This week Adobe released version 5 of its Creative Suite software compilation. CEO Shantanu Narayen has naturally hit the interview trail to promote his company’s wares, but the biggest news from him is actually a delay of sorts. We’d previously heard that Android, WebOS and BlackBerry versions of Flash 10.1 would be available in the first half of 2010, but Adobe’s chief now places delivery to those platforms in the second half of the year. At least consolation may be found in his teasing of new Flash-enabled tablets — most likely to be running Android or Chrome OS — which we’re told to expect to see within the same time frame. As to the question of Apple’s holdout from Flash nirvana, Narayen describes it as a business rather than technology decision, which “hurts consumers” and will ultimately be judged by people voting “for the experience that they want through their wallet.” Can’t really argue with that. Skip past the break for the full interview.
Update: The blog of Adobe’s Lee Brimelow gives us a likely reason for the delay: Flash Player 10.1 for Android has just entered private beta, as has AIR 2.0, with public betas on the way. Devs can sign up to be notified about both right here.
Now, we’ve all been concerned about recent updates to the iPhone dev agreement — you haven’t been sleeping and your parents are, quite frankly, worried for your sanity. And it’s a heady subject: “what is the fate of PhoneGap in the wake of the iPhone OS 4 beta SDK?” Well, worry no more, little one — it seems that Jesse Macfadyen, a contributor to the project, pinged Apple to make sure that users of the mobile development platform wouldn’t find their apps rejected simply for using the tool. As you remember, the agreement states: “Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine” (and of course HTML and CSS are cool), so PhoneGap — which indeed sticks to HTML, CSS and Javascript — is totally safe. Now developers can get back to having their apps rejected for any number of other silly reasons.
So Opera Mini for iPhone has proved to be kind of a big deal, and that HTML-laden beacon of hope is putting a twinkle in some other developers’ eyes. Take Skyfire, for instance. CEO Jeff Glueck posted this week a congratulations to the Opera team for its inclusion in the iTunes app store — a surprise to many, us included. He also explained that “this will certainly accelerate our strategy on iDevices,” and seeing as its only product is a mobile browser with Flash and Silverlight, Jeff certainly has our attention here. That said, we’re not exactly getting our hopes up, especially since the App Store’s rules have always forbidden any app from running a code interpreter and we don’t see how SkyFire can bypass that aspect of Flash and Silverlight entirely, even though it uses a server-side rendering model similar to Opera Mini’s. We’ll see what happens.
Adobe Photoshop CS5 on the Mac desktop: Faster, cleaner and filled with kooky new tools.
Photographers have their own version of sleight of hand, manipulating images to make us believe the final product is a representation of reality.
The latest version of Photoshop, the flagship image-editing application in Adobe’s Creative Suite, adds a new stack of cards to the photographer’s trick deck. Wired.com was shown demos of new tools — such as the new Content Aware Fill and HDR — in Photoshop CS5 that we expect will amaze and please photographers with the tools’ ability to bend pixels with absolute precision.
Photoshop CS5 will arrive as part of Adobe Creative Suite 5, the company’s package of 14 productivity apps for visual designers, photographers and publishers. Creative Suite 5 will ship mid-May, according to Adobe.
Prices for the suite range between $1,300 and $2,600, depending on which package you buy, with upgrades priced from $500 to $1,500. Photoshop CS5 alone will cost $700, or $200 for an upgrade. Photoshop CS5 Extended, which has some additional tools, will cost $1,000, or $350 for an upgrade.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Photoshop’s arrival, and there are certainly several “wow” features in Photoshop CS5 that achieve a level of technological advancement most of us couldn’t have even dreamed of 20 years ago.
Most impressive is the new Content Aware Fill brush, a mind-bending tool that can remove large objects from photos, altering the background to make it realistically appear as though the object were never there. It can zap tourists, delete power lines and otherwise alter photos with click-and-drag ease.
This video shows it most plainly. Fast forward to about the halfway point if you want to see the really crazy stuff. (When this video first started making the rounds in March, some thought it was a hoax. It’s not: This is a real feature of Photoshop CS5.)
As with any new tool in Photoshop, expect Content Aware Fill to be overused: A surfeit of tourist-free images of Machu Picchu will soon be littering Flickr. But beyond the novelty, it’s a truly useful touch-up tool that turns what used to be hours of work into a simple drag of the brush.
