Adobe

Along with a number of announcements landing today during Adobe’s MAX conference, the company has quietly released an Adobe Creative Cloud app for Android in preview mode. The app, which works with the free 2GB Creative Cloud membership in addition to paid subscriptions, allows users to manage their Creative Cloud accounts by browsing and previewing files stored in the cloud service. The app was previously available for iOS users and sports a similar design.
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Image via <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-01/tech-hubris-the-silicon-valley-antitrust-hiring-conspiracy#p2" target="_blank">Bloomberg</a>

A judge has rejected a settlement that was reached earlier this year between employees of Google, Intel, Apple, and Adobe and their respective companies, CNBC reported today. According to reports from the courtroom, Judge Lucy Koh ruled that the settlement was not high enough and should actually be $380 million.

The lawsuit was brought against the tech giants in question by current and former employees who believed (correctly) that their employers had created agreements to avoid attempting to hire engineers from one another. The idea was that if no competitors were making offers, each company was free to pay its employees whatever it wanted without having to worry about them jumping ship for a better offer.

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Adobe has just announced a significant update to its Photoshop Express app on Android. In a blog post, the software company announced a brand new version of the app, rebuilt completely from the ground up with KitKat in mind. Most notably, Adobe has focused on design with this update and making the app easier to use by bring the most popular features front and center. This includes things like, Looks (filters), cropping, red eye reduction, and auto-correct.

Also updated is the Corrections menu. This menu offers slider controls for fine-tunning exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, temperature, tint, and more. The app has received many improvements under the hood as well. It’s powered by Adobe’s latest image rendering engine, which is a first for the Android app. This engine will greatly improve performance with large file sizes.

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A federal judge ruled that a lawsuit against Google and several other companies can proceed as a class-action suit today after determining that a significant number of employees across the tech industry were hurt by “do-not-hire” arrangements between their employers and other companies. The policies in question were practiced by Google, Apple, Adobe, Pixar, and more as a way of keeping their own employees from defecting to competitors for higher pay. Essentially the agreements barred two companies from offering jobs to competing employees for a higher salary. Because doing so gave employees leverage with which to bargain for higher pay at their own jobs, employers were often faced with the decision to either pay any given employee more to keep them around or lose them to a competitor willing to pay more.

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Adobe just announced on its Photoshop blog that it is making the Photoshop Touch app available to Kindle Fire devices starting today for $9.99 in the Amazon Appstore. Adobe previously had version of the app available for other Android devices on Google Play, as well as an iOS version of the scaled down Photoshop app for Apple’s devices. The new app for Kindle Fire will be available on the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD, and the 7-inch Kindle Fire, and Kindle Fire HD models. The app is only compatible with devices running Android 4.0 and up, so it’s not available to first-gen Kindle Fire users.

We have worked closely with Amazon to enable Adobe Photoshop Touch on this device, and are proud to announce that it is available for purchase in the Amazon Appstore immediately for US$9.99… In addition, we are announcing support for the updated 7-inch Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD devices. This means that Photoshop Touch is optimized for both 8.9-inch and 7-inch screens, giving users a great experience on all recent Kindle Fire devices.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNLh85pKLw4&feature=player_embedded#!]

NBC just unveiled two Adobe-powered mobile apps for its 2012 London Olympics coverage.

The NBC Olympics Live Companion app will act as a second display for stats and other details so users have a full bevy of data to compliment their television-watching experience. Meanwhile, the NBC Olympics Live Extra app will pipe live-streaming video to on-the-go users. It can handle multiple camera angles, social features, and the ability to seamlessly switch between both Olympics apps.

The free apps will launch today on both Apple’s App Store for iOS devices and the Google Play Store for Android smartphone and tablets. They will also support “TV Everywhere” authentication with cable providers for unlimited access to all the premium content. Users simply need to login to their pay-TV subscription to tap into 3,500 hours of Olympic events.

“To make it as easy as possible, you only need to go through the sign-in once and won’t have to “re-authenticate” every time you want to watch a live event,” explained Adobe on its Digital Media Blog. “For the first time in Olympics history, mobile apps will give you the opportunity to view live broadcasts of all Olympic events in the palm of your hand.”

NBC Olympics is also using Adobe technologies to serve ads, measure and monetize content, and provide digital analytics in both apps.

This article is cross-posted on 9to5Mac.

The press release is below.

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Google’s Chrome browser has long released with a built-in Flash Player plug-in—the result of a technology partnership between the Internet giant and Flash maker Adobe. Though Adobe still allows customers to download a standalone Flash Player plug-in for Windows, OS X or Linux, the company announced today that the Flash Player plug-in for Linux after version 11.2 would only be available with Chrome browser distribution. The Linux plug-in will no longer be available as a direct download from Adobe. While one could suspect this news foreshadows broader policy changes on Windows and OS X, Adobe insisted that is not the case.

Flash Player will continue to support browsers using non-”Pepper” plugin APIs on platforms other than Linux.

