According to the release, Adobe’s popular desktop tools — Illustrator, PhotoShop, InDesign, Dreamweaver and Premiere Pro — will be rebranded as part of the new Creative Cloud SaaS offering and carry a CC label (e.g. Illustrator becomes IllustratorCC).

For anyone in the media business –including yours truly — this is a huge milestone. Nearly every publication relied on Illustrator to create artwork, and PhotoShop to tweak and touch up (occasionally rebuild) photographs. InDesign contended with Quark as the page layout and production software of choice.

According to a company statement:

“While Creative Suite 6 products will continue to be supported and available for purchase, the company has no plans for future releases of Creative Suite or other CS products. This update to Creative Cloud includes the next generation of Adobe desktop applications — including Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC and Premiere Pro CC.”

Adobe Systems is not facing this cloud dilemma alone. Microsoft is trying to ride the wave while offering Office 365 subscription while continuing to update its legacy Office desktop versions.Who knows how long that will last.

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Pics.io is the service that says it can deliver all of this and it has several videos to show off the concept. For example, a browser can’t typically display a RAW image file because it essentially doesn’t know what to do with the sensor data that comprises the image. That’s why we collectively use different file formats, such as .JPG, .PNG, .TIFF and others on the web. This video shows that RAW images can be converted in the browser, viewed and even edited, although no heavy image manipulation is being done.

The support for RAW images is a big deal, but leveraging the cloud is another: The uncompressed and unprocessed data in a RAW image file causes the file sizes to be much larger than compressed versions. So if one had a high resolution Chromebook Pixel and say, a terabyte of Google Drive data to go with it — see where I’m going here? — Pics.io would be a hugely useful service. Here’s how the company describes it:

Imagine all your photos finally in one place. So you can enjoy them from any device – iPad, laptop, smartphone – without hardcore syncing and dealing with storage issues. Organized and searchable. Nope? Still not great? How about advanced post processing workflow (picture a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop)? And special algorithms to make photos of kittens even cuter. Well, maybe just the last is impossible.

There’s plenty more to see on the Pics.io site and I’m looking forward to seeing if it actually delivers. If so, I may dust off my old Canon DSLR and play with some RAW imagery in Chrome OS. Thanks much to Rick Huizinga for pointing out Pics.io. As he says, there’s one less potential barrier for people to use a web-based computer: “With a RAW photography tool, ChromeOS can now totally replace my need for a computer using a classic operating system.“

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Products such Word and Excel have hundreds of time-saving shortcuts, and the fact is people don’t know most of them. With that in mind, a Berlin startup called Veodin Software has launched a new training tool called KeyRocket.

Mercifully, times have changed. For one thing, KeyRocket focuses purely on keyboard shortcuts, unlike Clippy, which seemed to appear at every possible opportunity.

“Microsoft tried to teach you the mainstream. ‘Are you writing a letter?’ Of course I am!” Veodin co-founder Jan Mechtel told me. “We do two things differently. One, we’re really relevant – we wait until we can show you something we know is relevant for you. The other thing is we do it subtly. We don’t move, roll into view and take the focus from everything.”

Indeed, KeyRocket’s little popup is notably less obtrusive than Clippy was. It’s also slightly gamified, which may make it more attractive to some users.

Here’s how it works: KeyRocket runs in the background and, when it sees that you’re going through the menus to access a function such as ‘find’ or ‘save’, it suggests the shortcut for that function. When you then use the shortcut, it congratulates you and moves a little rocket symbol further up a slider – after a few successful uses of the shortcut, it tells you that you’ve learned it, and stops bothering you about it.

Responding to the suggestions obviously takes time in itself, but Veodin maintains that KeyRocket saves time in the long run.

“For businesses, the advantage is that their employees are happy because they get a motivating and fun experience, and the second thing is that time is money. We save a lot of time,” Mechtel said. “Shortcuts are six seconds faster on average. The minimum is three seconds. That doesn’t take into account going to another ribbon; that’s just moving the mouse and clicking.”

