Adobe Archive

A few years ago, I signed up for one of Adobe’s free “ConnectNow” accounts when they launched acrobat.com. I was extremely impressed with the quality of the interface and the amount of features included with the free account. From the time the service launched, Adobe has always allowed up to three participants in a free ConnectNow meeting room at a time. ConnectNow proved a great resource to use when training clients how to use their new content management systems, holding meetings with small groups of people and more.

Unfortunately, though, Adobe sent out a notice yesterday informing all of its ConnectNow customers (the free accounts, at least) that they are changing things. The main change is that, as of Nov. 4, they will only allow two people in the meeting room at a time.

While ConnectNow still offers greater features than you’ll find in most other free packages, reducing the number of people allowed in the room certainly limits the situations in which I will use it.

The worst part is that they encourage us to upgrade to the Basic Premium account, which allows up to 5 people in the room at a time. However, that account comes at a cost of $15 per month. While that price may not seem outrageous (especially when compared to the cost of basic accounts with WebEx or GoToMeeting – both starting at $49/month), but for those of us that use the service once every few months, the cost simply cannot be justified. Continue reading “Adobe Increases Limits on Free ConnectNow Accounts” »

Web metrics reporting service comScore has announced a new partnership today with the newly-Adobe-acquired Omniture. The new strategic partnership is being announced in conjunction with New York’s Advertising Week. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

From the announcement, “the offering will combine the power of Omniture’s Web analytics with comScore’s new Media Metrix 360 hybrid audience measurement to help provide publishers and advertisers with a unified and comprehensive view of online audiences.”

My guess is that Omniture customers will now be able to view their own data next to industry and competitor analytics provided by comScore. It’s a smart move for both companies and should help Omniture customers save time and generate better analysis.

Could this bring comScore closer to the “quantified” service offered by Quantcast? From the announcement, “The strategic partner relationship is intended to allow joint Omniture and comScore customers to use Omniture tags to collect and share information with Media Metrix 360 using Omniture Genesis integration technology, quickly bypassing the normal implementation process for Media Metrix 360. The relationship also opens up the possibility of joint product initiatives that will leverage the granularity of the Omniture site-specific data with the Web-wide view of Internet user behavior provided by comScore.”

Yesterday we learned that Adobe reported weaker demand for their CS4 suites and has decided to let 600 workers go. Last month Curtiss (on our sister site) wondered if Adobe has lost its mind. Curtiss noted, "Are people and businesses, especially in today’s economy, really going to pay $2,500 for the master suite, $1,800 for the Design Premium suite or $1,700 for the Web Premium or the Production Premium suites? Are people truly still willing to shell out $1,000 just for Adobe PhotoShop?"

I’ve been using CS2 on my primary machine and Photoshop 7 on my laptop for years. I haven’t seen enough reason to upgrade and the pricing listed above just keeps me even further away from an upgrade. While upgrade pricing is less expensive, it’s still relatively high overall.

Adobe’s John Dowdell has put together a tweet list of comments post-announcement of the firings.

Is it time for Adobe to adjust their pricing to reflect demand and reflect the current state of the economy? While one might assume that a lower price would increase the demand for the product, I am not sure that holds true in this case. Even a temporary drop could get more users upgrading — which would help Adobe by moving more of their customers into the latest versions. This could also help reduce support for older versions of Adobe products. 

So report in… which version(s) of Adobe products are you currently using and will you upgrade (legally) to the CS4 lineup?

Apparently, Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 was launched the other day, and I am absolutely astounded by the significant price of the software.

I have always thought that Adobe’s products were severely over-priced, but I don’t even remember CS3 costing nearly as much as the retail price of CS4. Has the company lost its mind?

Are people and businesses, especially in today’s economy, really going to pay $2,500 for the master suite, $1,800 for the Design Premium suite or $1,700 for the Web Premium or the Production Premium suites?

Will people actually pay more for Adobe’s software suites than most spent on the computers on which they will be installing? Will they shell out five to ten times more for the design/development software than they did on the operating system on which they will be running the software (the current price of Windows Vista Ultimate – full version – is $319 – most Linux builds are available for free, and the boxed versions usually average between $50 and $100)?

Are people truly still willing to shell out $1,000 just for Adobe PhotoShop? Is PhotoShop really still that much better than Corel Paint Shop Pro (which retails for ~$99 – $60 for the upgrade) or GIMP/GimpShop (which is completely free and works completely cross-platform)?

Because I work for an educational institution, we are able to get a discount, but Adobe’s educational discount is a little strange. They only offer the full version of each product to educational institutions, and they sell it at the cost of the upgrade package. They do not offer the upgrade package to educational institutions.

