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Adobe announced the availability of some of the key creative technology it has been touting for months, including the Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Muse.
Adobe initially announced Creative Cloud at its Adobe MAX event last October and later said the technology would be available May 11. Keeping true to its word, Adobe has made Adobe Creative Cloud available as a radical new way of providing tools and services for creative professionalswhich the company refers to as creatives.
A subscription-based offering, Adobe Creative Cloud is a hub for making, sharing and delivering creative work and it is centered around the recently released Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) software, which consists of design, Web, video and digital-imaging tools. The CS6 product line includes new releases of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Flash Professional and other products.
In addition, two new Adobe Touch Apps, Adobe Proto and Adobe Collage, are now available for iOS devices, as are new features and additional language support in both Photoshop Touch and Adobe Ideas.
And emerging from a successful beta program, that saw more than 700,000 downloads, Adobe Muse software also became available May 11 to Creative Cloud members and individual subscribers. Muse is a new tool that enables designers to create HTML5-based Websites without writing code.
Adobe Creative Cloud members receive full access to the entire portfolio of Creative Suite 6 tools, integration with our touch tools, file storage and sharing services and Web hostingeverything they need to go from idea to finished work, at a breakthrough monthly subscription price,” David Wadhwani, senior vice president of the Digital Media Business at Adobe, said in a statement. Creative Cloud will allow our product teams to unleash a constant stream of innovation, releasing new features, apps and services as they are developed.
Adobe Creative Cloud membership is available to customers in 36 countries and in multiple languages. Pricing for Creative Cloud membership for individuals is $49.99 per month based on annual membership and $74.99 per month for month-to-month membership. A special introductory offer of $29.99 per month for CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS5.5 individual customers is also available. Adobe Touch Apps are available separately for purchase from the iTunes App Store or Google Play for $9.99 each. Special offers for Adobe Touch Apps are available for customers who sign up for annual membership of Adobe Creative Cloud.
An Adobe Cloud membership provides:
- access to download and install all CS6 applications, new HTML5 desktop productsAdobe Muse and Adobe Edge previewand integration with Adobe Touch Apps;
- easy storage and sharing of content across desktop, mobile devices and the cloud;
- integrated Website publishing and hosting; and
- ongoing innovation that provides members with the most up-to-date products and services.
Meanwhile, company officials said Adobe Muse makes planning, designing and publishing original HTML pages as easy as creating layouts for print. With master pages, built-in tools for interactivity and access to more than 400 Web fonts served by the Adobe Typekit service, Adobe Muse makes it easy to produce distinctive, professional Websites, the company said.
Adobe Muse is available as a standalone subscription or as part of Adobe Creative Cloud membership. Adobe Muse will feel immediately familiar to Adobe product users, as it has some of the same features and keyboard shortcuts found in other software, like Adobe InDesign. Adobe Muse allows designers to easily add engaging, interactive elements such as slide shows and embed content from sources such as Google Maps and Facebook. Users can preview and test functionality of a Website within Adobe Muse or create a temporary site and share the URL with clients for review. When the site is ready to go live, designers can either host it using a third-party solution or use Adobes flexible all-in-one hosting service. An Adobe Muse one-year subscription or Creative Cloud membership also includes some site hosting.
There have been more than 700,000 beta downloads of Adobe Muse to date. We have incorporated feedback from our beta users into the first release of Muse and the response has been very positive, said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. Adobe Muse gives designers the freedom to build sites without having to learn code, which will help them expand their businesses and offer their clients more cost-effective, professional Websites.
Adobe Muse is available for individuals at $14.99 per month with an annual subscription and $24.99 per month for a month-to-month subscription. For more information, go here.
In other product-related news, Adobe on May 10 announced that Adobe Lightroom 4, which provides a set of digital photography tools, is available in the Mac App Store.
The Mac App Store is a convenient and relatively new way to research and purchase software for your Mac computer, said Tom Hogarty, principal product manager for Lightroom, in a blog post. Its based on an Electronic Software Delivery (ESD) method so theres no box and no shiny disc. Lightroom would be downloaded and installed directly from the Mac App Store. (We also have ESD offerings on Adobe.com and via Amazon.com in North America.) The Mac App Store offering is the same product offered on Adobe.com in terms of feature and functionality, but has been modified to comply with Mac App Store regulations.