suite

Adobe Systems today began selling Creative Suite 6, its mammoth but expensive collection of software for designers, artists, photographers, videographers, publishers, and others in the "content creation" business.

The software is available in the $2,599 Master Collection, the smaller $1,899 Design and Web Premium or Production Premium collections, or the yet-smaller $1,299 Design Standard collection. About three quarters of Adobe's unit shipments today are in these collections, but individual packages are available, too, such as Photoshop CS6 for $699 in its standard version or Illustrator CS6 for $599.

With CS6, Adobe tried to mix … Read more

Adobe Systems is about to begin a difficult -- but smart -- transition.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company will overhaul its core software business in May when it launches a subscription service called Creative Cloud, which bundles its new Creative Suite 6 products with a swath of other products and services. To make it a success, it'll have to convince customers that it's a better value than traditional software licensing.

Here's an indicator of how hard the change will be: A CNET survey in March showed a frosty reception, with 41 percent of respondents viewing Creative Cloud negatively, … Read more

Adobe Systems first showed a few paws, then a tail, then a couple ears and some whiskers -- but now the company is letting the complete Creative Suite 6 cat out of the bag.

After a series of sneak previews and early announcements, Adobe now is detailing the full CS6 line, the meat and potatoes of Adobe's business. It's important to a large number of people involved with photography, videography, design, and publishing on the Web or on paper, and it's set to be arrive within 30 days, Adobe announced today.

But CS products aren't cheap, … Read more

Twitter has had enough of TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, TweetBuddy, Troption, and Justinlover. So much so, that the microblogging site filed a suit against these five tool providers and spammers in San Francisco's federal court this morning.

"Our engineers continue to combat spammers' efforts to circumvent our safeguards, and today we're adding another weapon to our arsenal: the law," Twitter announced on its blog today. "With this suit, we're going straight to the source."

By working to shut down these tool providers, Twitter hopes to stop other spammers from using those tools. The tools function … Read more

Facebook filed a third amendment to its $5 billion initial public offering filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today.

There aren't many changes to speak of -- except that Facebook has included notes about the recent lawsuit that Yahoo handed the social network over patent infringement earlier this month.

Although the suit is not a secret to anyone, at this point, it's a good idea for Facebook to disclose its potential liabilities -- both to the SEC and investors.

Actually, Facebook hinted at a pending legal battle with Yahoo in Amendment No. 2 to its … Read more

Last Wednesday Adobe announced the availability of the public beta for the Photoshop component of its upcoming Creative Suite 6 image manipulation and design software, which users can try before the suite is officially released later this year.

While past versions of Adobe's products have offered a decent spectrum of support for existing operating system and computing environments, new features and development directions in the program suite have had Adobe making some adjustments to the platforms that will support the new software.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 puts a major effort toward performance enhancements, primarily with the implementation of the new … Read more

There's so much big news surrounding Photoshop CS6 that I'm not sure where to start. This is Adobe's first-ever public beta of its most important product (expected to ship sometime in the first half of this year). It's the first Adobe product to incorporate the company's new DRM architecture. It's the first version of Photoshop to take video seriously and to make it into the Standard Edition of the product rather than the extra-pricey Extended version. It's the first version to integrate the company's GPU-accelerating Mercury Graphics Engine (MGE). And for the first time in more than 20 years, Photoshop goes dark.

The beta, which is actually the Extended version of the product, is downloadable from Adobe Labs or Download.com, though at a hefty 1.8GB, it's not for the bandwith-constrained. While you can't run it simultaneously with previous versions, like every Adobe update it installs completely separately so that you can keep predecessors.

Dear Adobe: while that's very convenient, I still want the option to actually update from the previous version. I am tired of the cruft Creative Suite leaves behind every time a new version comes out; on my previous system, I had random directories left over from at least three generations of CS. Given that your new subscription model is designed to drive users to more-frequent updates, you'd better deal with better ways to clean up behind yourself.… Read more

While Avast dominates worldwide security suite usage, and Symantec leads in North America, Microsoft Security Essentials is rising fast, says a new study by OPSWAT, a software development tool and data service company in San Francisco.

OPSWAT's numbers confirm that free suites drive personal computer security, not surprising given the non-existent cost. From March 2011 to February 2012, Avast, AVG, Avira, and Microsoft combined for nearly half of the worldwide security suite market. While it's true that Avast, AVG, and Avira all have paid upgrades, and those companies won't reveal how many people use their free versus … Read more

After long deliberation, CNET has awarded the top two 2012 security suites Editors' Choice awards.

In the paid suite category, we decided on Bitdefender Total Security 2012 (download) for its top-rated security, its low impact on your computer's performance, and its excellent range of features. Bitdefender started strong out of the gate, and although some came close, notably Norton and F-Secure, Bitdefender posted an impressive set of benchmarks that kept it ahead.

Choosing a top free suite for the 2012 release cycle was even more challenging. After a few years of lackluster updates, popular Avira returned to the fold, … Read more