Adobe Creative Cloud Now Available

Posted on May 11, 2012

Adobe announced today the release of the Adobe Creative Cloud. This marks a new milestone in the history of creative workflow using Adobe apps. Here are a few of the capabilities the Adobe Creative Cloud can do:

Adobe Creative Suite 6 Now Available

Posted on May 7, 2012

Adobe Systems Inc. announced today the release of Creative Suite 6 and the expected release of the Adobe Creative Cloud on Friday, May 11th. I’ve been involved with the testing of CS6 and I’ve been really pleased with many of the new features and enhancements. My favorite “feature” so far has been the overall performance boost I’m seeing on my Macbook Pro. Working with large 250MB+ panoramic files in Photoshop CS6 has been noticeably faster. 30-day trial versions of most Creative Suite apps are available on Adobe’s website.

Building Instructional Objects with Adobe Edge

Posted on Apr 30, 2012

As we move more towards mobile and tablet development in building educational content, we’re going to have to find tools and technologies that can make that content available on a wide range of devices. I’m liking the progress I’m seeing in Adobe Edge (it’s currently in beta, or preview status). I recently repurposed an older project done in Flash to put together this interactive graphic showing the progress of The Plague in the Fourteenth Century. I was able to create interactive buttons to switch between time periods, and a play/pause button to play through the slides. I did notice that the exported .svg files from Illustrator were 171KB whereas those same files exported to Flash (.swf) were only 57KB. This was after copying and pasting each layer out of a bloated Illustrator file in to a new file. The original .svg export was 2.6MB for each slide! It’s going to be an interesting time for content developers as more and more students demand educational content be optimized for their devices.

Click to See the Interactive Graph

Adobe Announces Creative Suite 6 and the Adobe Creative Cloud

Posted on Apr 23, 2012

Adobe announced today that within 30 days they will release Creative Suite 6 and the Adobe Creative Cloud.

This is a monumental upgrade for CS6 with over 100 new features and significant increases in performance in most apps. The Adobe Creative Cloud offers some really interesting online storing, sharing and collaborating capabilities for content creators.

Vidyo vs. Adobe Connect

Posted on Apr 2, 2012

Recently, I had the opportunity to give a short presentation about Vidyo vs. Adobe Connect in a meeting about video conferencing on campus. Many people see these two products as completing technologies. I currently don’t see it that way. Both products have their strengths, some feature overlaps and limitations. I’ll try to identify those in this write up. Both of these products are software based conferencing solutions which rely on computers to be connected to the internet to work correctly. Some of the advantages of software-based conferencing solutions is that they can be much less expensive than hardware based solutions and they can scale much faster in your organization (at the expense of bandwidth on your network).