Adobe apps — works in progress
Posted by Kathleen Maher on December 11th 2011 | Discuss
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Adobe has come to the market with a raft of new apps for the tablet. They are useful to varying degrees but they all cost $9.99. Now, $9.99 is not a lot of money but it is a little high for an app and Adobe’s new apps vary quite a bit when it comes to usefulness and features. The app list looks like this:
- Photoshop Touch—a scaled down version of Photoshop optimized for touch and designed primarily for content creation.
- Collage—a brainstorming tool that lets people gather visual elements together on a work board to try out concepts.
- Kuler—a color picking tool that lets you combine colors whether they’re complementary, adjacent, etc. into a swatch that can be used when designing or brain storming ideas.
- Ideas—an illustration tool first introduced for the iPad and designed to work with Illustrator. It’s a vector-based drawing tool.
- Proto—a design tool for web design. People can rough out a web design and bring it into a web design tool and add CSS.
- Debut—a presentation tool for artists allowing them to present their art on a tablet.
You’re probably tired of looking at the list since we’ve written about the apps a bit but I’ve been playing with the apps quite a bit on an Android tablet Adobe (a Samsung Galaxy) gave us that was preloaded with apps and since I did all the work you’re going to have to read about them, at least a little bit.
This first slate of Touch apps are a real mixed bag and the usefulness of these apps will probably vary with the ways in which people work. That was exactly Adobe’s motivation in putting these things out there as quickly as they could. They’re probably not sure how people are going to work with these things either.
Not surprisingly, the two most useful apps are those that are closest to strong Adobe applications in the contrent creation world: Photoshop Touch and Ideas.
With Photoshop Touch, it’s clear that people went to work developing this product from a deep well and probably with a desire to try out some things that would make its way into Photoshop.
Photoshop Touch has limited support for layers; it has more advanced editing than is available in competitive products; and it has one of the best new tools we’ve seen in a photo editing photo, the scribble tool. Scribble lets you roughly scribble in the areas you want to keep and in the areas you want to delete. Photoshop Touch will create a mask and it does a good job with fuzzy, outlines. Creating masks is a huge pain (for me, anyway). Using Photoshop Touch, you could cut out figures and send them to Photoshop or Illustrator via the cloud for more work. However, your work will be in the lower res of the tablet. You can’t scale up.
Similarly Ideas is a vector drawing tool. It too has some layer support but I found it most valuable as a line drawing tool. You can trace photos or do free hand drawings. Files imported to Illustrator come in with paths and strokes intact and ready for editing and work can be output as .eps, .pdf, or exported to .jpg, .png., whatever format is suitable for the work you’re doing.
With Ideas Adobe has created a valuable work tool for artists who can now work wherever they please.
We weren’t so thrilled with Collage and part of the problem is due to some problems the way the Touch apps let you get to your data. By far the best way to access data is via the Cloud. The Touch apps also support Facebook and Google. I could get to my photos on Facebook, but weirdly I could not get to my images in Google. Instead I could go to everyone’s images in Google and there are nice search tools to help me rummage through the available stuff. Okay, Collage is for brain stroming and so maybe it makes sense that I want access to a whole wealth of (more or less) open source images, but you’d think it’d be easy to get to my own images. Also, I couldn’t choose Gallery on the Android as a source for images.
I also found it a lot easier to grab a Kuler color swatch from the Creative Cloud than to copy it from the Kuler app.
This is in fact a problem throughout the Touch apps and a lot of it probably due to the architecture of tablets for iOS and Android. Apps aren’t really designed to interoperate all that much. Some apps interact better with others. I can use Gallery images for layers but I couldn’t get to them for Collage. There is a frustrating lack of consistency.
Debut, is a tool I just don’t get. It’s designed to enable artists to show their work using a tablet but hey, I can show my work easily enough by using Gallery or some other photo tool. I’m not sure why I want to spend $9.99.
Kuler is nice, but it’s kind of a one trick pony. As such it seems over priced compared to all the other $.99 show ponys out there. On the other hand, I’m not giving it up. One of its best features is that it can create a swatch of colors from a photograph. So, if you see something you like: a great room in a hotel, fabulous shades in a wall paper, you can grab it.
Proto also shows promise of being a very useful tool and not surprisingly, it is closely aligned with Adobe’s web development tools including DreamWeaver. Ideas for web designs can be sketched out and then sent to DreamWeaver for realization. It looks good, but I need to work with it a lot more to give it a fair shake. Truthfully, unless you’re a web master, once you’ve designed your web design, you don’t tend to go messing with it.
The Creative Cloud
Adobe’s Creative Cloud is at the center of the company’s strategy for its tablet apps. It is exchange central allowing files to be fomatted correctly for the tablet and to be managed in the cloud for other applications. The Touch apps are only a tiny piece of Adobe’s huge and ambitious strategy for the Cloud. In fact, Adobe hasn’t revealed how it’s going to extend Cloud support to Touch app users over the long haul. The Creative Cloud is in beta now and it’s free. When it’s officially rolled out, subscribers will pay $50 a month for services that include the ability to see and share files created in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign complete with layers, artboards and pages all intact as they are in the app.
In addition, the Creative Cloud will support the Cloud access to the Adobe desktop apps including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, After Effects, and so on.
It will also support Adobe’s growing publishing services products including Business Catalyst, online fonts via Typekit and more.
It’s not at all a bad deal for those using the Creative Suites in their jobs and large companies are going to love this, but some customers are having conniptions. They don’t like the idea of paying a monthly subscription fee. It’s a great deal for Adobe, which can count on an regular annuity (as we’ve heard Autoesk’s Carl Bass talk about subscription revenues). Adobe has pledged to allow customers to remain on the current licensing model and to keep using the their products as they have been if they prefer (I know, nice of them, isn’it?)
What do we think?
Have I said Inflection Point? No doubt the most overused phrase in this issue. But, let’s face it, the way we use and buy our tools is changing.
In this first round of products for tablets and the Creative Cloud Adobe has done more than introduce a few interesting programs. It has introduced its new pricing and packaging models. We think that in the long run, Adobe will offer different packages for different types of users. The companies offering Cloud subscriptions don’t seem to know that they’re not operating in a vaccum and that customers are being asked to sign up for a lot with each Cloud product they try or buy. – K.M.
