adobe

Adobe Introduces Creative Suite 5.5 with Subscription Plans and a Tablet SDK

Frederic Lardinois

10 Apr 2011 — 1 min read

Adobe just introduced version 5.5 of its Creative Suite – a bundle of software for creative professionals that, depending on the specific bundle, includes graphics and development-oriented tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver and video-focused programs like Premiere Pro, Audition and After Effects. This is the first time Adobe has released a major point release of its Creative Suite (CS) and while the company plans to continue to launch major versions of the suite every 24 months, it also no plans to release more point releases as warranted. The new versions the company is introducing today will, for the most part, add additional functionality to these tools that will make it easier for Adobe’s users to bring their content to mobile devices.

Subscription Editions

Another major change that Adobe is introducing with CS 5.5 is a subscription service. As Adobe notes, quite a few of its users only need access to specific products in the suite for specific projects. With the new Subscription Editions, Adobe will give these users the ability to lease access to specific products and editions of the Creative Suite on a month-by-month basis. Access to Photoshop, for example, will cost $35 per month, while the Design Premium suite will cost $95 per month and access to the Master Collection will cost $129 per month. In comparison, a new copy of Photoshop today costs $699 (though it’s worth noting that Adobe also offers various discounts for students and teachers).

One-year subscriptions will be available at a discount.

Touch SDK

Maybe the most interesting new feature is the new touch software development kit (SDK) for Photoshop. This new SDK allows developers to use Android, BlackBerry and iOS devices to connect directly to Photoshop. Adobe itself is launching three iPad apps for Photoshop: Color Lava for mixing colors and creating custom color swatches and themes, Eazel for creating paintings right on the iPad, and Adobe Nav for Photoshop, which allows users to select the Photoshop tools they want from an iPad interface and browse and zoom in on their image files.

These apps will be available in early May and cost between $1.99 and $4.99. The SDK is available now.

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

Google used to be a company where experimentation was encouraged -- or at least it felt like that from the outside. Now it's hard to remember when Google last launched a new product that was an immediate hit. But with NotebookLM and its AI podcasts, Google finally scored

🪧 Pressed words

I don't think anyone outside of Matt Mullenweg had the recent WordPress/WP Engine drama on their bingo card for this year. After a bit of early confusion, I think it's now clear that this is, in many ways, an extension of the open source discussions

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

I've followed the development of quantum computing for the better part of the last decade. For the longest time, it's been "just around the corner" and with the advent of generative AI, any of the hype around the technology has receded into the background.

The week after CrowdStrike

It's been a week... Given everything that's happened lately, it's hard to believe that the CrowdStrike outages hit only a week ago. We're now deep in the clean-up phase of that particular disaster and while the blame for this particular incident falls