Microsoft's Windows leader Steven Sinofsky picked an interview this week to reveal that Windows 8 on ARM wouldn't support plugins. He explained to AllThingsD that Internet Explorer on these chips, even in the regular desktop, wouldn't run Flash or any similar browser add-ins. Mobile devices were moving away from Flash as a whole, he said.
Eolas' attempt to patent the "interactive web" may have been dealt a permanent blow after a jury in the normally patent lawsuit-friendly town of Tyler, Texas ruled that the patent was invalid. The decision negated both any attempts at claiming damages and also negated three future trials. The rejection came in part after testimony from the spiritual creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, as well as individual creators whose work predated that of Eolas owner Michael Doyle.
Adobe has uncovered more details of Creative Cloud, its upcoming online service. The service was originally announced in October, but until now has been largely kept under wraps. Access will cost at least $50 a month under a one-year contract, but grant users access to the apps in Creative Suite 6; by comparison, current CS5.5 bundles start at $1,299 up-front, and can cost as much as $2,599 for the complete collection.
Ukrainian authorities have reportedly shut down file sharing site Ex.ua over alleged copyright violations, just weeks after US authorities pushed to shutter Megaupload. A spokesman with the Interior Ministry, Volodymyr Polishchuk, suggests the site was closed following complaints from a variety of companies, including Microsoft and Adobe.
Mozilla has released the latest mobile version of its browser for Android devices. Firefox 10 is now available for download (free, Android Market). As expected, the new version offers enhanced HTML5 support, but doesn't support Flash.
Northern California district court judge Lucy Koh ruled late Thursday that multiple technologies can't dismiss a lawsuit over anti-poaching deals. Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar will have to face the allegations that they unfairly hurt compensation and job chances by making informal pacts to avoid recruiting each other's staff. Judge Koh's view echoed those of the raw evidence, which confirmed individual deals but didn't show that the industry at large was colluding against recruiting attempts.
Newly publicized evidence in the wake of an agreement to stop no-poaching deals among Silicon Valley technology companies has shown that several firms did ultimately have deals but stopped short of colluding on a larger level. Although short on details of the supposed Apple-Google agreement, an e-mail message from Adobe Senior VP of human resources Theresa Townsley confirmed that Adobe and Apple had an informal rule against hiring each other's staff. At least in 2005, Adobe chief Bruce Chizen and Apple's Steve Jobs had blocked attempts to get each other's staff.
Special upgrade pricing for Creative Suite 6 will extend to owners of CS3 or CS4 after all, Adobe has announced. Owners of pre-CS5 suites had recently been told they would pay full price, discarding an earlier, more lenient policy. Under the new arrangement, a special discount will run from whenever CS6 is launched until December 31st.
Adobe has released the first beta edition of Lightroom 4, its forthcoming photography workflow software. Numerous upgrades have been made over Lightroom 3, mainly in terms of tools; v4 sports new highlight and shadow recovery options, for instance, and a white balance brush, which can be used to tweak colors in a specific part of an image instead of the photo as a whole. Local adjustments can also be made for noise reduction and moiré removal.
Apple has managed to poach an Adobe executive, Todd Teresi, to put in charge of its iAd division, Bloomberg reports. Until this week, Teresi was a VP and general manager of media solutions at Adobe. Before that he served as the chief revenue officer for Quantcast, and earlier still, he was a senior VP with Yahoo.
Adobe posted its last significant update to Flash 11 on Android (Market). The update is primarily to provide support with Android 4.0 phones like the Galaxy Nexus. Speed-ups and bug fixes are also part of the fix, Adobe said.
When the Samsung Galaxy Nexus began shipping earlier this month, it did so without either Adobe AIR or Adobe Flash Player. Adobe now has confirmed that it will be supporting both those apps, not just Flash, on the Android 4.0-based smartphone some time in December. The company will be offering the functionality through a "minor update to the runtimes."
Great discounts on software titles are currently available for Cyber Monday from a range of online retailers. MacMall.com has slashed prices on software titles like Adobe CS5.5 production premium for Mac - student and teacher edition, which has been cut from $1699 down to $416.99, a $50 mail-in-rebate drops the price further to $366.99 with FREE shipping. Save 67% on Kaspersky PURE total security good for use on up to 3 PCs, now $28.99.