For now, KeyRocket’s database offers around 1,600 Windows-only shortcuts for Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. The lack of Mac support isn’t going to change for a while (“Right now we want a kickass Windows product”) but Veodin’s looking into extending the supported package list to the likes of Photoshop, Visual Studio, SAP and even software development environments.

And, in the future, the company wants to make KeyRocket a bit more proactive. Veodin employs a psychologist and it wants to use the resulting insights to profile its users, aggregate the data and figure out which functions might be worth suggesting to each user.

The company’s also working on creating new shortcuts for the Microsoft and Adobe programs it targets.

“Right now we try to bring users and software closer together by teaching the users,” Mechtel said. “Eventually want to bring the two together by changing the software, for example by adding a shortcut that didn’t exist. For example, if we observe that you always do bold and underline at the same time, nothing stops us from saying, ‘Do you want that to be default behaviour, so when you bold we also underline it?’”

Unlike the trialware model Veodin tested during the KeyRocket beta, the final product is free for all non-commercial use. The plan is for business customers to be honest enough to pay for their use on an annual basis — doing so would also come with other benefits, such as extra help from Veodin in supporting and updating mass deployments.

The year-old company’s funding so far consists of a €100k university grant, which has kept the eight-strong team going until now. More seed funding is apparently en route.

Clippy was a disastrous mascot for shortcut training, but it is a bit silly having hundreds of shortcuts at your disposal and not using them. As long as it stays on the right side of the utility/annoyance divide, KeyRocket may achieve what the cursed paperclip could not.

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Carousel was unveiled at Adobe’s Photoshop World 2011 conference this morning. It’s a new app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that will leverage Photoshop Lightroom technology to offer image fine-tuning and adjustments on all platforms, as well as automatic syncing, sharing and browsing of your collection via the cloud. Increasingly, the cloud is becoming the tent pole of mobile software, as we’ll see discussed in detail at Mobilize 2011. If you take a picture on one device, it should be available on all others immediately and automatically, according to Adobe. Edit on one device, and those edits are also shared, but your originals won’t be lost since Adobe’s tech uses non-destructive editing tech.

The catch is that Carousel won’t be free. When it launches later this month, it will cost $60 per year or $6 per month as a subscription service. That’s the introductory price; it goes up to $100 per year or $10 a month after Jan. 31, 2012. That’s quite a bit more than the one-time fee associated with most existing iOS or Mac photo editing apps, and it’s more expensive than the similar iCloud service, which provides free syncing of photos through Photo Stream, as well as the ability to purchase more storage for between $20 and $100 per year. Google+ also offers basic mobile photo syncing for free through its iOS application, though in a far more limited form.

Adobe’s offering provides more powerful editing tools, as well as sharing options that allow up to five non-Carousel members to collaborate on individual photos or a library of photos for free. Non-subscribers get a special download link for a single install of the app of their choice and can view and edit photos in shared albums. With Photo Stream, your options for collaboration are more limited; you can share through external social networks, but that’s about it, and Carousel has that angle covered, too; you can share to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr from within the apps.

Carousel definitely offers more than Photo Stream, but it also isn’t integrated at the OS level like Apple’s offering will be, so you’ll have to go to apps to use it. It also might be more muscle than the average mobile photographer needs, at a higher price than they’re willing to spend, though I can easily see the appeal for pro photographers who need to work with distributed teams on a regular basis. But Adobe is clearly targeting consumers, and talks mostly about uses average folks might have for the service, like creating and sharing family photo libraries.

You can sign up now to be notified when the service goes live, and Adobe is offering a 30-day free trial before you have to start paying for Carousel. Anyone interested in getting this level of control over your personal photo cloud, or are Apple’s upcoming built-in iOS features good enough?

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Color Lava ($2.99)

Finding the right color or color scheme for design work or image editing in Photoshop can be tricky, and may be especially so for artists used to mixing paint using traditional media. Color Lava attempts to mimic this experience using the iPad’s touch interface, allowing you to create and store color palettes and instantly set the foreground color in your desktop Photoshop installation.

