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Adobe and Mobile

I’m at Adobe Max 2014 in Los Angeles today where Adobe has made a slew of product announcements, including several new and reworked mobile apps. The company has apparently doubled-down on its cloud- and mobile-first strategy, with lots of new features and services designed to bridge workflows from phone, tablet and desktop seamlessly.

TechCrunch has a rundown of the announcements in this article, and if you like you can watch this morning’s impressively produced, jam-packed, longish keynote address, which includes live demos of many of the features. Also, designer Dan Mall has a nice overview of one of the key new services, Creative Cloud libraries, which lets you store your project assets in the cloud and access them from any Creative Cloud-connected app.

Notice that I didn’t say “any Adobe app” there, because Adobe’s Creative SDK is now letting several third-party apps integrate with the CC ecosystem, including Fifty-three’s popular Paper app for iPad. That bit was rather underplayed amidst all of the content delivered onstage during the keynote, but for my money it represents a huge step forward for Adobe. This is one of the strongest signals yet that it’s a new day for that company, as I wrote earlier in the year. If nothing else, Adobe is actively making things more and more interesting in the creative space, rather than just standing in place and throwing its weight around listlessly, as it has sometimes been guilty of doing in the past.

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll present the app that I’ve been working on with the Adobe team all year, and I’ll post some notes on it here later in the week.

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