When CS3 was released, we picked up the Design Premium suite for around $300. The educational edition of the Design Premium suite is now selling for twice that price.

Do you think that this pricing structure is a result of the massive software pirating that occurs with Adobe’s products, or is it possible that it’s the other way around?

Curtiss Grymala is the full-time Webmaster for a community college in Virginia. In his spare time, he runs a freelance Web development company called Ten-321 Enterprises, is an active participant in the HTMLCenter Forums and offers small snippets of code and bug reports to the developers and modders of the YaBB Forum system. He has been developing Web sites and applications for nearly 15 years.

Over the past week Adobe has apparently started to push out Flash 10 to general users. There appears to be issues with the way Flash 10 handles uploads versus the previous version, Flash 9. CN reader Jamie Lin sent over a handful links this evening pointing to trouble with uploads. Here are some examples of uploading issues:

• WordPress trouble ticket system
• WordPress general user forums
• Vimeo user forums
• Allvoices blog
• Flickr – apparently Flickr has moved to a different type of connection to avoid the Flash upload issue

From my research, the issue comes from how Flash 10 handles the "SWFUpload" function. YouTube may also be affected by this upload issue however I was not able to confirm in my testing.

I have an email into my contacts at Adobe and will report back. For now most of the links above suggest not updating to Flash 10 at this point.

Update: John Dowdell from Adobe points to this document for more information.

Adobe AIR is a platform that can be utilized to create rich desktop applications. Twhirl and AlertThingy are two recent examples of applications built on AIR.

freshAIRApps is a community resource that offers a directory of AIR applications, news, resources along with developer tutorials. Corvida posted a review of the service on Readwriteweb and noted, "FreshAIRApps is poised to be the premier directory for all your Adobe AIR needs by providing a haven for users and developers to mingle together."

Apparently Adobe is now going after anyone who uses the word "air" in a domain name that has content related to the Adobe AIR platform. freshAIRApps creator James Whittaker noted today:

I have recently been informed that Adobe systems believe that this website and it’s domain name are in infringement of their trademarks. This is because I am using the word AIR in the domain name freshAIRapps.com. Adobe seem to think that they own the trademark of AIR and that I can’t use it and should hand the domain over to them and stop the website. After reading through the list of Adobe trademarks they only reference Adobe AIR and not AIR. I have been in communication with members of the Adobe evangelist team who truly believe that I am helping the community and promoting the use of the AIR runtime and subsequent applications built on the platform. I started this site because I have a genuine interest in AIR and other Adobe technologies.

James concludes by saying that, "Adobe has let me and the community down by trying to block sites that appear to challenge their marketplace, even though none of the apps featured on this site are hosted by me." If James properly redirects the domain, the change should be semi-transparent.

We will try to get some comments from Adobe AIR evangelist Ryan Stewart today. Going forward, freshAIRApps will now be known as RefreshingApps.

Adobe is making a major announcement tonight — the public beta launch of Acrobat.com. No longer does the Acrobat name only mean "related to PDF." The suite of hosted tools include a word processor, PDF converter, conferencing and file storage. From the looks of it, Acrobat.com could be a competitor to parts of office suites from Google/Zoho and could also compete with document sharing tools including Docstoc and Scribd. All of the services are hosted on Acrobat.com and use the SaaS model (software-as-a-service). It’s clear that collaboration is now Adobe’s focus and this makes sense as we all move to a more connected world.

The tools offered on Acrobat.com include:

Adobe Buzzword

A word processor that allows you to share documents, comment, review, and create printer-ready document output.

Adobe ConnectNow

A conferencing tool including video, audio, text chat and desktop sharing.

Other

There’s storage in the cloud for your files along with online file sharing, PDF conversions and the ability to create embeddable documents directly from Acrobat.com. There’s also an API for extending the services listed above.

Is Acrobat.com a game changer? Certainly could be if marketed correctly. Companies (and agencies) using the suite of tools that Adobe provides will see seamless integration with these new Acrobat.com tools and should be effective in providing access to clients, customers and team members.

For Docstoc and Scribd which live on sharing documents, Acrobat could make an impact. Both Docstoc and Scribd allow you to share most formats while Acrobat requires you to convert the files first. Will this help Docstoc and Scribd keep their edge? Only time will tell but if I was in their shoes, I would be ramping up innovation within their tools.

Adam Ostrow agrees on the potential document sharing woes.

In other Adobe news, they have released version 9 of Acrobat — ranging in price from $299 to $699. Dana Wollman has more on the differences between the versions and pricing.

One of the things I find interesting is when we talk about the big Web companies, Adobe is usually not on the list. With today’s Acrobat.com launch, we might just begin to group them with the top players in the Web space and specifically in the collaboration space.