With Cyber Monday right around the corner online retailers have already started cutting prices in preparation for the busiest online shopping day of the year to begin. At Amazon, buyers can save 58 percent on Roxio Easy VHS to DVD, originally $60 but now $25 with free super saver shipping. A 56 percent price break can be found on the XtremeMac Tango TRX 2.1 Bluetooth audio system for iPads, iPhones, iPods and Android smartphones. It drops from $180 to $80 at Amazon.
A presentation from Google developer evangelist Paul Kinlan at the Develop Liverpool conference has revealed that the Chrome browser, and by extension Chrome OS, should get plugin-free support that will be much more conducive to gaming. The browser should get support for common USB peripherals and allow for console-style gaming with a gamepad, Edge heard. Likewise, it would open the door to more seamless video chat, augmented reality, and body tracking.
YouTube has been improving its HTML5 player. The app has incorporated several new features, including support for 1080p video. The changes increasingly make it a viable replacement for Adobe's Flash player, which is so far still needed to get the entire feature set.
Adobe slightly backtracked on its plans to drop mobile Flash entirely Monday after it stated that there was one more version coming to support Android 4.0. Where it had previously said Flash 11.1 was the last version, the company told Pocket-lint one more version would come to support the Galaxy Nexus and future devices before the end of the year. An update was also coming for the Flash Linux Porting Kit on a similar schedule.
Occupy Flash, a group dedicated to seeing the end of the Flash platform, has called on all PC users to uninstall the Flash Player plugin from their desktop browsers. The group calls themselves “The movement to rid the world of the Flash Player plugin.” As far as the group is concerned, the death of mobile Flash is not enough, and it wants to see the end of all Flash development.
Adobe has posted its promised Touch Apps in the Android Market for Android tablets. Introduced at the MAX conference early last month, the apps include Photoshop Touch ($9.99, Android Market), Collage ($9.99, Android Market), Debut ($9.99, Android Market), Ideas ($9.99, Android Market), Kuler ($9.99, Android Market), and Proto ($9.99, Android Market). Each is meant to help creative or business types accomplish different tasks, and all require Android 3.1 or later.
Adobe's Mike Chambers in an outside explanation clarified the company's decision to drop mobile Flash. As expected by many, the absence of Flash on iOS virtually guaranteed that the plugin would never gain ground. Web developers always had to end up making separate Flash and HTML5 versions of their pages regardless, leaving little point to supporting Flash when HTML5 would achieve a similar goal.
Adobe's plans to drop mobile Flash came quicker than expected as it rolled out the last update, Flash Player 11.1 (Android Market) late last night. The new version is a maintenance update and switches on support for 1080p Flash video on Tegra 3 devices like the ASUS Transformer Prime. Those with the Galaxy S II also see a bug fixed where video would refuse to play.
RIM will keep working on Flash on the BlackBerry PlayBook despite Adobe's exit from mobile Flash, the company said in a statement. It vowed to AllThingsD that, as a licensee of Adobe's source code, it would work on its own variant on Flash. Despite Adobe itself saying HTML5 was a superior choice for mobile devices, RIM was still echoing Adobe's previous attitude, saying that a complete browser needed both Flash and HTML5 to work.
Adobe has followed up its cancellation of mobile Flash with a statement extending that end to TVs as well. The company would continue to give support to those using the Porting Kit to convert Flash to apps on TV, but it told GigaOM that it would press hardware makers to build native apps instead. It went so far as to indirectly suggest that Google TV had been taking the wrong route with its focus on the web until the Google TV 2.0 update.
Adobe in a statement Wednesday confirmed that it was stopping work on mobile Flash. After Flash 11.1 for Android and the BlackBerry PlayBook, it would limit any future updates to major bug fixes and security holes. Those with source code could develop on their own, but Adobe wouldn't spend effort updating to support newer operating systems, browsers, or hardware.
Microsoft may join in decisions to drop proprietary plugins with an exit from Silverlight, insiders mentioned later on Tuesday. Silverlight 5, expected to be finished by the end November, is said by Microsoft partner contacts for ZDNet to be the last-ever version. It might not get any minor updates and may even go without any support beyond Internet Explorer for Windows, backtracking on claims of cross-platform support.