Speaking of brushes, all of the painting features in Photoshop — neglected since the release of Photoshop 7 — have been rewritten. The app now features much more realistic interactions. If you use a digitizer tablet, you’ll find that your brushes are considerably more responsive. The angle of the stylus now controls the edge of the brush and the new paint-mixing tools control color blending, wetness and bristle length, making for a very lifelike painting experience.
Another bit of Photoshop trickery that’s become popular lately is high-dynamic-range imaging, or HDR. The Flickr crowd is crazy for it, and Adobe has responded by improving Photoshop’s Merge to HDR tool, which helps you create HDR images.
The new HDR tool now has fourteen HDR presets which can save considerable effort when hand-toning an image. The HDR presets shipping with Photoshop range from the cartoonish to the fairly realistic, and should satisfy all but the pickiest of HDR enthusiasts.
Composing a real HDR image requires multiple photos taken with multiple exposures, but now you can fake it. Photoshop CS5 has a new set of tools to create what Adobe calls “single-image HDRs.” The results will never quite match a true HDR with multiple images, but the new single-image HDR-toning dialogue lets you get pretty close using just one file.
Also incredibly helpful for HDR fans is the new Remove Ghosts tool in the HDR dialog, which makes it simple to eliminate ghosting and artifacts caused by differences between your layered HDR images. With Photoshop CS5, you can simply outline a ghosted area (say, for example, a flower that moved in the breeze between shots) and select a single layer for that portion of the image.
Mini Bridge: You can now embed the Bridge file browser into a Photoshop palette.
Photoshop CS5 isn’t just new brushes. There’s been plenty of attention to performance — the Mac OS X version is now fully 64-bit native, the same enhancement the Windows version got in in CS4. That means that you could, in theory, throw as much as 128 GB RAM at Photoshop.
This update further deepens Photoshop’s integration with Bridge, Adobe’s file-browsing tool. Bridge can now be embedded in a palette within Photoshop (known as Mini Bridge). You can quickly navigate through your images using the familiar Bridge interface without needing to leave Photoshop. Interestingly, the UI metaphor for Mini Bridge seems influenced by the iPhone — when you navigate through folders, the interface slides left and right.
Photoshop CS5 also gets the same massive overhaul to the Camera Raw engine that we’ve seen in the forthcoming Lightroom 3. Camera RAW in both apps offers much better sharpening and noise reduction, which is impressive not so much for its ability to remove noise, but to retain detail while doing so.
Photoshop CS5 also has a few tricks designed to make designers’ lives easier, particularly the new Puppet Warp tools, which allow you to make path-like selections and bend, warp, shorten, lengthen and twist an object.
Wired.com was shown a demo by Photoshop product manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes. He took an image of an elephant with a straight trunk and, with just three selection points, he bent and curled the trunk back so the elephant appeared to be eating.
Photoshop's new Puppet Warp tool in action: before and after
Puppet Warp introduced almost no distortion into the finished image. Puppet Warp also provides a much easier and faster way to straighten tilted horizons.
We were also impressed with the new Lens Correction tool, which fixes distortion and other lens artifacts, using profiles tailored to correct specific camera lenses (the lens type is determined by embedded EXIF data, so Photoshop can determine that automatically).
Most of the other smaller features that make this release of Photoshop a must-have are user-suggested features and workflow improvements. Adobe solicited user suggestions, filtered through the ideas, picking some three dozen ideas and making them a part of Photoshop CS5.
Photoshop has several outstanding new features — it’s probably worth the price of the upgrade just for the new Content Aware Fill tool, the 64-bit boost and the improvements to Camera RAW — but what really sells this release is amount of time it promises to save you.
Among our favorite workflow improvements: You can now adjust the opacity and fill percentages on multiple layers simultaneously, the Save for Web dialog is available in 16-bit mode (and handles downsizing to 8-bit automatically), and Photoshop has the ability to save layer styles as a default behavior that even persists across sessions.
Adobe has done an impressive job of focusing not just on the whiz-bang features, but on how photographers, designers and digital artists spend their time using Photoshop, and how making small changes can speed up their workflows.
Adobe might continue to crow about Flash and its importance on both the desktop and mobile devices, but there’s no lying to investors, and the company is pretty blunt about the threat of the iPhone and iPad in the end-of-quarter Form 10-Q it just filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission: it flatly says that “to the extent new releases of operating systems or other third-party products, platforms or devices, such as the Apple iPhone or iPad, make it more difficult for our products to perform, and our customers are persuaded to use alternative technologies, our business could be harmed.”
