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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.

Adobe Systems thinks we can do better with the quality of digital video images. It is also developing a way to search on the audio within video clips.

At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2008 in Las Vegas this week, Adobe will announce a joint initiative to develop a specification that it hopes will eventually lead to a file format for higher image quality.

Adobe will show a preview of technology that will create a text transcription of the audio within a video clip at editing time.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The effort is called CinemaDNG, named after the DNG (Digital Negative) raw digital still image format designed by Adobe. The company is working with others in the industry including camera makers and software developers, said Simon Hayhurst, senior product manager for dynamic media at Adobe.

The group's hope is to have a specification ready sometime this year and to submit it to a standards body to encourage broader industry adoption, he said.

Initially, the specification will only affect "high-end Hollywood and top-end indie" filmmakers because equipment that supports this format would be the most sophisticated and expensive available. But eventually, this format could be used more broadly.

"It lays the foundation for the correct way that you want to do cinema in the future," said Hayhurst.

Creating a common standard will help accelerate adoption of higher quality imaging, he said.

The advantage of the specification will not only be better resolution, but it will also give more image control to cinematographers and editors. The format can be useful for archiving films which could be reissued with a different look as well.

Adobe intends to support the format in future versions of its video work-flow products, like After Effects and Premiere Pro.

"You want enough space to innovate but have commonality so that you are implementing technology when there is a genuine need for it to be different," Hayhurst said.

Video to text
Separately, Adobe will give a preview at NAB 2008 of technology that automatically transcribes the audio track of a video file.

For editors, this will allow them to more quickly find passages within a clip based on a text read-out of the audio. The output of the video-editing software will also include that transcribed information.

As a result, viewers of a Web video will be able to search on terms to find a specific location within a video.

For example, a person could search a CNET video review for a product name and a specific feature, such as camera zoom.

Adobe will demonstrate the feature on a version of its Soundbooth audio-editing product under development and on Premiere Pro.

The company intends to support the feature in the next major release of its video work-flow software. There was a two-year gap between the releases of Creative Suite 3 and 2, so the next major version is likely to come some time in 2009.

The transcription information will be stored in XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform), another format developed by Adobe.

"We keep saying that metadata is the most important thing happening in our industry and we want to prove it," said Hayhurst.

In other announcements, Adobe will announce that it is now natively supporting Sony's XDCAM EX tapeless video file format in its Creative Suite 3 video-editing tools.

And it is adding support for H.264 standard, high-definition video format on its Flash encoding software. It added support for H.264 for Flash video playback last year.

People are taking a serious shine to Adobe Systems' Creative Suite 3.

Creative professionals are buying the most recent version of Adobe's flagship product, released in April, much faster than the previous suite, according to retail data compiled by NPD Group.

Unit volume sales of CS3 after six months were up 87 percent when compared with the first six months of sales of Creative Suite 2, which was released in May 2005. A comparison of dollar sales through U.S. retail outlets and e-commerce sites shows almost the same increase.

(Credit: Adobe)

"This shows that the CS3 launch was an absolute success and Adobe hit one out of the park," said Chris Swenson, an analyst at NPD Data.

He said that the strategy of linking the different products gained through the merger of Adobe and Macromedia is resonating with customers.

"Improved integration means massive time savings for creative professionals and developers, so a lot of people are rushing to get the product," he said. For example, people can take files from photo-editing package Photoshop and work with them in Web-authoring tool Dreamweaver.

Commercial sales of CS3, typically sold directly by Adobe, show a slower adoption rate than retail. The unit volume growth was about 25 percent higher for the first six months of CS3 compared with the first six months of CS2.

"So U.S. commercial sales of CS3 are doing good; U.S. retail sales are on fire," Swenson said.

The rate at which people are buying CS3 is closely watched by financial analysts because it represents a large percentage of Adobe's revenue.

During a meeting with financial analysts and media at Adobe's Max conference earlier this month, company executives acknowledged that CS3 was outpacing CS2 sales in terms of revenue.

In September, Adobe beat analysts' estimates for its third-quarter earnings and raised its full-year forecast.

Of the different editions of Creative Suite 3, NPD's figures show that the Design Premium edition is the best-selling version, accounting for more than 50 percent of retail sales. Adobe's most-expensive option, called Master Collection, accounts for only about 2 percent of retail unit shipments.

The Design Premium edition is most popular, Swenson said, because it includes the most common set of tools designers and developers use: Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, InDesign, and Acrobat 8 Professional.

Sales of CS3 on the Mac make up about 75 percent of sales, consistent with CS2 sales, he added.

BOSTON--Adobe Systems sees the so-called YouTube generation as its next big customer base.

At the JPMorgan Technology Conference here on Tuesday, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen explained how his company sees the market for its line of Creative Suite 3 software packages.

While Adobe has traditionally considered its base to comprise about 3 million professionals who return for each new software edition and continue to buy other Adobe products, that base is skewing toward nonprofessionals.

Chizen said his company estimates that there are about 38 million "aspiring professionals or amateur users" who want to be able to say they use what the pros use. They are now buying Adobe's lower-end packages. He cited several examples of young family members and friends who have suddenly become interested in getting "freebies." He contends that Adobe software is the new cool thing to have among the Web 2.0 set.

"Because of the social sites and sites like YouTube, everyone wants to create stuff that looks cool," Chizen said.

Chizen was pressed with questions from analysts on the price differences between Creative Suite 3 and Creative Suite 2 products. He initially said that because of CS3's new features and configurations, the comparison is akin to that of apples to oranges, but then he decided to answer the question.

"We still have lower price SKUs 'cause we don't want to alienate the 38 million-plus noncreative professionals. We have a lot of customer loyalty. We know customers will pay more, but we don't want them hating us 'cause we know that that will come back to haunt us," Chizen said. "I don't want our customers to have a perception of Adobe like the perception some have with Microsoft--like they're being held hostage."