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Users of the next Adobe Creative Suite may be able to mix and mash up the applications with online content and third-party tools.

In a bid to make workspaces more nimble, Adobe Systems is considering making parts of Photoshop and other Creative Suite applications available for users to manipulate within Flash widgets, according to a blog post Monday by John Nack, product manager of Photoshop.

The capability to bring tools from the Creative Suite to the desktop or the Web with Flash or Flex could lead to novel ways of exploring Adobe's expensive, hulking software. Users have mashed up Google Maps, for instance, to display apartment listings, ecological pollution, and even UFO sightings.

"The appeal of extending one's app with lightweight, cross-platform, network-aware widgets is so obvious that we were busy building support in my first app some eight years ago--and we had to build our own Flash Player clone to do it!" Nack wrote.

Developers would ideally be able to write one bunch of code rather than six separate chunks to create widgets for panels from Photoshop, Illustrator vector illustration, and InDesign page layout software, Nack added.

Adobe made its flagship photo-editing software available online with the March release of Photoshop Express.

The company aims to tell the public more about the next iteration of its Creative Suite on May 27.

A prerelease, beta edition of Flash Player 10 became available Tuesday via Adobe Labs. New features include effects for 3D-rendering effects and text-rendering enhancements.

There's been a lot of teeth-gnashing of late about photojournalists for the Toledo Blade or Reuters doctoring photos, but photo manipulation is alive and well--not to mention perfectly legitimate--in artistic circles as a way to dramatize. One compelling message is delivered in a batch of photos is by Chris Jordan.

A portion of Cans Seurat by Chris Jordan shows U.S. can consumption

(Credit: Chris Jordan)

Jordan created several images for an exhibit called Running the Numbers--An American Self-Portrait that could be considered a brute-force approach to the visual display of quantitative information. Each image is a montage of a gargantuan number of various objects that people in the United States consume.

One shows the 426,000 cell phones that are retired daily. Another, the 60,000 plastic bags used every five seconds. My favorite is the reconstruction of George Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Jatte made from the 106,000 aluminum cans the country uses every 30 seconds.

"My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books," he said. "

The real images can be up to 25 feet wide, though most are merely 6 or 8 feet. Johnson helpfully has included versions at various magnifications on his Web site. But the Web has its limits.

"The prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little Web images," Jordan said.

The exhibit opens June 14 and runs through the end of July at the Von Lintel Gallery in New York.

(Via Mike Johnston)