There was considerable buzz about Adobe’s online efforts today. First, the launch of Photoshop Express was announced, and picked up by many bloggers and analysts.
Reviews were quite positive, and with good reason. The functionality is excellent – like Buzzword, Photoshop Express makes common tasks easy, usable and is very responsive. And also like Buzzword, this is an elegant Rich Internet Application, with nice transitions and helpful animations. It just feels good to use it.
In the middle of the day, in response to the Photoshop Express announcement, there was a good article in ReadWriteWeb about Adobe’s presence in the online application area. The article gives a nice overview of many of the offerings now available. Speaking of which, you might want to check out Brio, the codename for a free web-conferencing service that’s incredibly easy to use, and makes remote meetings far more effective. The article also mentions a real sleeper of a utility, called Cocomo. Stay tuned for more on this set of communication and collaboration components, but you might be interested in seeing a cool Yahoo Maps mash-up, featuring real-time collaboration (this app was chosen as an Editor’s Pick on the Yahoo Gallery).
Then, at the end of the day, Adobe launched an updated version of Share, our of spaceonline file preview and sharing utility. There’s a good write-up on the Share blog, but it’s worth just going over and trying out this service. You’ll not only have a gigabyte of storage for uploading and storing your files, but Share also automatically creates easy-to-view previews of your files, and offers the ability to convert your files to PDF.
And, of course, Share makes it easy to share these files with others – either as a URL, or an embeddable preview in another web site.
To see Share in action, here’s a link to a Buzzword presentation uploaded to Share. The presentation is stored on Share, where I’ve set it’s access to “open” (as opposed to “limited” or “not shared”). Share provides both a URL to the document, which I’ve used, and the HTML required to embed a viewer within a web page. When you click the link, you’ll be taken to a full-fidelity preview version of the presentation, delivered very responsively in Flash with nice navigation affordances.
All in all, it was a good day for Adobe and a sign of things to come. We have a long way to go, but will be working continually to update these offerings and add new ones. In the meantime, check out all the stuff we’ve got available now, and stay with us as we grow.
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