Now, Adobe has to make doom-and-gloom statements in its SEC filings — it also says that slowing PC sales or a failure to keep up with desktop OS development could harm its business — but the timing is crazy here, since just yesterday Apple changed the iPhone OS 4 SDK agreement to block devs from using the upcoming Flash CS5 iPhone cross-compiler to build iPhone apps. What’s more, Apple’s also using HTML5 for its new iAd platform, which could potentially undo Flash’s stranglehold on online advertising as well. Yeah, we’d say all that plus the recent push for HTML5 video across the web — and from Microsoft — could harm Adobe’s business just a little. Better hope that final version of Flash Player 10.1 is everything we’d hoped and dreamed of, because Adobe’s going to have to make a real stand here.
Well, this is just a huge surprise. In response to our not entirely glowing review of the JooJoo, Adobe’s PR team has gotten in touch to inform us that Fusion Garage “has no direct relationship with Adobe.” Citing the young startup’s non-participation in the Open Screen Project and use of “a public beta release [of Flash] designed only for desktop use,” Adobe is drawing a thick line between itself and the JooJoo, and urges us to instead look at the alternatives from its partners like HP, Dell and Lenovo. Mind you, not one of those companies is (as yet) selling a competing tablet, and it’s not like there’s some magical formula that will make 720p Flash video run smoothly on a bare Atom CPU (remember, Ion GPU acceleration is not yet available for the Linux-based JooJoo), but who are we to stand in the way of a carefully worded damage limitation statement? Click past the break for the entire thing.
Apple’s already got a veritable novella describing things you can’t do with the iPhone as a developer — create apps that execute their own code is the biggie, obviously, blocking technologies Flash and Java in the absence of a loophole — but it seems they’ve locked down the ecosystem just a little further today with the release of the iPhone OS 4 beta SDK. Check out this snippet from the developer’s agreement:
Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
What does that mean, exactly? Well, it means that technologies like Adobe’s iPhone compiler in Flash CS5 won’t be allowed, simply because the source code of the app that you’re writing isn’t in a language Apple’s comfortable with. The compiler had been seen as a potential boon for Flash devs that had already been blocked out of the iPhone ecosystem for lack of a true Flash player, but Apple’s found a way to block even this workaround — technically you don’t need to be using Apple’s own tools, but you’ve got be using one of three variants of a single programming language. It’s hard to say why Apple cares, exactly, but we suspect that the company would have to analyze your app pretty closely to detect variances in how the compiler produced your machine code in order to determine that you’d violated the rule.
This could be a blow to publishers — Condé Nast included — who’d been banking on Adobe Air to lead the digital push, since those guys presumably won’t be able to bring their issues to the iPhone (and, more importantly, the iPad) without violating the terms of Apple’s agreement. Protectionism is a core element of the iPhone’s success, in Apple’s view — but ultimately, this might come out as a decision that’s difficult to defend, unnecessarily sours publishers to the platform, and turns Flash devs’ heads just a little grayer than they already were.
If you make an app for the iPhone, it has to be done Apple’s way or the highway.
That’s the upshot of new iPhone developer rules, released Thursday without fanfare, even as Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced myriad details of the company’s new mobile operating system to a packed room of reporters.
The changes affect the so-called developer’s agreement required to access tools for building apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. They add significant new restrictions to software makers hoping to create products for Apple’s mobile devices, which happen to be among the most sought-after in the world. More than a billion apps have already been downloaded so far from Apple’s App Store, creating a billion-dollar software business nearly overnight. It’s also led media companies, including Wired.com owner Condé Nast, to make big bets on emerging platforms such as Apple’s iPad tablet.
With so much at stake, some software developers on Thursday bristled at the new agreement, which for the first time appears to bar any app built using “intermediary translation” tools, such as those made by Adobe, from running on its various mobile devices. Instead, apps must be written directly in Objective-C and other approved languages.
“So much for programming language innovation on the iPhone platform” said Joe Hewitt, developer of the Facebook iPhone app, via Twitter. “I’m upset because frankly I think Objective-C is mediocre and was excited about using other languages to make iPhone development fun again. It’s so hard to reconcile my love for these beautiful devices on my desk with my hatred for the ugly words in that legal agreement.”