Despite the fact that Adobe is expected to bring in record revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, it has announced plans to eliminate 750 full-time positions, just under 11 percent of its employees, primarily in North America and Europe. The move is part of a "restructuring" of its business around "explosive growth categories" in its Digital Media and Digital Marketing products. Adobe has cut about 2,150 jobs in total since 2008, bringing it to just over 6,400 employees.
Adobe has brought Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10 to the Mac App Store in the form of special "Editor" editions. At $80 each these are $20 cheaper than their regular editions, but lose things like the Elements Organizer, support for case-sensitive HFS, and in the case of Premiere Elements, any Smartsound functions. As the Editor tag implies, both programs do retain all editing options.
RealNetworks on Tuesday named Thomas Nielsen as its new CEO. Neilsen headed Adobe's Digital Imaging business unit that included the Photoshop, Photoshop and Premiere Elements, and Lightroom apps. Neilsen is assuming the permanent position that had been left open by the sudden departure of Bob Kimball earlier this year.
Google on Tuesday kickstarted the GoMo project to encourage mobile-optimized websites. The page gives both studies showing the incentives for a company to make a smallerpage as well as tips as to how to do it, such as making touch-friendly, easily visible sites. Developers can also get a mobile-optimized preview of their existing page if content is missing.
The next version of Adobe Photoshop, CS6, should have a new look and a significant array of new tools, early betas are said to show. Builds compiled earlier this month are described by AppleInsider as having a darker-toned, more Aperture-like aesthetic, although Adobe is at least temporarily providing users with the option of reverting back to the style of Photoshop CS5. The CS6 software is also said to include new palette icons, although these should be still recognizable enough to avoid confusion.
Adobe has released promised Mac and iPad/iPhone clients for Carousel, its new cloud-based photo service. In a manner similar to Apple's Photo Stream, Carousel lets users sync photos across devices. Images can also be shared with friends and family however, and the Carousel apps permit non-destructive editing in a style similar to Adobe's Lightroom.
Canon started off the week by introducing a rare printer aimed squarely at pro photographers. The Pixma Pro-1 takes its looks from the DSLRs it's intended to work with, like the EOS-1D X, and focuses on producing "gallery-quality" prints both for pros and for serious hobbyists. It carries 12 inks and can put out large A3+ sized images with a wider color range, at 16 bits per color channel, that more accurately reflects the lighting and scene from the DSLR itself.
Adobe has released the first iOS version of Reader, its dedicated PDF viewer. While iOS can already open PDF files, Reader supports some additional features, such as the ability to load portfolios, packages, annotations and drawing markups. Users can open documents protected by passwords or Adobe LiveCycle, and launch files in other apps using an "Open In" command. Likewise, Reader becomes an option in any other iOS title that supports Open In.
Adobe is currently providing Creative Suite customers running older versions of the design software with an opportunity to upgrade with a 20 percent discount. The offer runs through December 31st and will be honoured by Adobe and all Adobe Resellers for customers with a valid licence to a qualifying CS2, CS3 or CS4 products. A full list of qualifying products and terms and conditions can be found on Adobe's website.
Adobe used one of its sessions at its MAX 2011 event to swing attention away from creative tablet apps towards a new technology that could reduce or sometimes eliminate the blur in photos. A "sneak" of an algorithm for Photoshop can determine what the movements of the camera were when the shutter was open, giving it a way to correct the shot. The test plugin lets users choose to sharpen just a small piece of the photo and optimize it for common needs like text.
Pandigital hoped to raise the bar on starter tablet e-readers with a Friday unveiling for the SuperNova. The eight-inch tablet is still rare in the class for having a capacitive touchscreen and has a 4:3, 800x600 aspect ratio that suits magazines and newspapers. To fully customize the OS, it uses the most basic version of Android 2.3 and doesn't have the official Android Market, although it does have GetJar's app store as well as preloaded access to Barnes & Noble's bookstore and Flash.
More tributes remarking on the life and legacy of Apple Co-Founder and Chairman Steve Jobs have come in from several significant names in the tech world, including Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web and the modern Internet; Adobe's president and founders; and Lee Clow, who worked closely with Jobs at Apple's long-time ad agency TBWA, and one of the people responsible for the company's groundbreaking "1984" Macintosh commercial.
