Creative Cloud Team Blog

Just about 6 months ago, we released a preview of Creative Cloud Connection, a utility that keeps the work you’ve created in our touch apps or uploaded to the web site in sync with the files on your desktop. In that time, many of you have brought our file sync into your workflow, and we appreciate the help with fine tuning how our service performs.

Next month, we will launch the fully integrated version of our new Creative Cloud desktop application. As part of that transition, we are updating the server APIs and code that manages file sync. We had initially planned to take the preview offline next week for these updates, but some updates this week have caused instability in the service. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you.

Preparing for Release

To facilitate the transition from the preview, we are suspending the file sync desktop preview for the next couple of weeks while we finalize the updates for the initial full release. We plan to bring it back online prior to release, in order to allow additional testing. This does not affect mobile applications which use file sync.

You can, of course, continue to access and work with your files on your local system as well as via the Creative Cloud website. However, changes to local files will not be automatically synced to the Creative Cloud while the file sync preview is offline. You can continue to manually upload and download files to and from the Creative Cloud website.

As always, you can view the real-time status of Creative Cloud services at:

http://status.creativecloud.com/

What’s Coming

We are excited to be launching the new Adobe Creative Cloud desktop application soon. If you would like a preview of all the new capabilities, watch the Adobe MAX keynote from earlier in the month.

Thanks again for using Creative Cloud. If you have any questions or comments, please post them in our forums, where we are continuing the conversation.

Thanks,
The Creative Cloud Team

You probably heard back in December that Adobe acquired Behance, the leading online social media platform that enables creative professionals to showcase and share their work with millions. We wanted to share some great news for our Creative Cloud complete members.

Starting today, Behance ProSite (normally $100/year) will be available at no additional cost for all paid Creative Cloud complete members. ProSite transforms a public Behance portfolio into a fully customized personal portfolio site with your own URL. You can design an incredible portfolio site that stays in sync with your projects on Behance, increasing your efficiency and helping your work get more exposure from Behance’s 18+ million visitors every month.

If you’re ready to get started building and customizing your Behance ProSite, just a few quick steps:

1. Login and go to the Apps page on creative.adobe.com
2. Find the ProSite icon under “Other Services” and click on the “Get Started” link
3. You’ll be brought to the ProSite welcome page on Behance, where you can either log in or sign up for Behance to build your portfolio and launch your ProSite when you’re ready.

Not a paid Creative Cloud complete member yet?  Free Creative Cloud members can link their accounts to Behance.net using the “Get Started” link under the Behance icon.  When you’re ready, move up to a Creative Cloud complete plan or team plan, and you’ll get ProSite too!

If you have any questions, please leave comments here or visit our forum.

UPDATE (May 6, 2013): In addition to all the groundbreaking Creative Cloud announcements today at Adobe MAX, we have great news about Behance ProSite.  We’re now including ProSite with ALL Creative Cloud paid memberships. When you’re ready to build and customize your ProSite, just follow the same simple steps in our original post here.  If you missed the keynote, you can watch it here.

Today we released an update to Adobe Muse, the software that enables designers to create HTML websites that meet the latest Web standards, without worrying about the code.

This update is available to all Creative Cloud members, and delivers some of the top-requested productivity features requested by Adobe Muse users. It adds new functionality that is familiar to designers who use InDesign, including:

• Hierarchical Master pages – Apply Master pages to other Master Pages, as well as control the positioning of Master page elements such as headers, footers, logos, and navigation on individual pages.
• Spelling checker – Use the new Check Spelling command to confirm words are spelled correctly throughout your websites.
• Widget updates – Updates to all widgets, including the slideshow, composition, and accordion widgets, allow more control over widget behaviors.
• Site preview enhancements – View portrait and landscape orientations of tablet and smartphone versions of your websites in Preview mode.
• Site export improvements – Easily manage updates to larger, more complex sites by publishing to a specific host sub-directory for sites hosted with the Adobe Business Catalyst service or with a third-party hosting provider.
• Code quality and performance updates – Ongoing code updates ensure your websites load quickly, are optimized for search engines like Google, and will work across multiple browsers.

To get the update, simply launch the Muse application and follow the on screen prompts. Or, open the Adobe Application Manager and select the “updates” panel to find a link to the latest version.

Happy Valentine’s Day! To spread love to all our Creative Cloud members (free or paid), we released several new product updates for HTML5 Web tooling today.

Leading the release is the first public preview of Edge Reflow, a new responsive design tool that we first showed a sneak peek to the community at our Create the Web event in September 2012. We heard from many users wanting to get their hands on Edge Reflow and today we’re happy to make that happen. We look forward to people playing with this very early preview release and telling us what type of features they would like to see added.

We’re also excited to deliver several new feature updates to the following products:

• Edge Animate has been updated with new capabilities for easily adding CSS gradients and CSS filters. A new visual web font selector powered by the Edge Web Fonts service has also been added.
• Edge Code now has been updated with support for live preview that shows changes in the browser as soon as they are made and supports editing code inline instead of requiring you to switch between files. Code hinting support for CSS and HTML properties have also been added.
• Dreamweaver has integrated support for Edge Web Fonts making it easy to review, select and incorporate fonts into projects. The Fluid Grid Layouts have also been updated with a new editing interface for flexibility in creating fluid grid.