The app provides a color wheel featuring the three primary and three tertiary colors, as well as shades of black and grey. You also have access to a virtual water tray for cleaning your digital “brush,” and to help you blend the colors you already have on your working palette. You can mix colors and tap different areas to create a five-color scheme which you can save to the app for later use. You can also use photos from your camera roll or other on-device albums to draw colors for use in schemes.

Color Lava works well, is simple and self-explanatory, and even provides some interesting visual enhancements like animated ripples in your water tray and 180 degree rotation support (though only landscape modes are supported). Once you set up your Photoshop connection (you must be on the same Wi-Fi network), setting your foreground color is incredibly easy.

Adobe Nav ($1.99)

This is the app that has the most integration with the desktop version of Photoshop. Adobe Nav essentially provides an iPad-based toolbar for your desktop Photoshop install. It has all the tools you’ll normally find in your left-hand PS toolbar column, and includes the ability to edit the configuration to include any commands available to that toolbar. The app also provides a foreground/background color switcher, a one-button Screen Mode toggle, and a one-button zoom to return the image to Actual Pixels magnification.

The ability to completely customize which commands are available on your 4 x 4 grid makes it very easy to line up your most commonly used Photoshop tools for quick and easy access. You can have Gradient Fill and Fill Bucket side-by-side, for instance, instead of having them as an either/or nested toggle the way they are in a default Photoshop installation. The one-touch commands Adobe provides are also great choices, although I’d appreciate the ability to bring up a basic color picker in the app itself, or to customize which zoom magnifications appear by default.

Adobe Nav also provides a thumbnail viewer that allows you to switch between your currently open Photoshop documents with a single tap. This is a terrific addition for Photoshop users who often have many files open at once. Trying to cycle through open images to find one only by name is a chore, and this eliminates that completely.

Adobe Eazel ($4.99)

Of the three apps, Eazel represents the most innovative from a control perspective. The app provides nothing but a blank canvas by default, and you bring up controls by tapping the screen with five fingers simultaneously and then lifting all fingers except the one associated with the tool you want to alter. These include color, brush size, opacity and settings.

The interace is very different, but it is also surprisingly easy to get a handle on. I’m by no means an artist, yet I was able to come with the reasonable facsimile of some kind of fruit you see in the screens. The feel is decidedly watercolor, and there’s no way to change that, but it’s a good tool for sketching out ideas or for doing some amazing digital painting for more capable artists.

Eazel’s connectivity with the desktop version of Photoshop is limited to the ability to push images from the iPad app to Photoshop wirelessly, preserving layers (though only a foreground and background layer are currently possible in the app). Even though you can’t manipulate the image on the iPad after its sent to Photoshop, it’s a handy function for users who want to create on mobile and edit on desktop. Also, it’s early days and really just serves to hint at what Adobe’s Photoshop Touch API is capable of.

Good Now, Better Later

Adobe’s apps are impressive. They integrate easily with the desktop version of Adobe Photoshop (so long as you have Version 12.0.4 or higher), and they make working with the software either easier or more interesting. Color Lava and Adobe Nav in particular should find their way into the every day workflows of many iPad-toting Photoshop professionals and amateur enthusiasts. Eazel’s appeal is more limited, but it will probably do well among those who have a need for it.

The apps are simple, easy to connect (and they automatically reconnect upon reopening after a few uses), and they show how powerful Adobe’s Photoshop Touch API is. In addition to being useful tools on their own, they also whet the appetite for what’s to come. Tight desktop/second screen integration will be one of the ways in which major traditional software companies ride the post-PC wave, and the first crop of Photoshop Touch apps are a great example of that integration.

