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Adobe launched Photoshop Express beta today. It’s a very “flashy” web-based consumer-oriented photo editing product. It integrates it’s own album sharing feature, and links directly to Photobucket, Facebook, and Picasa. The features are pretty basic – certainly not what I’d call a slimmed-down Photoshop. The flash interface is terrific. Simply rolling over editing options automatically shows you the effect on you photo. The price is also very un-photoshop: free!

The trial is only available in the US (although Adobe isn’t checking IPs)

Sign up here .

[tags]Photoshop-Express, Adobe[/tags]

Popularity: 25%

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Pirates, User Experience Adobe, Photoshop-Express

Yesterday was the launch day for Pixelmator a Mac OS X graphic application which meets my Photoshop needs. Yes, I really will be giving up on Adobe Photoshop for Pixelmator. In fact, I think Pixelmator surpasses Photoshop with its User Interface elegance. These are my initial impressions after using the application for a couple of hours. Perhaps under heavy continued usage I’ll have a different opinion (ask me again in 3 weeks). It’s scary to think that I might be giving up on my main digital graphics tool Adobe Photoshop which I’ve used since 1995. We’ve had such good times Photoshop! We’ll miss you now that we’re playing with our new friend.

Photo made with Pixelmator.

Incidentally, Pixelmator is $59 bucks US (about the same Canadian). Adobe PS, as you probably know, costs more.

[tags]pixelmator,photoshop-alternative,adobe,mac[/tags]

Popularity: 27%

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Software, User Experience Adobe, Mac, photoshop-alternative, Pixelmator

Adobe is about to attempt to compete with Microsoft’s Word by investing in BuzzWord an online word processor made by Virtual Ubiquity.

If you’re from Ottawa you’ve probably heard of Corel, the makers of CorelDraw and the current home of WordPerfect. I have not been a fan of Corel since they took my beloved Fractal Design Painter and messed up version 9 so badly. The buggy software kept crashing and was ultimately useless on my mac. I really can’t see how anyone can deliver garbage software like that and get away with it (for long).

Corel is pretty insignificant when compared to Adobe in annual revenue figures. Corel ~$250 million vs Adobe’s $2.5 billion. Yet, Corel might have a few lessons it could teach Adobe about competing with Microsoft. It’s not pretty when you try to compete with entrenched software products like MS Word. The trick here is to convince people to switch from something that already works. It’s even more difficult to convince people to switch to ‘older’ software. Luckily for Adobe, Buzzword is new and exciting! However, the potential customer base will have some expectations for a what a word processor is and what features it should include such as compatibility with their current MS Word documents, their fonts, their printers, and their other applications.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Adobe is onto something here. It’s pretty cool when applications run online. I love using Wordpress, Flickr, Ning …come to think of it, about half of the applications I use are already online. These applications are excellent, not only because they’re accessible from any computer, but also because I don’t have to worry about software updates. Upgrades happen silently in the background. The best online applications are also mashable meaning they run within or along side other online applications. Unfortunately, despite the advances of Flash and AJAX, the bottle neck is still the web browser. For that reason, online applications like Flickr are expanding their off-line application components.

If Adobe is to successfully transition to Software as a Service (SaaS) it needs to ditch the legacy Software as a Product thinking. Rather than trying to replicate stand alone applications in a browser, they should be making their current products into services. You would still download and install the applications, but you pay a yearly service fee and updates happen in the background. The feature set could be split up for beginners and pros and Photoshop could plug-in to online services like Flickr but also work off-line. While they’re at it, why not also create a Photoshop server with an open API? Imagine being able to call up an online Photoshop filter to batch edit images on your website when needed? Now this is SaaS as it should be, breaking the rules of traditional software as a product. Don’t be afraid, you can do it Adobe!

