Adobe Courts Designers and Developers -- Visual Studio Magazine

Adobe Courts Designers and Developers

Creative Suite version 4 ties together design and development features for print, Web, mobile, interactive, film and video production.

By John K. Waters
10/15/2008

Looking to bridge the gap between developers and designers, Adobe Systems Inc. says its new Creative Suite version 4 ties together design and development features for print, Web, mobile, interactive, film and video production, and is integrated with the company's ubiquitous Flash technology.

Adobe's new release, to ship this week, puts it directly into competition with Microsoft, which offers its Expression studio and design tools bundle, and which just made available the release candidate of its Silverlight rich interactive application runtime.

Creative Suite 4 marks Adobe's strategy to "lift itself out of its traditional end-user product sales business, and create a more business- and team-focused positioning," says Macehiter Ward-Dutton Ltd. analyst Angela Ashenden.

The suite consists of 13 point products, 14 integrated technologies and seven services. It comes in six editions that carry list prices ranging from $1,699 to $2,499: Master Collection, Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Web Standard and Production Premium. The suite bundles technologies from Adobe's flagship image editor, Photoshop, with its Dreamweaver Web site designer, InDesign desktop-publishing app, Illustrator drawing program and Flash, among others.

The release emphasizes online collaboration, which is a growing trend in the professional design space, adds Macehiter Ward-Dutton analyst Bola Rotibi. Adobe's ConnectNow personal Web-conferencing application, a component of Acrobat.com, can be accessed from each of the point products in the suite. Adobe launched Acrobat.com, its free Web-based productivity and collaboration tools bundle, in June.

"This is our first set of APIs," Adobe's Entrepreneur in Residence Rick Treitman said at the time, "but it won't be our last."

About the Author

John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].

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