Additionally, it will continue supporting Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for years to come. “Adobe will continue to provide security updates to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years from its release,” wrote the company in a blog post…

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Those ICS early adopters who want to browse all the Internets, including the ones that are Flash enabled, got some good news today that Flash 11.1 is ready, right on time, for Android 4.0.  Currently available in the Android Market, the release date actually says Dec 12th wich was a few days before the release of the Galaxy Nexus in the US.

Adobe of course shelved their Mobile Flash development earlier this year after a dismal earnings report and the need for cost cutting.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvQrP1szEzg]

Getting the user interface of a mobile application right down to the pixel level is a daunting task which often requires a lot of testing. To help Android developers get a better feel of what their designs will look like on an actual device, Adobe introduced a tool aptly named the Android Design Preview Tool. It takes some pain out of UI work by mirroring your desktop to your Android device, which helps mitigate guesstimating the appearance of the user interface elements and avoid wasting time compiling a build and syncing it to the device in order to test out each tweak. The new tool joins Adobe’s suite of Android utilities comprised of the Android Asset Studio and UI Prototyping Stencils.

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Two months ago, Adobe unveiled Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 for Android devices. As you know, the company changed its mind and said recently it will halt Flash development on mobile after Ice Cream Sandwich. Even though they pledged to continuously support mobile platforms with critical bugs and security flaws, users have gotten confused as to whether or not Adobe will release Flash Player 11.1 and AIR 3.1 for the Galaxy Nexus devices.

The company took to the official blog to explain that some support is in fact in the cards:

We will provide a minor update to the runtimes to support the Galaxy Nexus in December.

However, Adobe reminded users that it’s always been phone vendors’ and carriers’ responsibility to deploy Flash and AIR updates to their customers:

To be clear, the Galaxy Nexus does not initially support Adobe Flash Player 11.1 and AIR 3.1. As we previously communicated in a blog post, devices and software updates from our partners which introduce new technologies are being developed on varied schedules that are different from our own, which means that the Adobe runtimes may not always be optimized or supported on devices until a subsequent release.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0IwvN4IdH4]

Adobe today announced in a blog post that it will updated its Flash Player and AIR platform with new capabilities allowing for rich 3D-accelerated graphics across desktop and mobile devices. The company boasted top to bottom 3D acceleration on supported hardware and said developers will be able to take advantage of native code libraries and tap specific hardware and software features of a target device, such as NFC, accelerometers, light sensors, magnetomeres, device vibration and what not.

2D graphics will also see significant performance enhancements with overall rendering faster up to a thousand times. AIR 3 apps can be packaged with the embedded AIR run-time and can be updated separately of the AIR runtime updates. They believe that under-the-hood tweaks will enable Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 to power console-quality games on any mobile or desktop platform and the company made compelling demos to prove their bold claims.

Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will be available across Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BlackBerry Tablet OS, Android and other platforms. The release candidate versions are available for download here. The company also noted it partnered with Microsoft to bring Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 to Windows Phone software. Needles to say, support for iOS is planned only for AIR 3. Go past the fold for more impressive tech demos and features.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szaXvTsoeVs]

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After sending out the usual laundry list of bug fixes for its Flash Player yesterday, Adobe is coming under pressure from Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy who claims the update only listed 13 of the approximately “400 unique vulnerabilities”… A number he describes as “embarrassingly high”.

Ormandy claims he sent the bugs to be fixed “as part of an ongoing security audit” and, according to a report from Computerworld, was “upset that he was not credited for his bug reports”. After noticing he hadn’t received credit in the patch, he took to Twitter to address his concerns, prompting Adobe’s senior manager of corporate communications to tweet the following:

“Tavis, please do not confuse sample files with unique vulnerabilities. What is Google’s agenda here?”

Ormandy responded, also in a tweet, saying:

“I don’t know what Google’s agenda is, but my agenda is getting credit for my work and getting vulnerabilities documented.”

Hours before the patch officially rolled out, Google launched the latest version of Chrome 13 and 14, which included the Flash Player patch in question, and was accompanied by the following statement from Google:

“The Chrome Team would especially like to thank Tavis Ormandy, the Google Security Team, and Google for donating a large amount of time and compute power to identify a significant number of vulnerabilities resolved in this release of Flash Player.”

Adobe did credit 10 other researchers in the report accompanying the update, but had only this to say about Google and Ormandy’s work:

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Google has updated the stable Chrome channel with new security, privacy and graphics acceleration enhancement. Carrying a build number of 12.0.742.91, Google’s browser now warns you before downloading certain malicious files “without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download”, software engineer Adrienne Walker explained in a post on the Chrome blog.

The team has also advanced Chrome’s GPU-assisted hardware acceleration to include 3D CSS elements on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windows Vista or later. Finally, Google has worked closely with Adobe to provide greater control over local storage for Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects directly from Chrome’s settings, without having to visit a special page on Adobe’s site to tweak your settings . Thanks to Chrome’s silent updating mechanism, your copy of Chrome will automatically update itself to the latest stable version available. If not, choose About Google Chrome from the wrench menu.

Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com

Check out GPU-acceleration improvements in the “Shaun the Sheep” Chrome experiment which lets you rotate and scale the video, disable or enable cool reflections and more.

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