[tags]MS-Word, buzzword, Corel, Adobe[/tags]

Popularity: 37%

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Business, Innovation, SaaS Adobe, buzzword, corel, ms-word

I’ve been holding out on buying Adobe CS3 for my new iMac for weeks now. I’m still using my old machine to do my Photoshop work and it’s a pain. I’ve tried just about every alternative freeware / shareware product that’s currently available and let me tell you, there’s not much that can match Photoshop. My very last hope lives with the Mac application Pixelmator which has not yet been released. So far I’ve tried Gimp and many similar apps and I’m afraid they will not do. The closest match I found was Pixen, that is, until features just didn’t work. So my search shifted to online solutions…

You may remember that Adobe announced that it would begin developing a free Photoshop online edition. Fauxto could be considered a preview of what a Flash based Photoshop app might look like. Unfortunately, Fauxto just freezes up on me after I impatiently click too frequently. Hopefully, future versions will iron out these bugs.

I’ve really enjoyed using the wonderful online which seamlessly connects with Flickr. You can pull up your entire library and edit images online. This is nice if you’re working across multiple computers like I normally do. However, picnik is limited, it is by no means a replacement for Photoshop. For instance, it lacks some basic features like cut and paste, however despite these current limitations it’s well worth checking out. For what it does it does it well.

[tags]Adobe,Photoshop,Pixelmator,picnik[/tags]

Popularity: 29%

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Software, Usability, User Experience Adobe, Photoshop, picnik, Pixelmator

A while back, we wrote about ColourLovers – a cool if somewhat odd social networking site that allows users to create and share colour palettes. It seems that Adobe thought it was a good idea too. So big cash-cow buys tiny web 2.0 startup?? Nope. According to ColourLovers founder Darius Monsef, Adobe just copied the idea. It does appear that Adobe Kuler - the first interactive app to come out of Adobe Labs is eerily similar. Unfortunately, there’s not much a tiny company can do to battle a giant… except blog about it! A great sense of humour helps too… Kudos, Darius!!

[tags]ColourLovers, Adobe, Kuler[/tags]

Popularity: 27%

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Business, Innovation, Pirates, User Experience Adobe, ColourLovers, Kuler

The news this week from Adobe about their release of Adobe Labs’ Apollo alpha was very exciting. I quickly downloaded the runtime engine and some sample apps. Unfortunately, nothing worked on my PC, but my PC was running an old OS. Take two, I tried again with my Mac and success! How fun, it worked!

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Doing away with the headaches of browsers that won’t run my code sounds terrific! However, when you consider the user experience for someone surfing to your site and then having to download an application to do things is a little odd. A lot of us are trained not to download and install software from the internet as it could contain a virus! Now Adobe wants us to forget all that and learn to trust that downloading these little apps is safe and good? I think it really could be! However, I wish all of these web apps could be housed in.. wait for it.. a.. browser! Isn’t that like just being silly? Well, no not at all. Adobe should also release an Apollo web app browser that just lets all of these apps install without the need to ask the user every time. It would be like.. surfing the web! As an alternative, it could be released as a plugin for your browser. Plugins? Who uses those any more? Well, no doubt your browser has many already installed such as Macromedia’s Adobe’s Flash.

[tags]Adobe,Apollo,Alpha[/tags]

Popularity: 24%

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Usability, User Experience Adobe, Alpha, Apollo

We were very surprised by the instant response we received here at the site over a post Baxter wrote for us on his frustrations with the Adobe website.. His mission was to buy Dreamweaver in Canadian dollars on the Adobe website. Unfortunately, he failed and continues to fail his attempts even today.

The response from Adobe can be read in our comments for that post..

“…Escalation in progress.” tx, jd/adobe

A follow up post included this little tid bit: “Multiple emails with the web and store teams, though just hasn’t been resolved yet.” jd/adobe

We’re very happy to see the effort being put into this by Adobe. Although it may seem insignificant, it is possible that the entire Canadian market is shut out from buying software from Adobe through their website. Probably just a small glitch in code or some other internal who knows what?

I have to say that I’m very impressed by Adobe’s excellent customer service in being able to respond to the issue so quickly. I hope to see the fix soon as I still need to buy the software.

[tags]Adobe,Blog,customer-service,web-usability[/tags]

Popularity: 31%

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Bones, Usability Adobe, Blog, customer-service, web-usability