All these releases are immediately available, exclusively to both free and paid Creative Cloud members. Click here for more information on Adobe Edge Reflow.

Over the last year, we’ve been working hard to improve the experience of installing and updating Adobe applications. While we’ve made good progress, we also realize that a Creative Cloud membership comes with lots of apps, and new versions are coming out frequently. We thought we could do better in how we manage all those updates. So, the team building our Adobe Application Manager has been working hard to address some of your concerns. We’re happy to announce today that a new version of the Adobe Application Manager is available, equipped with an updater! This means its easier to discover, download and install updates for your favorite Adobe applications.

From the updater, we’ll notify you which new updates are available and let you know which installed products are up-to-date. You’ll see a new “Updates” tab that consolidates all the updates, and you can choose to install all of them at once or one-by-one. We hope this makes it simpler for you to stay current with the latest features and bug fixes as we release them in Creative Cloud.

To get the new version, just launch the Adobe Applications Manager and it will self-update. Alternatively, you can download the latest copy here.

We will continue to add more capabilities to the updater and Adobe Application Manager in the future, but your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated — take this survey and let us know what you think!

Adobe Muse enables you to create and publish distinctive, professional HTML websites without writing code. And now, you can create unique tablet and smartphone versions of your websites using new mobile features available in an update to Adobe Muse.

This update is a direct response to customer demands for mobile device support. Mobile-friendly websites are vital for businesses today – IDC estimates that by 2015 more end users will access the Internet through a mobile device than a PC. Because of this, designers and their clients are realizing the need to provide an optimal viewing experience whether sites are viewed on a large monitor while sitting at a desk or on a smaller screen while on-the-go.

New features in Adobe Muse include:

• Mobile Layout Options: Select a tablet or smartphone layout in the planning stage, and define the site plan and master pages to create unique layouts for each.
• Mobile Content and Style Options: Design the content and style of each experience.
• Touch-Enabled Interactivity: Link phone numbers to automatically dial when tapped, email addresses to open an email client with the “To” address already filled in.
• Gesture-Enabled Widgets: Copy and paste Adobe Muse widgets in mobile layouts – site menu navigation, slideshows, page-swipes, and more will work automatically, with the touch of a finger.

Adobe Muse is available in Creative Cloud and you can download it here. If you already have Muse installed, just open the application and click “Install Now” on the updater screen to get these new features. For more information about Adobe Muse, go here.

We’re excited to be delivering over a dozen exciting new features today in Photoshop version 13.1 — exclusively for Creative Cloud members. Below are just few of the key enhancements:

• Smart Object support for Blur Gallery and Liquify: Enjoy the creative freedom to experience nondestructive editing with Blur Gallery and Liquify, now that both features offer Smart Object support.
• Powerful CSS support for web design: Quickly export CSS code for text and objects, and also import color codes from HTML and CSS files to your Color palette to help you design incredible websites.
• Conditional Actions: Speed up image processing by creating Conditional Actions. These commands use logic to automatically choose between different Actions based on rules that you establish.
• Retina display support: See more of the details in your images and in the Photoshop user interface when viewing on high-resolution displays, including the new Retina display available on MacBook Pro.*

To get these features, just open Photoshop, go to the main menu, choose Help > Updates. Or, download Photoshop for the first time from Creative Cloud.

For more information about additional features in Photoshop 13.1, visit the Photoshop.com blog, check out Adobe.com, or watch some videos about the new features on Adobe TV!

* Retina display support for Mac is available to all Adobe Photoshop CS6 customers today, including customers who are not Creative Cloud members.

From the beginning, we promised that Creative Cloud members would always get the latest software upgrades at no extra charge. We’re excited to make this happen today with the release of Acrobat XI Pro. Members can go to the Apps page right now to download and install Adobe’s newest and most powerful collaboration solution.

You’ll get features that let you create forms in minutes, edit PDFs faster than ever with a range of new tools, and easily convert PDFs to Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Plus, there are many more features to explore in Acrobat XI… Read more on the Acrobat XI blog or watch this video to learn!

Not a member of Creative Cloud yet? Go here to learn about what we have to offer!

One of the best things about being a Creative Cloud member is getting early access to exclusive features, like the three Illustrator features we announced last month. Today, we’re announcing six Dreamweaver features exclusively for Creative Cloud members and Dreamweaver subscribers. These features give you the ability to easily add HTML5 tags, audio, video and Adobe Edge Animate compositions to your projects, and quickly find files with real-time search results on Mac OS. To learn more, check out this video.

To get these features, just open Dreamweaver, go to the main menu, choose Help > Updates or download Dreamweaver for the first time here.

If you aren’t a Creative Cloud member, or are signed up for the free Creative Cloud membership and want access to these Dreamweaver features, you can become a paid member here. Current Creative Suite customers can join Creative Cloud and get 40% off their first year of membership, and pay just US$29.99 per month for the first 12 months. See if you qualify.