this integrated with Dreamweaver, Fireworks and the recently revealed Project Muse. Designing web fonts directly into these Adobe products looks like a very slick idea and shows Adobe going all CSS3 on us.
Next up is another chequebook job. Adobe have acquired PhoneGap.
Now very excited about this one. PhoneGap, if you have missed it, is the open source tool that will take your lovely HTML5, CSS and Javascript and package it up as an Android, Blackberry or IoS App. Very cool. I can see this been integrated into (again) Dreamweaver (CS5.5 already has jQuery Mobile) but also Flash. That is Flash Professional, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst – all development environments we associate with producing content for the Flash Player but which are been subtlely refocused as development environments that, yes do Flash Player SWFs, but also do other stuff too.
Then they announce a whole splash of tablet apps. Coming to Android first but promised to be available on iPads by 2012 there are 6 apps known collectively as the Adobe Creative Cloud. This are all very touchy feelie drawing / inspiration / mood board type apps. Expect a flurry of handdrawn style content as designers get their grubby little hands (and of course fingers) on these new creative tools. I am feeling all flowly and floaty just thinking about it.
Could we be witnessing the emerging shape of a Post-Flash Adobe.