Hasta La Gadget!

Adobe does not only churn out software it seems, as at the recent MAX conference, it seems as though Adobe is working on hardware as well as they paraded a couple of prototype devices for tablet artists. These two devices would be the Mighty Pen stylus and Napoleon ruler. Both prototype devices are currently firmly entrenched in the Research & Development phase, where they will eventually arrive on the market – although their respective names have yet to be finalized. The Mighty Pen stylus and Napoleon ruler’s main purpose of existence would be to make life easier for digital artists to wield their magic on tablets such as the iPad.

The Mighty Pen comes across as a pressure-sensitive stylus which relies on Bluetooth Low Energy to connect to the tablet, where all of its preferences are stashed in the cloud, allowing the stylus to carry a similar setting even if you switch to a different tablet. Obviously, it will come with full Adobe apps integration. As for the Adobe Napoleon, this digital ruler and guide that works via Bluetooth is a modern version of a drafting tool which was specially designed for digital artists, making it a whole lot easier to draw straight lines and arcs using its snap tools.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Glass Augmented Reality Apps Are A Possibility, Google May Open Retail Stores Exclusively For Google Glass,

As Adobe announces that they’ll no longer be selling software in physical boxes, they continue their physical presence in this world with two bits of hardware: Project Napoleon and Project Mighty. With Project Mighty, the company is showing a cloud-connected stylus made specifically for apps and interfaces inside the Adobe Creative Cloud, Photoshop CC included. Adobe Project Napoleon is a candy bar-sized accessory that will allow users to keep digital lines straight – or curved, if they like.

Project Mighty

With Adobe’s push for the cloud in a big way this week with a convergence of Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop CC, so too did they decide to remind the world that their creative software environment is made to work hand-in-hand with the hardware you’ll be using on a daily basis. Project Mighty is an embodiment of that initiative, being displayed this week as a bit of an experiment – it’s not yet clear whether or not Adobe will be releasing this stylus as an actual for-sale item in stores.

This experiment does exist in some physical sense, however, as the company shows it to be working with Bluetooth LE for wireless connectivity, on-board memory, and pressure sensitivity for advanced illustration. With “your creative cloud” inside this device, you’ll be connecting to not just the machine you’re directly interfacing with, but your online presence as well.

This stylus device works with a rechargeable battery inside and a Pen Tip charger up on its nose. The build shown this week is a triangular shape that curves in an ever-so-slight spiral from the tip up to the bunt of the device.

Project Napoleon

The device known as Project Napoleon is, at the moment, a rather new concept in the world of wireless connectivity for illustration. This is Adobe’s “Digital Ruler”. You’ll be tapping one of six different modes of execution in this machine, this then wirelessly indicating on the machine you’re working with – be it your tablet, your touchscreen monitor, or your Project Mighty pen – that you want to create in one of several ways.

Tapping the circle option allows you to create a smooth circle shape. Tapping the straight line allows you to draw smoothly in a straight line. It’s not clear at the moment how this device will be interacting with devices across the board, but we can assume it’ll be in collaboration with Adobe CC applications exclusively.

Both of these devices have been shown in extreme brief this week and we can expect additional information in the near future from Adobe on their availability. As Adobe leaves physical stores behind with boxed software, so too does it stay!

[via Adobe]

Adobe Project Mighty and Napoleon mark group’s first hardware releases is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Adobe surprised everyone by showing off a new hardware effort today at its annual MAX conference, including Project Mighty and Napoleon. Mighty is a pressure-sensitive digital pen that works with tablets and stores a wide variety of settings and preferences in the cloud. Adobe showed it off working on an iPad, and it looked similar to what we’ve seen from existing pressure-sensitive input devices from other companies, but with tighter integration into Adobe products.

It can pull in stored Kuler color palette themes from Creative Cloud, for instance, as well as brush settings and a cloud clipboard that stores assets you’ve created previously for use in new drawings. Moving from tablet to tablet preserves the settings associated with your pen, which makes it possible to take everything from tablet to tablet.

Napoleon looks a little like a modern Apple remote, but allows you to easily draw straight lines and arcs via snap tools combined with digital pens like Mighty. It’s almost like having traditional drafting tools including squares and triangles, but better suited to digital media. For precise drafting and more serious, demanding graphics work, these two tools in tandem should help push creativity on mobile devices quite a bit further than what we have available today.

The Mighty pen itself looks similar to something like the Jot Touch 4 pressure sensitive pen, but with full access to Adobe’s Creative Cloud services behind it. It’s a little like an entire artist’s box in a single device, judging by what Adobe has shown us on stage today. It also takes advantage of non-stylus touch, too, in a way that looks novel, allowing users to do things like erase with their free hand. But when paired with Napoleon, it becomes much more powerful than what we’ve already seen, which should really push the envelope on mobile creativity.

The pen boasts an LED on the back that can display different colors depending on what a user is doing with it, and there’s a button for connecting via Bluetooth. The ruler has two touchpoints on its underside to give the tablet its orientation, and the pen has managed to make Apple’s iPad recognize even small touches, which it actively tries to ignore using its built-in accidental touch software. Adobe isn’t saying exactly how it pulled that one off, however.

This is still essentially a project in the R&D phase, Adobe noted, but we will definitely see it materialize down the road as a real product, they said. The real question will be how this can compare to for-purpose devices like the Wacom series of tablets, which are much better than anything else out there in terms of pressure sensitivity, latency and overall ability to mimic the experience of working with traditional artists’ materials.

When Adobe first offered up Creative Cloud to those opting for its design software, the outfit promised that those members would get access to new features first. Now, the company has rebranded its Creative Suite to keep the creativity cloud-focused. Adobe has announced an entire line of CC apps at its annual MAX event, replacing the CS naming convention to follow up on last year’s CS 6 release. There’s no word on if those numerals are gone for good too, but what we do know is that the list of newfangled tools for Photoshop CC includes revamped Smart Sharpen, upsampling for low-res images, support for Camera Raw 8 (as editable layers, too), editable rounded rectangles and more. Additionally, a few tools that were only available in the Extended versions of Photoshop (3D editing and image analysis items) are now available in this Creative Cloud version. Join us on the other side of the break for a quick rundown of the digital workbench that will arrive in June.

Update: The Next Web reports that from hence forth, Creative Cloud apps will only be available through the subscription-based service for $50 a month. CS 6 will still be available for purchase, but will not receive the support of updates and bug fixes.

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Source: Adobe Photoshop Blog, Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe is planning to release a professional-level photo-editing app for iOS that will be similar to the company’s Lightroom editing software. Adobe plans to add the ability for the app to sync with Lightroom so that users could edit photos on their iOS devices and send them back to their computer for finalization.

Adobe’s group product manager for Lightroom, Tom Hogarty, demonstrated an early prototype of the app on The Grid, which is an online web show hosted by photography guru Scott Kelby. Hogarty goes through some of the features of the app, including adjusting the temperature of a photo, as well as edit RAW files right in the app.

Lightroom iOS demo starts at 18:09:

The app will be constantly synced through the cloud, so while you make edits on your iOS device, the changes will appear on the file on your computer in Lightroom. You can edit certain things like exposure, clarity, shadows, highlights, and white balance, as well as zoom in to 100% for fine detail work on an image.

Of course, the app isn’t a full-fledged version of Lightroom, so you won’t be able to do any of the more advanced stuff, but it still looks like a decent way for photographers to edit their images on the go using something more advanced than iPhoto. Adobe hasn’t named the app yet, but it could be an extension of Lightroom, such as Lightroom Mobile or something along those lines.

[via CNET]

Adobe working on Lightroom app for iOS, can edit RAW images is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.