As promised yesterday, Adobe has released Flash 11.0.1.152 for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris along with version 3 of AIR, it's cross-platform development environment. Both products bring with them new support for Stage 3D, the overall name for hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics that Adobe claims can result in up to 1,000 times faster rendering performance over Flash 10 and AIR 2. The updates also bring new mobile features for Android, Blackberry OS and -- in the case of AIR -- iOS.
Adobe has acquired TypeKit, a privately held provider of hosted fonts for use on websites. Available as a subscription-based cloud service, TypeKit offers a large font library to web designers and developers. TypeKit fonts will be offered as a standalone service and over time will become part of Adobe's Creative Cloud initiative.
At its MAX tech conference, Adobe promised that it will release Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 at 9PM Pacific Time (midnight) on Monday. At the same time, LG and TiVo have become the latest partners to bring Flash-based apps using AIR to connected TVs and digital home devices. The latest code from Adobe will allow hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics rendering using Stage 3D.
Adobe started off its MAX conference with six new creative apps all focused around the iPad and Android tablets. Its flagship, Photoshop Touch, is intended more to replicate professional image editing with support for layers and other "core" editing tools. It acknowledges the limitations of fingers and pens, and carries a unique scribble select feature to extract objects as well as the desktop app's Refine Edge option to get very minute selections with broader strokes.
Either by sheer coincidence or simple bad planning, Adobe -- about to kick off its annual Adobe Max developer conference -- has scheduled an announcement from the company on Tuesday, October 4th at 10 a.m. Pacific time, exactly the same date and time that Apple will be making its highly-anticipated iPhone (and perhaps more) announcements at the company's town hall stage in Cupertino. Adobe has said even less than Apple about the nature of its announcement.
Adobe has posted the final editions of the Lightroom 3.5 and Camera Raw 6.5 updates. In both circumstances the software adds support for over 20 cameras. Consumer-level additions include the Fuji FinePix F600EXR, Nikon Coolpix P7100, Pentax Q, and Ricoh GXR Mount A12, as well as Olympus' E-P3, E-PL3 and E-PM1, Panasonic's DMC-FZ150, DMC-G3 and DMC-GF3, and Sony's NEX-C3, NEX-5N, SLT-A35, SLT-A65 and SLT-A77.
Facebook's reported plans to launch its iPad app next week might be joined by Project Spartan. New claims early Thursday had the social network planning to roll out both next week. The TechCrunch tip suggested Facebook could be on stage at Apple's October 4 event to show its app and Project Spartan's HTML5 features in iOS 5, but it was reportedly determined to unveil them on Monday if Apple couldn't them in the schedule.
Facebook's delay over its iPad app may have had as much to do with synchronizing with Apple as disputes with it, a rumor floated on Monday. The updated universal app is now believed by Mashable to be unveiled at the October 4 event for the iPhone 5. Apple's gathering is expected to introduce iOS 5 as well and may show an improved interface for the iPhone-sized version.
Adobe has posted a new beta release of Muse, its upcoming web design tool. The software is unusual in targeting graphic designers, allowing them craft websites without actually writing any code or operating within limited templates. Muse beta 3 is said to include over 40 bugfixes and other improvements.
YouTube boosted its editing tools Wednesday with more than what it had already added just last week. A beta addition lets users convert 2D videos to 3D with a single-click tool. The conversion is strictly software-based but will save the trouble for some of having to get a 3D-capable phone or tablet like the T-Mobile G-Slate.
Adobe is set to deliver the first version of its ubiquitous Flash Player that will be 3D-capable. Flash Player 11 and the developer platform Air 3 are due to arrive in October and are said to offer significant enhancements over previous versions of the products. Flash Player 11 is also claimed to offer rendering enhancements in 2D mode in the order of 1000 times faster rendering and is explained in the video embedded below.
Just in time for the products' 10th anniversary, Adobe has issued both standalone packages and a bundle offering for Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 and Adobe Premiere Elements 10 for both Mac and Windows systems. The new programs offer new features, new format support, content-aware tools and a new online service that offers 20GB of storage for photos and videos along with additional themes, tips and templates for $50 per year.
A pair of tips may have spoiled what will and won't show at Facebook's f8 conference this Thursday. The social network has supposedly pushed back Project Spartan, its HTML5 mobile app project, after repeated delays. The plan once identified by TechCrunch as iPhone-only is now thought to have expanded to include Android and the desktop.
