Adobe Creative Suite 5.5
One of the nice things about being a successful and well established graphic designer in a city world known for it's graphic designers, is that I occasionally get invited (and paid) to participate in focus groups by various industry companies, especially our local software company which is known for it's leading design software.
I've had 2 of these happen in the past few months, and from this, I have some info on what is coming up for Adobe, and thought some of you folks out there who use their products might be interested (and they didn't have me sign a NDA, so I can post this).
Adobe Creative Suite is coming out with a new major upgrade soon. This will be CS5.5. This will be a paid upgrade from CS5, not just one of their regular free updates (they were indecisive on whether to call it CS6, but maybe decide it was too soon). So if you havn't purchased CS5 yet, but find the new features relevant to you, you may want to wait for CS5.5. If you don't find the features relevant, then plan on skipping CS5.5.
The new features in CS5.5 will focus mainly on interfaces with the iphone, ipad, and android operating systems. Mostly, being able to export in formats native to those devices (including html5 to build sites for mobile devices). Not too long ago, apple said they would no longer just have a flat out ban on Flash files, but instead would work with adobe to create flash formats that are compatable with apple mobile devices. I'm sure most of the updates are resulting from this collaboration. There will be some other features too, such as the ability to use an ipad to interface with photoshop on your normal device to show your tool pad. Very limited interface, but at least it's a step in the right direction, and maybe by the time CS10 comes out, you will be able to run it nativly on an ipad (or even better, in 10 years, be able to run a real OS like the Mac OS on a device that looks like the ipad).
They may also be offering the ability to buy a subscription based license for their products as well. So you'd be able to either give them both arms and legs in exchange for the full license you own, or you can just send them one finger a month to buy a month-to-month license. Although this may not happen for a bit down the road.
Anyways, hopefully some of you find this usefull, and hopefully it might save some of you some cash if you were planning on buying CS soon.
I've had 2 of these happen in the past few months, and from this, I have some info on what is coming up for Adobe, and thought some of you folks out there who use their products might be interested (and they didn't have me sign a NDA, so I can post this).
Adobe Creative Suite is coming out with a new major upgrade soon. This will be CS5.5. This will be a paid upgrade from CS5, not just one of their regular free updates (they were indecisive on whether to call it CS6, but maybe decide it was too soon). So if you havn't purchased CS5 yet, but find the new features relevant to you, you may want to wait for CS5.5. If you don't find the features relevant, then plan on skipping CS5.5.
The new features in CS5.5 will focus mainly on interfaces with the iphone, ipad, and android operating systems. Mostly, being able to export in formats native to those devices (including html5 to build sites for mobile devices). Not too long ago, apple said they would no longer just have a flat out ban on Flash files, but instead would work with adobe to create flash formats that are compatable with apple mobile devices. I'm sure most of the updates are resulting from this collaboration. There will be some other features too, such as the ability to use an ipad to interface with photoshop on your normal device to show your tool pad. Very limited interface, but at least it's a step in the right direction, and maybe by the time CS10 comes out, you will be able to run it nativly on an ipad (or even better, in 10 years, be able to run a real OS like the Mac OS on a device that looks like the ipad).
They may also be offering the ability to buy a subscription based license for their products as well. So you'd be able to either give them both arms and legs in exchange for the full license you own, or you can just send them one finger a month to buy a month-to-month license. Although this may not happen for a bit down the road.
Anyways, hopefully some of you find this usefull, and hopefully it might save some of you some cash if you were planning on buying CS soon.