Monday 11 April 2011

Adobe Announces Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium and Design Standard

Key Design Suite Enhancements Support Explosion in Content on Mobile Devices and Tablets

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced Adobe® Creative Suite® 5.5 Design Premium, the industry standard software that lets designers produce high-impact materials faster and deliver immersive, visually rich experiences to screens of all shapes and sizes. Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium comprises powerful new versions of Adobe InDesign®, Adobe Dreamweaver®, Adobe Flash® Professional and Adobe Flash® Catalyst™, as well as Adobe Acrobat® X Pro, Adobe Illustrator® CS5, Adobe Photoshop® CS5 Extended and Adobe Fireworks® CS5. A new version of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard will also be available.

Today also sees Adobe debut an affordable and flexible subscription-based pricing plan, attractive to customers that want to get current and stay current on Creative Suite products, have project-based needs, or try the software for the first time. New Subscription Editions ensure customers with active subscriptions are always working with the most up-to-date versions of the software, without the upfront cost of full pricing.

"Our design suites have helped publishers set the standard for what readers and advertisers should expect from publications, in print and now, in interactive form on tablet devices," said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Creative and Interactive Solutions, Adobe. “Our content authoring tools have been embraced by industry leaders like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and National Geographic, who are relying on Adobe software to reinvent iconic titles for the digital age."

Deliver Amazing Designs to Tablets and Smartphones
With Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium, designers can create immersive digital magazines, elegant e-books with accompanying video and audio, world-class websites based on HTML5 and CSS3 standards, and interactive mobile applications built with familiar Flash tools that display consistently across Android™, BlackBerry Playbook and iOS devices. Updates to Dreamweaver CS5.5 (including the Live View mode, CSS panel and Multiscreen Preview panel) streamline the design of websites that need to be optimized for viewing on multiple devices, and let designers preview desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers side-by-side.

With the new Folio Producer tools in InDesign, which work in conjunction with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, creative professionals can design interactive, rich media digital magazines, newspapers, corporate publications and advertising for reading on tablet devices such as Apple iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook and a wide variety of Android tablets. Using InDesign CS5.5 in combination with the integrated Folio Producer toolset, designers can add new levels of interactivity to their page layouts. Documents targeted to tablet devices can include video, audio, panoramic views, 360-degree rotation of objects, pan and zoom of images, integration of HTML5 content and other interactive overlays. Designers can also easily test how their content will look and feel on a broad array of tablet device directly from within InDesign. Once content authoring is completed in InDesign, tight integration with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite allows users with a Digital Publishing Suite account (available separately) to efficiently produce, distribute, optimize and monetize content for tablet devices. A number of features in InDesign have also been enhanced to improve reading experiences on e-book devices, such as Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony Reader and Apple iPad. Designers can now add refined typography, images that resize automatically to fit virtually any screen, and video and audio for e-book reader applications that support HTML5 video and audio tags*.

New capabilities in Flash Professional CS5.5 let designers and developers build mobile applications that run on iPhone, iPad, Android devices and BlackBerry Playbook. The apps can be easily deployed through the application markets such as Apple's iTunes App Store, Android Market and BlackBerry AppWorld.

Efficiency Beyond the Desktop
Adobe is continuing to extend productivity with cloud services and new tablet apps. Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium works with new tablet applications for Photoshop (available separately) that enhance the creative workflow and extend the design experience beyond the desktop. A new scripting engine in Adobe Photoshop and an enhanced Photoshop Software Development Kit (SDK) enable developers to build tablet applications that interact with Photoshop from Android, BlackBerry and iOS devices. Adobe used the new SDK to deliver three iPad applications that demonstrate the creative possibilities of using tablets to drive common Photoshop workflows – Adobe Color Lava for Photoshop, Adobe Eazel for Photoshop and Adobe Nav for Photoshop (see separate press release). Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium also integrates with CS Live, a set of hosted services that accelerate key project workflows such as shared reviews.

Express Creative Ideas Rapidly Without Sacrificing Quality or Control
New features in Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium bolster the hundreds of timesaving features that were introduced in Creative Suite 5 to improve efficiency of everyday tasks. Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5 Extended removes details or objects from images and fills in the space left behind, so it looks as if the removed content never existed. Illustrator CS5 includes several powerful features, including variable-width strokes, precise arrowheads, dashed-line controls, stretch controls for brushes, and brushes with corner controls. And introduced in InDesign CS5, simplified object selection and editing speed up the page layout process. Whether users are designing a document that will be printed, viewed onscreen or both, everything from aligning and distributing space between objects to adjusting corner effects is faster and easier in InDesign. Also, the addition of Acrobat X Pro provides custom PDF Portfolios, Guided Actions and a revamped user interface that makes preparing, protecting and delivering professional PDF documents more efficient than ever.

“We’ve been a pioneer in independent print magazine publishing, delivering the industry’s first clear cover and first ever magnetic paper, as well as building a breakthrough website and entirely customized experience for mobile device users,” said Emin Kadi, founder and creative director of Clear Magazine. “Now we’re leveraging the latest tools in Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium to stay at the forefront of technology and design, by creating exciting experiences on tablets like the iPad with 360-degree product views, slide shows, integrated videos, pop-up text and more – almost like a TV channel.”

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