Apple has exercised tight control from the start over the iPhone platform, at first refusing to provide a software developer kit, or SDK, of any kind. Under pressure, Jobs ultimately relented, spawning a massive outpouring of creativity. More than 150,000 apps have made their way to the App Store so far.
But Apple’s grip over the iPhone has not loosened — and on Thursday appeared to tighten considerably.
While the long-term implications of the policy change are not certain, immediate losers appear to be providers of software that translates applications built originally for other platforms, like the web, to run natively on the iPhone OS.
A number of companies have created tools offering flexibility to developers who wish to code in different languages and port their software into native iPhone apps. The best-known example of such a tool is Adobe’s Packager for iPhone. The tool lets people build apps using the company’s Flash development tool, then export those apps to an iPhone-native format so they can run on Apple’s mobile devices, which don’t support Flash.
The Packager for iPhone is in public beta now, but will be a part of Adobe Creative Suite 5 when it’s released later this spring.
Adobe’s Creative Suite is widely used by the publishing industry and by videogame designers, and Apple’s new rule throws a wrench into their plans to publish iPad and iPhone versions of their magazines, newspapers and games using Adobe’s tools.
Other cross-compilers (as they’re known) are made by smaller companies like Appcelerator, which are scrambling at the news of Apple’s latest curveball.
“It seems like it will be difficult for Adobe to get around this restriction,” said Ross Rubin, an NPD analyst, regarding the updated iPhone developer agreement. “Apple wants to ensure developers use the technologies exposed in its tools and wants to avoid being an assimilated platform. It extends the Flash ban and says Apple is willing to risk doing without certain content rather than ceding control to Adobe.”
Apple did not return e-mails or phone calls seeking comment.
“We are aware of the new SDK language and are looking into it,” an Adobe spokesman said in a statement e-mailed to Gadget Lab. “We continue to develop our Packager for iPhone OS technology, which we plan to debut in Flash CS5.”
The policy change comes amid a chilling in relations between Apple and Adobe. Addressing his staff shortly after announcing the iPad, Jobs railed against Flash, calling it buggy. He also threw barbs at Adobe for being “lazy,” as first reported by Wired.com.
In the past, Apple’s agreement stipulated that applications “may only use documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple” and barred the use of private APIs.
The same portion of the new iPhone Developer Program License Agreement now reads:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
Additional reporting by Wired.com’s Michael Calore.
Google continues to stake out its territory online. The search-and-advertising giant announced Tuesday that it will bundle Adobe’s Flash player with downloads of the Chrome browser, putting Google in sharper opposition to Apple — and giving Adobe a powerful ally.
Google’s decision to throw its weight behind Flash is an attempt to protect its turf — the internet — and strengthen its Android and Chrome operating systems for mobile phones, tablets and notebooks. By contrast, Apple’s iPhone and upcoming iPad do not support Flash.
“Integrating Flash into Chrome is more of a signaling and partnership thing than anything else,” says Michael Coté, analyst at RedMonk, a research firm that focuses on strategy and developer-related issues. “After all, anyone who wants to get Flash can otherwise download it.”
A mere 5 percent of internet users run the Chrome browser today. But Google’s dominance as a search engine and advertising network gives it both money and clout. The company’s free, open source Android operating system is targeted at mobile phones and has already become popular with smartphone makers such as Motorola, HTC and Sony Ericsson. Separately, Google is planning to release Chrome OS, a new operating system for netbooks and tablets based on the Chrome browser.
In that context, Google’s embrace of Adobe Flash has far greater significance than the browser’s market share would indicate.
Once partners, now rivals, the competition between Apple and Google has intensified over the last few months. In January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra was “bullshit” and cast aspersions on Adobe Flash for being buggy. Earlier this month, Apple filed a lawsuit against smartphone maker HTC, a close partner of Google, alleging that HTC violated several patents related to the iPhone hardware and interface. Some industry watchers construe Apple’s lawsuit as an indirect attack on Google, whose Android OS powers HTC’s latest phone Nexus One.
But Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt have recently been seen in public together, and the iPhone still utilizes Google services like Maps, indicating that the relationship between the two companies is not completely severed.
Flash will be the first plug-in that’s not from Google’s stable to be amalgamated into the browser, says a Google spokesperson. “This will make Flash on the browser a seamless experience,” says the spokesperson, “so you will see performance benefits and use of fewer resources. A lot of the controls and shortcuts will work better and Flash will truly feel like a part of the browser.”
