creative

Unimpressed by Adobe Systems' Creative Cloud, its forthcoming $50-per-month subscription plan? Adobe wants to change your mind.

The company offered some new details today to show people that the Creative Cloud plan gets people access to more than just the full Creative Suite (CS) Master Collection and tablet-oriented Touch programs. Specifically, according to Scott Morris, senior director of product marketing on Adobe's digital media team, there are these elements:

• The Creative Cloud will include Adobe's Muse and Edge software for creating Web pages. Muse won't be part of the Creative Suite, and Adobe hasn't decided whether … Read more

I'm always looking for cheaper alternatives to Bose's highly regarded but expensive Quiet Comfort noise-canceling headphones, which is why Creative's new HN-900 headphones caught my eye.

In the past, Creative's noise-canceling headphones have been pretty decent, and the nice thing about this one is that unlike the Bose and many other noise-canceling models, the HN-900 has an integrated microphone for making cell phone calls. One AAA battery gives you about 40 hours of active noise-cancellation.

At the same time Creative released the HN-900s, it also announced the impending arrival of a higher-end model noise-canceling model, the $… Read more

Adobe Systems has responded to complaints about its Creative Suite upgrade prices with a new option for customers who bought earlier versions of the software.

The company, which plans to release its CS6 software bundles in the first half of 2012, had offered upgrades only to those who'd bought CS5 or CS5.5. That raised a ruckus, especially after Scott Kelby, president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, griped about the upgrade pricing in an open letter.

Adobe's now changed course with an upgrade offer for CS3 and CS4 users, too. That offer, though not yet detailed, … Read more

Amazon is selling many smartphones for just a penny through Cyber Monday, Microsoft uses bacon to entice potential employees to its Kinect for Windows group, and Facebook may be working on a smartphone with HTC codenamed Buffy after the TV show.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

It's time for Photoshop customers to think carefully about how to pay for the software, because Adobe Systems is curtailing upgrade deals to steer people toward a new $600-per-year subscription for a wide range of its products.

Subscription pricing, in which a person gets rights to use software for period payments, has been a mixed success in recent years. Red Hat has made it work with Linux and related server software, but Microsoft's enthusiasm for subscription pricing seems to be emerging mostly through online services such as Office 365.

Adobe--a software powerhouse going through a rough patch with layoffs … Read more

Last month, Adobe announced its Creative Cloud intelligent dropbox service and six pro-targeted tablet apps; now Creative Cloud (CC) has entered public beta and the apps are available to the select few with Android tablets running Honeycomb 3.1.

I've had a few days to work with the apps, which consist of Photoshop Touch, a tablet-size version of Photoshop from the days when it was just a photo retouching and compositing program; Proto, a Web wire frame-creation tool; Ideas, a vector drawing tool that has been available for a while on iOS; Collage, a tool for assembling random elements … Read more

For those who like to play video games, or who let their kids play, a new study linking gaming to creativity in 12-year-olds may be very validating.

It reminds me of the little flutter in my chest that occurs every time I read about the health benefits of dark chocolate. Or perhaps that flutter is due to how quickly I race to the chocolate stash in my pantry.

But I digress. The research out of Michigan State University, published online in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggests that of the 491 12-year-olds studied, the ones who play video games tend to be more creative, regardless of whether those games are violent--and that the more they play, the more creative they are.

Head researcher and psychology professor Linda Jackson says these findings should encourage game designers to investigate which aspects of gaming are more responsible for this creative effect.

"Once they do that, video games can be designed to optimize the development of creativity while retaining their entertainment values such that a new generation of video games will blur the distinction between education and entertainment," she says in a news release.… Read more

Facebook is in flux, or let's say, full epic swing.

On the eve of F8, Facebook's annual developer conference, the world's busiest social network is expected to undergo its most radical change yet.

Facebook, now 7 years old, appears on the verge of becoming a full-on consumer brand powerhouse--where entire industries like publishing, film, and television will live and conduct commerce at an unprecedented rate and scale, industry watchers say. As Facebook grows and evolves, it's also becoming a more complex platform to understand and navigate. That's why Platlas, the world's first social-networking "… Read more

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Facebook set to launch "something awesome"later today

Google to drop Blogger and Picasa brands

Adobe and Avid offer deals to switchers

Steve Jobs biography gets title

iPad 2 jailbreak is live

CNET infringement case dropped