Both IDG and Gartner are predicting that Windows Phone sales will pass the iPhone by 2015. While Android is predicted to remain the top-dog in the smartphone market, Windows Phone market share is projected to grow while iOS market share is projected to shrink. We’ve been seeing an increased interest in designers and developers moving their apps to Windows Phone, and we expect this to increase in the coming years. Read the IDC report here and the Gartner report here. Apple is hardly dead, as this past quarter Apple sold 18.6 million iPhones, which is more than double the number of iPhones it sold in the same quarter just one year ago. While their sales may continue to go up, the overall smartphone market is expected to grow at a higher rate, with more of those sales going to Windows Phone and Android.
Joining Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Sony’s Reader, later this year the Amazon Kindle will support the ability to borrow books from libraries. The books will be checked-out and accessible for a specific time period, and then unavailable after the lending time has expired. Look for this feature to be available in many libraries that offer electronic lending by the end of the year.
The only enhancement from Photoshop CS5 to Photoshop CS 5.5 is for software developers. If you don’t write programs, or more specifically, plug-ins to Photoshop, there isn’t anything for you. Adobe is experimenting with the idea that a tablet device can control Photoshop. If you are familiar with Wacom tablets, think of the idea that your tablet, such as an iPad, may someday be able to display an image that you are editing while near your desktop or notebook computer. While it’s an interesting idea, there’s no reason Adobe should be changing the version of Photoshop from CS 5 to CS 5.5. Our verdict for Production Premium Users: there are no new features that impact end-users, and it’s not worth the time or expense to upgrade.
There is nothing new to add regarding the other Creative Suite 5.5 products like Illustrator CS5.5, Bridge CS 5.5, and Fireworks CS 5.5. These CS 5.5 products have no noticeable changes or improvements from their CS 5 versions. Adobe is simply relabeling them from Creative Suite 5 to Creative Suite 5.5, calling them new, and charging you an upgrade fee. Overall can’t recommend the CS 5.5 upgrade for most customers.
We reviewed After Effects CS 5.5 and Premiere Pro CS 5.5 together as they are often used in the same workflow. These two products along with Photoshop CS 5.5 get bundled together into the Production Premium CS 5.5. As with the CS 5 upgrade, the most significant enhancements with these tools with the CS 5.5 release are related to speed and workflow. Digital video is changing rapidly, and it makes sense for Adobe to update these products more regularly to keep up with these changes. The workflow advances and subtle speed improvements for playback will be useful for full-time video professionals. Things like source timecode support, additional file support, and enhanced playback speed are useful. Our verdict for Production Premium Users: this upgrade to After Effects CS 5.5 and Premiere Pro CS 5.5 is worth serious consideration if you are a full time video professional.
InDesign is the one product in the Creative Suite 5.5 to offer some significant improvements. Adobe’s near monopoly in the desktop publishing market has left book publishers with few alternatives despite Adobe InDesign’s terrible ePub export capabilities. Publishers have had to create their own workflows that involve manually editing the contents and code of ePub files using text editors – an ugly and inefficient process. With InDesign CS 5.5 Adobe has reduced, but not eliminated, the need for book publishers to manipulate ePub files that are exported from InDesign. These ePub export improvements are long-overdue, and are essential for book publishers that create ePub files. Other features that were added to InDesign are designed to upsell users to Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite, a ridiculous platform where Adobe wants publishers to pay them a fee every time a reader views a digital file created using their tools and distributed using their platform. The Digital Publishing Suite is nothing short of Adobe using their monopoly power in the design software business to extract additional revenue from publishers that are already struggling to adapt to the changing face of publishing. While the idea of creating interactive documents from InDesign is cool, the need to distribute them through Adobe’s platform – and then pay a fee to Adobe for every reader– is simply absurd. Digital content producers are better served by creating content for print using InDesign and then exporting well-structured XML into layouts for online or interactive use. While the ePub enhancements are worthwhile, the Digital Publishing Suite is a case of Adobe putting their financial interest ahead of their customers’ needs. Our verdict for InDesign Users: If you are a book publisher that creates ePub files, you’ll want to upgrade to CS 5.5 but publishers should ignore the Digital Publishing Suite – they are better served by leveraging open standards like ePub and HTML5.
Our review of Flash CS5.5 found that they’ve added more new features to Flash CS 5.5 than most of the other CS 5.5 products, but nothing worthy of a paid upgrade. For example, Adobe added auto-save capabilities to Flash CS 5.5. This is something that’s been available in much older print publishing software like QuarkXPress for 15 years – and Adobe is just now delivering this “feature” to their supposedly cutting-edge application? And Adobe wants customers to pay for the ability to recover from bugs in their software that cause crashes? It’s not that Flash CS 5.5 is without other new capabilities, though. They’ve added the ability to export to the latest AIR versions – which would be great if anyone actually used AIR. The ability to copy and paste layers is a nice addition, as is the ability to share symbols across files – but it’s ridiculous that you couldn’t do this previously. Adobe has also added some code snippets and the ability to preview the snippets, and made some changes to the Publish settings window.
