Creative Cloud Team Blog

As part of the Creative Cloud, we offer discount pricing for our education-oriented customers – anyone who is currently a faculty member, student, or administrator at an accredited school or university. Like all our other memberships, students and teachers get access to every Adobe Creative Suite 6 desktop application, hosted services like Typekit or Business Catalyst, as well as new applications as they are released (like Adobe Lightroom 4 which we just released at the end of June).

We are excited to have just rolled out some improvements to make it even easier to signup and purchase for educators and students. We’ve clarified eligibility requirements and simplified the validation process upon signup. The new validation process now makes it very simple to enter in your school information, indicate whether you’re a student or faculty or staff member, your area of instruction, and graduation date. Fill in your payment details. Click confirm. Done. It’s that easy.

Sound good? You can sign up here

As always, your feedback is incredibly valuable. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear it!

We’ve just added some new features to the Creative Cloud web site that make it even easier for you to manage your files. Now when you sign in you’ll see both “list view” and “grid view” icons in the upper right corner of the files page. The list view includes details like name, size, and last modified date, and it allows you to select multiple files for moving or deletion. You’ll also notice a new “trash” icon: use this to see all the files you’ve deleted. From there, you can permanently erase the files or, if need be, restore them to their previous location.

In addition to improving the web experience, we’re currently hard at work putting the finishing touches onto our desktop sync client, Creative Cloud Connection; we’ll keep you updated on our progress here. In the mean time, if you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear it.

We know a lot of you have been waiting for this news, so we’ll get right to it: Lightroom 4 is available right now as part of your Creative Cloud membership. You can download and install it from the Apps & Services page.

The new features in Lightroom are simply fantastic. The team has really found the right balance between powerful controls and an intuitive user experience. Image importing, management, and processing is better than it ever has been. The new video, geolocation, and book publishing tools all point to how quickly Lightroom is responding to the world’s changing technology.

If you have a Creative Cloud membership, this new release is included along with future updates to Lightroom and all our other applications. If you’re not yet a member, all the details are listed on our plans page.

Oh, and if you have purchased any suite or individual Adobe product going back to CS3, you can use our special offer and get your first year of the Creative Cloud for just $29.99 per month. We won’t be running that offer much longer, though.

Thanks again to all of you who have left comments and posted tweets since our launch. Your feedback is incredibly valuable, and we love to hear how we can improve everything we’re building.

When we launched the Creative Cloud Membership a few weeks ago, Jeff blogged about the change we’re undergoing at Adobe. One of the key changes is the move from huge releases every couple of years to continuous improvements through frequent iteration.

We’ve been listening to your feedback since we launched and are responding as quickly as we can. Some of the customer feedback we heard when we launched was around file upload performance and file management. As a result, we have added significant performance improvements – particularly for file upload. Now, when you upload a bunch of files to Creative Cloud, you’ll see much faster transfer speeds. If you’re using Firefox, Chrome or Safari, you can just drag those files right into your browser. Try it and let us know what you think.

We are also working on some file management enhancements, starting with making it easier to move and delete individual files. Small changes, but, this is just the beginning. Stay tuned as there is much more to come.

Jill Soley

Jill Soley is Group Product Manager, Creative Cloud and Touch Apps

One of the things we’re most excited about is how the Creative Cloud will continue to get better over time. We’re committed to Creative Cloud as a service, and that means constantly adding new features and functionality, releasing new software and services, and rolling things out quickly. Here’s a taste of what we’ve got planned in the near future.

• Creative Cloud Connection. Our first major update will come in a few weeks and include our desktop client. Connection will complete the circle, offering automatic syncing of your desktop machine. You’ll be able to edit or create files on any device and have your changes pushed everywhere else you work. Getting this right is, of course, critical. That’s why we’re releasing each component of our strategy in succession, ensuring the best possible experience as you begin using the Creative Cloud.

• Sharing and collaboration. Next, we’ll give you the ability to connect with other people as well. I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to people about how they do their work, and thinking a lot about how I collaborate with my own team. More and more, it seems that our working style feels a lot more like the social tools we use everyday. Rather than rigid processes, we embrace sharing. Rather than formal critique, we offer quick comments and “likes.” Investing in these patterns will be one of our highest priorities for the Creative Cloud. Soon, we’ll offer even more ways to connect with your colleagues and clients. You’ll be able to set sharing permissions on groups of files organized by either folders or thematic collections, build a profile out of publicly shared files, and follow the work of other members who inspire you. Shortly after that, we’ll be offering a Team Edition, including intuitive license management and permission tools so you and your coworkers can focus on creating beautiful work, not juggling your software and projects.

• Seamless workflows. We’ve also been hard at work tying all of Adobe’s tools together with services. This means we can support the entire creative process, from the initial spark of an idea through to the finished product. We’re launching our first example of this today with web publishing. Log on to Creative Cloud and you can design websites in Muse, add web fonts via Typekit, publish to our Business Catalyst hosting platform, and manage all your site’s assets with our integrated file syncing. We’ve been calling these “end-to-end workflows” and there will be more coming soon, including iPad publishing through InDesign and mobile app development using PhoneGap Build.

• Deeper integration with desktop and touch tools. Finally, every product team across Adobe is thinking about how integration with Creative Cloud can help you be more successful. That means being able to do more cool stuff when your files are stored in the cloud — file translations, back-end processing, and versioning. It also means bringing powerful sharing and collaboration features into the apps themselves. And with all of your applications connected to the cloud, you’ll have the choice to install new features and updates sooner.

This is, of course, just the beginning. We’ll be updating things continuously, but doing so in a clear and focused way. You’ll always be able to see what’s been added in the product itself, but also on this blog, our Twitter feed, and on Facebook.

We’re very interested in your thoughts on our future plans. What can we do to make all of this fit even better into the way you work? Where should we invest our time? Please let us know.