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Tablets and other mobile devices acting as unique, flexible control surfaces that can act with or without direct connection to their parent programs is an area that so far has only been lightly explored. Perhaps that’s because much of the focus so far has been on whether or not post-PC devices can truly operate independently of traditional computers. In our haste to prove they can, we may have overlooked the fact that sometimes, hardware codependence is a beautiful thing. Other software companies should take a close at what Adobe is doing here and see if something similar wouldn’t benefit their own products. Even Apple’s Final Cut video editing software cut definitely benefit from something similar.

Photoshop Touch will first be implemented in three official Adobe apps scheduled for May release, called Eazel, Color Lava and Nav. Each app essentially transforms your iPad into an additional control device or surface for your desktop-based installation of Adobe Photoshop. Adobe certainly isn’t the first to attempt this (there are apps that act as control surfaces for video and audio editing software, too, and even apps that work as game controllers), but it is probably the largest and most influential company to do so, and it has also gone a step further and made these tools available to third-party developers for use with its software.

The apps Adobe showed off work in a couple different ways. Nav allows you to create a custom tool palette, and also use a color picker and zoom controls. You can flip through open Photoshop files, and open files directly from your iPad in your desktop Photoshop installation. Nav is pure companion app, and doesn’t exist independently of Photoshop on the desktop.

Eazel and Color Lava, on the other hand, can work both with or without Photoshop itself being open. Eazel is an independent iPad painting app that very accurately simulates physical paint media (if the demos are any indication). It works independently, but allows you to transfer your paintings to Photoshop at any resolution, which means you can resize for print without any loss of quality. Color Lava, as its name suggests, is all about creating color palettes and swatches. These can later be synchronized with your desktop Photoshop, or it can be used in real-time with Photoshop open.

There’s also a video demo (see below) of one third-party Photoshop Touch app by Shawn Welch making the rounds (via MacRumors). It looks to act as a high-level management tool for all Photoshop installations on a given network. For example, you can open images simultaneously on all connected computers, and you also have very granular control over every individual running instance of Photoshop. Looks like a very handy tool for design studio art directors.

The apps previewed by Adobe show the company has been thinking carefully about how to extend interfaces to mobile devices in a way that makes sense. Each of the apps seems to work particularly well with a touch interface, and they do much more than treat the iPad as just another keyboard or mouse. These apps may leave some design professionals wishing the iPad had pressure-sensitive input (I know I was thinking wistfully of the Wacom-penabled Axiotron Modbook), but to dismiss them because of those kinds of hardware limitations is a mistake.

Adobe announced the Photoshop Touch apps and SDK alongside its CS5.5 paid mid-cycle upgrade, but according to the company’s official press materials, Touch apps will work with existing installations of Adobe Photoshop CS5 thanks to a free patch available May 3, 2011. I’m happy Adobe isn’t limiting the availability of these new features to CS5.5 customers, and I can’t wait to see how they work in an actual photo-editing workflow. Does anyone else think Adobe’s on the right track here?

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The announcement of Premiere puts Adobe in direct competition with Apple’s iMovie application that ships with every new Mac. This obviously begs the question, why would you choose Premiere over iMovie? Having just downloaded and installed Premiere, I don’t have the answer yet.

What I can say is that iMovie and Premiere seem very much alike in function and appearance. Both applications tout ease of editing, basic special effects, and simple sharing with online services as their primary draws.

Installing and launching Premiere is a bit odd, unless you are used to the Adobe way of doing Mac apps. The download is 1.84GB, which expands to 3.3GB after installation. After launching, Premiere shows a blank screen with a row of buttons at the top. Clicking on the house button launches a separate application called the Adobe Premiere Welcome Screen.

Adobe Premiere Elements 9

Even based just on this slightly confusing experience, I think Premiere will face stiff competition from the incredibly user-friendly iMovie and iLife suite.

As mentioned, Photoshop Elements 9 is also available for download, and includes some great features from Photoshop CS5. This quote from Adobe’s press release mentions one feature alone that could be worth the $99 price tag:

Adapted from Photoshop CS5’s celebrated Content Aware Fill feature, the content intelligence in the Spot Healing Brush analyzes what’s in the image and quickly de-clutters or repairs photos (like removing tourists from a crowded scene) with a swipe of a brush, magically filling in the background.