Flash on Chrome
In winning Google’s support for Flash, Adobe has found a powerful godfather for its technology. Apple decision to not include Flash for the iPhone and the iPad tablet has set the stage for the rise of HTML5, an open standard that Apple backs.
Already, video distribution platforms like Brightcove are trying to offer choices to publishers who want to reach Flash-less viewers. Brightcove, which provides online video backend systems for many websites including Wired.com, has introduced a product based on HTML5 so websites can continue to serve video, even if a visitor’s browser doesn’t support Flash.
For Adobe, working with browser companies may be one way of preserving Flash’s dominance.
“Our goal is to make the Flash API platform-neutral,” says Paul Betlem, senior director for Flash player engineering at Adobe. “We want to pull in the participation of all browser vendors and even other API vendors.”
Adobe says it is talking to Firefox and IE but it seems unlikely to find any backing from them.
“We don’t have any current plans to bundle Flash with Firefox downloads,” says Chris Blizzard, open source evangelist for Mozilla. “We’ve always made it easy to install Flash via our automatic plugin finder service, which has been part of Firefox for years.”
Betlem says that may not be enough for developers. Integrating Flash into the browser makes both the browser and Flash more powerful, he says. “Some of the problems developers are identifying with the current plug-in system is that all the key events that browser has access to is shared with the plug-in,” he says. “This allows web developers and users a more powerful and consistent experience.”
Future of the Internet
Ultimately, the Apple-Google rivalry comes down to the future of the web and Google’s place in it, says Coté. Through the iPhone and iPad, Apple is increasingly creating a “walled garden” where content and games need to be approved by Apple and accessed through its app store. Meanwhile, it is trying to control how the internet develops by deciding which technologies it will support on its devices — yes to HTML5, no to Flash.
For Google, that’s a future that can directly threaten its revenue stream, since Google’s business model is built on the openness and anarchy of the public internet.
“Strategically, it is not in Google’s interest to supplant an existing platform with a new one,” says Coté. “The way Google makes its revenues is with the web completely open. If Apple starts controlling access to content then it would make it very difficult for Google to find ways to insert itself into the system.”
Google and Adobe say that decision to integrate Flash with Chrome is for now limited to the browser for PCs. But the duo are working together to offer the latest version of the Flash player on Android mobile phones.
At the Mobile World Congress, Adobe demonstrated the latest version of Flash on Android devices. It hasn’t said exactly when it will be offered to users, but Betlem says “Google is very supportive” of the technology.
“I don’t believe the plans are finalized on the exact distribution of Flash players on Android-based devices,” says Betlem. “But my expectation is that there will be a seamless experience for installing Flash players on smartphones, though it will ultimately be a device manufacturer’s choice rather than Google’s.”
It would help Google strengthen its position a pro-choice company and position itself as an alternative to Apple. After all, in the smartphone business, the lines are becoming increasingly clear. It’s the iPhone vs. other platforms.
“When it comes to Android, the idea is that you will have the complete web instead of the blue-box web that Apple is offering,” he says. “So, obviously Google is interested in having Flash around and increasing the access to it.”
Google’s Flash support also doesn’t mean that it will not back HTML5. “Google has never claimed to be an open source company,” he says. “What they have claimed to offer is choices and alternatives.”
Support for Flash in the Chrome browser will also help Google’s plans to put its operating system on tablets. Last month, mock-ups from Google showed the company is planning to partner with gadget manufacturers to introduce tablets that could potentially challenge the iPad.
If Apple had its way, we expect that the iPad would go down in history as the device that nearly single-handedly destroyed Adobe’s empire of Flash. While HTML5 has been in development for years, content providers like the Wall Street Journal, NPR, CBS and more have only begun transitioning video services to the new standard (and subsequently, away from Flash) now that it’s time for Cupertino’s big release. But this week, Adobe has found an ally in Google, which has just announced that the Chrome browser — and more importantly, Chrome OS — will not merely support but natively integrate the technology. In the short run, what this means is that the Chrome browser won’t require you to download Adobe Flash Player or spend time updating it before back-to-back YouTube viewings and marathon Newgrounds sessions. In the long run, Google explains that it intends Flash to become an integral, seamless part of web design up there with HTML and Javascript — and if we extrapolate, an integral part of its new Chrome OS as well. Pardon us for thinking out loud, but it sounds like Google’s found an exclusive feature to highly tout, when it inevitably brings a Chrome OS tablet to market.
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