Adobe to touch the cloud

Marina Freri
Tuesday, 04 October 2011 14:22

Your IT - Mobility

Adobe today from its annual MAX conference announced a series of deals and new app releases, which would assist the company to migrate its services to the cloud.

Adobe today revealed the acquisition of fonts provider, TypeKit, which offers a cloud-based library of web fonts; but it also announced it was in the process of acquiring privately held Nitobi Software, creator of the PhoneGap open source solution for HTML5 developers.

Adobe Platform general manager, Danny Winokur, said PhoneGap allowed developers to easily build cross-platform mobile applications with HTML5 and JavaScript. 'PhoneGap is a fantastic solution for developing a broad range of mobile apps using the latest Web standards, and is already integrated with Dreamweaver CS5.5,' he said. 'It's a perfect complement to Adobe's broad family of developer solutions, including Adobe AIR.'

Also, Adobe said Typekit fonts would firstly be offered as a standalone service, and then as part of Adobe Creative Cloud. Vice president for product management, Lea Hickman, said: 'Typography is a fundamental design element and something that designers want to be more creative with on websites - especially as these websites now need to be viewed on mobile devices,' she said.

In conjunction with the announcement of these two acquisitions, Adobe also revealed the launch of six new touch screen tablet applications, called Adobe Touch Apps, designed to work for both Android tablets and Apple iPads. The most interesting of the six is the Adobe Photoshop Touch, an application, which allows users to sketch, edit and design with Photoshop on tablets.

'With simple finger gestures, users can combine multiple photos into layered images, make popular edits and apply professional effects,' Adobe stated.

The other touch screen applications include Collage, which will enable users to combine images, drawings and text; Debut that allows to present designs to clients and to add notes to them; Ideas, which is a vector-based tool for drawing; Kuler, which helps to generate colour themes and Proto that enables the development of interactive wireframes and prototypes for websites and apps.

Adobe said these six applications would be available for Android devices in November 2011, while users of iOS devices would have to wait until 2012. Prices will be announced closer to launch.