Photoshop Elements 9 and Premiere Elements 9 are available from Adobe for $99 each, or as a bundle for $149.99.

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Watching the iPad’s first television spot on the Oscars Sunday night, I got giddy all over again in anticipation of getting my hands on this hot new product. Though it’s still a few weeks away, I’m even more excited for the applications that will be coming to the platform. Here’s my top 10 list of apps that I want to see developed for the iPad.

Coda

As a graphic designer and web developer, Coda is a staple in my workflow. It features a built-in FTP system, which could be problematic to port to a mobile device, considering there isn’t a traditional file structure to store data. However, perhaps the iPad’s new file storage system will provide an adequate solution. Regardless, as someone who codes, it would be awesome to sit next to a client and modify code and push changes to a site all from my iPad while they load and test the revisions on their own desktop.

Photoshop

Before you laugh, remember that Adobe has already released Photoshop Mobile for the iPhone, and all things considered, it’s not such a bad application. A larger iPad version could allow support for opening and manipulating native Photoshop files as well as working between multiple files. CS4 introduced a new tabbed approach to viewing multiple documents at once. A similar setup could easily be implemented on the iPad.

Katamari Damacy

What’s a fun touchscreen device without a fun game? Katamari already exists as an iPhone app so it’ll scale up decently on the iPad. But given the advanced graphics of the iPad and the larger screen, a native iPad version is a must. If you’ve never played Katamari, check out this clip below.

iMovie

Call me crazy (it doesn’t hurt to be wishful) but the feasibility of an iMovie-like app is certainly within the realm of possibility. I would have never expected Apple to introduce video editing on the iPhone. Nevertheless, along with a video camera, the iPhone 3GS allows for simple video edits. Why couldn’t we have a larger implementation of this on the iPad, provided it gains a video camera at some point? With the larger screen, there’s plenty of room to view a larger timeline, add transitions or effects and with one tap, upload your masterpiece to YouTube.

iChat

I’m actually quite surprised this app still hasn’t made it to the iPhone yet, but as a platform that’s designed to be “the best way to experience the web, email, photos and video,” the iPad seems like the perfect device for iChat, especially if a future model gains a video camera.

Screen Sharing or Remote Desktop

There have been a number of third-party developers that have created similar apps for the iPhone, but I’m honestly shocked to see that Apple hasn’t implemented its own solution yet. With a larger screen and almost full-size keyboard, remotely accessing and interacting with other Macs on my network would be a breeze on the iPad.

Preview

While the iBooks application will open books that are in EPUB format, I’d love to see a more robust implementation of Preview available on the iPad (and iPhone). Specifically, an app that is capable of annotating PDF files and provides support for links within PDFs. Since I’m also an academic, some of the journals I read (as PDFs) contain bookmarks to other articles or chapters and currently, none of the built-in applications on the iPhone support interacting with them.

Hulu

I don’t care how it has to happen or if it involves Flash or not. Who doesn’t want Hulu on the iPad? Even if it required a small subscription, I would love to be able to access my Hulu queue on the go. Better yet, since the iPad is a closed system, the app could download and cache content so it wouldn’t necessarily have to be streamed in real time. This could be a great solution to save AT&T’s crowded bandwidth for 3G models and allow WiFi-only models to still play even if a network isn’t around. I’d pay for that; would you?

Bento/Filemaker

Now that we have iWork, how about a real implementation of Bento (or FileMaker if that’s not too much to ask)? The current iPhone version is pretty pathetic and really hard to use to manipulate larger databases. While FileMaker may be a stretch, I’d put serious money on seeing an iPad version of Bento before the year is out.

