April 15, 2011 - Comments Off on The Thinking Mechanism – 4/15/11

The Thinking Mechanism – 4/15/11

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

Steve Jobs has approved an official biography, written by Walter Isaacson, an ex-executive from Time who has written biographies about Ben Franklin and Einstein. It’s been rumored that Isaacson has been working on the book since 2009. The book, titled “iSteve: The Book of Jobs" will be out in early 2012. This adds fuel to the speculation that Jobs health is not improving. Also, why a book? Why not release it as an app with additional audio and video content? Steve Jobs biography, there's an app for that?

This week Adobe announced an update to the Creative Suite family of products, from CS5 to CS5.5. No major changes to Photoshop, Illustrator or Fireworks. The whole upgrade is obviously about adding HTML5 functionality to the suite to facilitate the creation of content for smartphones and tablets, a direct response to Apple's refusal to include Flash on iPhones and iPads. I think most significant is the introduction of a subscription program for the applications, for example you can subscribe to Photoshop for $35 a month, perhaps a way to curtail the large volume of pirated versions of CS because of its perceived high-price.

• While no one was really wowed by the CS update announcement everyone was impressed with the Photoshop on an iPad demo. The way layers are handled is amazing. As if that wasn't enough Adobe is working on three Photoshop-complementary iPad apps, Eazel, Nav and Lava, that link to Photoshop on a PC or a Mac and greatly enhance functionality. Eazel let's you paint on the iPad, Nav tranfers navigation elements to the iPad and Lava is an intuitive color mixer. The three apps use Adobe’s new Photoshop Touch SDK. This software development kit lets anyone write iPad apps that interact with Photoshop. This is what happens when Adobe and Apple aren't fighting about Flash.

• Hard to believe it is still around, but yes, Quark announced QuarkXPress 9.

Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism

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