The really crazy thing is that Adobe is still thinking that developers will use their Flash program to develop for mobile and then put apps through their meat-grinder to deliver to other platforms like iOS. They are also thinking that developers will create Flash apps targeting mobile – which isn’t going to happen. Our developer customers continue to reject this approach in favor of native development to target a specific platform. We believe this approach should continue, as Flash and AIR simply add an artificial layer between the device’s operating system and the user. Our verdict for Flash users: don’t bother upgrading to CS 5.5 unless you are using Flash CS 3 or earlier.
Dreamweaver CS 5.5 LiveView and Design View are updated to provide more accurate previews. While it is good to see this enhancement, we think this should have been a free patch update to CS 5. Live preview is needed to remain competitive with other available web design tools like Microsoft’s Expression Web which includes SuperPreview to get a better understanding of what a website will look like on multiple devices. Dreamweaver also improved their JavaScript support, especially around jQuery. As most of our customers that use the Adobe Creative Suite are designers and not developers, we don’t see this as being so significant to warrant our customers to purchase or deploy The Creative Suite 5.5 version of Dreamweaver. Adobe is indicating that bugs have been fixed – while this is great, it’s absurd they would charge for this. Our verdict after reviewing Dreamweaver CS 5.5: Most users shouldn’t bother upgrading to Dreamweaver CS 5.5.
Soon Adobe Systems will start shipping Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, and we’ve been taking an early look at this group of Adobe CS products to review them and help AGI clients decide whether they should upgrade. Our conclusion after reviewing Adobe CS 5.5: most customers should take a pass on CS 5.5 and wait another 12 months until Adobe releases CS 6. The release of CS 5.5 is more of a business move by Adobe as they shift to a 12-month release cycle and now offer $1,200 per year annual subscription packages. But users that have already upgraded to CS 5 won’t find much value in this new version. Many of the products in the Adobe Creative Suite were not upgraded at all from Creative Suite 5, and only their name is changing. A few products received only minor updates, and only one product, InDesign, received updates that we feel are really valuable – and only for users that create electronic books using the ePub format. We feel this update should have been issued as CS 5.1 and as a free upgrade. Adobe may argue that they are now providing Acrobat X with the Creative Suite, but creating PDF files is already an integrated part of all the Adobe tools, and Acrobat version 9 is more than suitable for the needs of most creative users. With CS 5 we were already recommending that users of Creative Suite 3 and earlier upgrade to the current version, and we continue with that recommendation, but if you have CS5, you shouldn’t bother with this mid-cycle upgrade. The CS 5.5 upgrade isn’t worth the time, effort, and expense. Over the course of this week we’ll be issuing a new product review of each of the key Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 products every day, so check back each day for CS 5.5 reviews of Dreamweaver CS 5.5, Flash CS 5.5, InDesign CS 5.5 and reviews of the other Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 products, or subscribe to the RSS feed of the AGI Training blog.
The .99 cent songs exploded in popularity on iTunes, and a recent analysis of the best-selling e-book titles on Amazon.com by the Wall Street Journal shows that 15 of the top 50 titles are priced under $5. This leaves book publishers to consider whether they need to adopt a lower price point per unit with their e-book titles. While Amazon.com lets self-published titles share virtual shelf-space with big-name publishers, the real story for publishers shouldn’t be competition. Publishers
AGI publishes the Digital Classroom series of books with our partner Wiley. I’m seeing e-books as a chance to reach readers who might not need an entire book, and may prefer only some of our content – maybe they want some parts of our Photoshop books or pieces from our Dreamweaver books. E-books are allowing us to break-down larger books into smaller pieces with lower price-points, so users who don’t want an entire Microsoft Office 2010 book can simply buy the chapter on Excel 2010 or Word 2010. E-books let publishers create new products and if they are seeking higher prices and margins, they can create unique items, like enhanced e-books that include multimedia elements or extra content that couldn’t make it into the print version. The publishers that will thrive are those that leverage the digital platform, creating new and unique products that add value for readers.
Readers are continuing to adopt e-reading devices. This week e-reader company Kobo indicated that they have 3.2 million users, adding 1 million new users in the past 90 days. They announced this number as they indicated that they have received an additional $50 million in funding. Separately, Apple announced that in the past quarter they sold 4.69 million iPads, a number which many analysts believe would have been higher if Apple didn’t have supply constraints.