An Improved iTunes App

It looks as though the new iTunes app represents a step ahead of the current iPhone version, but there are still some missing features that would make this app a rock star on the iPad. Adding support for Internet radio, browsing my other libraries by Home Sharing or support for iTunes Extras and LPs would be amazing. Honestly, why hasn’t Apple announced support of iTunes Extras and LPs? The specs call for a viewing area of 1280×720 (the 720p high definition standard). They also call for building your iTunes Extras with what’s called a bleed graphic, or a graphic that can “fill in the extra space” if you’re viewing it at a size greater than 1280×720. Now given that as a way to compensate for a difference in aspect ratios, if you were to scale down an iTunes Extra for the 1024×768 display, wouldn’t it just make sense? Come on, if the Apple TV can do it (and we all know how excited Apple gets about that product), shouldn’t the iPad as well?

What are your thoughts on apps you’d like to see? Share your thoughts in the comments below. The great thing about Apple’s developer community is that they keep up with what’s discussed in the blogosphere. You never know; a developer might see your suggestions. So, share what you’d like to see on the iPad!

Photoshop CS5 will finally become 64-bit, for starters, something which Photoshop CS4 for Windows could claim nearly two years ago in 2008. The new 64-bit Photoshop CS5 has be completely rewritten in Apple’s Cocoa development framework, after Apple’s decision to scrap a 64-bit version of Carbon blocked the simultaneous release of a 64-bit Photoshop CS4 for Mac. But that’s not all. Many other new goodies are also forthcoming.

Many Behind-the-Scenes Improvements

As a frequent, though not very in-depth user of Photoshop CS4, I consider it by far the best iteration of Adobe’s image editor to date, and so I wasn’t too disappointed to learn that many of the changes made in CS5 will come as backstage enhancements. Like Apple did with Snow Leopard, Adobe’s engineering efforts with the new version of Photoshop were concentrated on taking better advantage of available system and software resources.

Those improvements will result in a nice little speed boost according to AppleInsider:

In its own internal tests, Adobe found the average 64-bit app to run about 8 to 12 percent faster than a 32-bit one. The primary advantage of 64-bit applications is their ability to address very large amounts of memory in excess of the 4GB limit of 32-bit apps.

Other changes will mostly affect users who do a lot of 3D work, which is something I’ve never even attempted. Few other details about these changes were revealed, although specific feature information about improved photo retouching, including smart object removal was part of the report. If it works as well as advertised, this feature alone will make the upgrade worth my while.

Flash, Dreamweaver and InDesign

Many of the changes being introduced in other software titles included in Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 seem aimed at shoring up and further entrenching Flash web technology, to the detriment of HTML 5, which threatens to eventually render Flash almost irrelevant.

Flash CS5 includes the ability to convert Flash apps and games into code that will be accepted by the iTunes App Store, though according to the sources for the report that isn’t yet working in the beta versions of the software:

This functionality is not working in the current beta versions. We don’t think serious developers will use Flash for creating iPhone applications. It also appears that Adobe continues to miss the boat with HTML 5, and is focused almost exclusively on trying to get users to depend more on Flash – even as the Web development community is looking elsewhere.

Finally, new InDesign features also try to reinforce the use of Flash, making it possible for layout designers to create web-based Flash tie-ins to their print content, or just making it easier to introduce Flash content into their InDesign-created websites. Testers were confused about why Adobe would try to shift focus for InDesign to web content creation, when Dreamweaver is so much better at that kind of task. Having used both, I have to admit I’m wondering the same thing. Perhaps the fear is that InDesign will become less appealing as print culture continues to falter.

Web Review Across the Board

While a lot of the new features revealed so far seem focused on righting the sinking ship that is Flash, some seem genuinely useful to all users. One such improvement is the introduction of web review across of the CS5 products. This will allow designers and artists working in the various creative suite applications to quickly and easily share proofs and samples with clients and coworkers who don’t have access to CS5 themselves. It should take at least a few steps out of the QA process, and anything you can do to simplify that headache of a process is plenty impressive in my books.

Look for Adobe CS5 to come to market sometime this Spring. No pricing details have been announced or hinted at.