Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
News
Adobe Ships Creative Suite 4, Flash Player 10
10/15/2008
Adobe has begun shipping Creative Suite 4, with new versions of its development, design, publishing, and video/motion graphics applications, along with new and modified pricing and licensing schemes for both K-12 and post-secondary education. The company also released Flash Player 10 Wednesday.
Creative Suite 4
Creative Suite 4 is available in six distinct editions--Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Standard, Web Premium, Production Premium, and the Mast Collection, which contains all of the individual applications. Almost all of the applications in the collections have received some major upgrades, with a particular focus on performance and UI enhancements in the applications that formerly belonged to Macromedia (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.).
For an in depth look the updates to the individual applications, please see our article "First Look: Adobe Creative Suite 4." What follows is a list of some of the more significant enhancements to the individual applications in Creative Suite 4.
Photoshop:
- 3D compositing and editing features;
- 3D object/layer manipulation directly within the main interface window;
- Support for painting on 3D objects;
- New painting modes used on 3D layers--diffuse, bump, glossiness, shininess, opacity, reflectivity, and self-illumination;
- A new integrated ray tracer for higher final render quality;
- Non-destructive adjustments for raw images;
- A new version of Adobe Bridge featuring updated navigation, workspace control, and UI, among other new features;
- New printing options, including 16-bit printing in Mac OS X;
- Support for multi-touch gestures in Mac OS X;
- Overall performance improvements;
- Support for using video layers as textures;
- Support for exporting 3D layers to the OBJ, KMZ, Collada, and U3D file formats;
- General UI enhancements;
- Manipulation of light, camera, and material properties of imported 3D objects; and
- The new ability to convert text and images to "volumes."
Dreamweaver:
Recommended Reading
- Tufts Grants Rights for Mileage-Increasing Transportation Technology to Electric Truck
Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles.
- U Florida and Cyntellect Collaborate to Unlock Mysteries of Cancer Stem Cells
The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers.
- George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum
George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.
- Institute for Cyber Security at U Texas, San Antonio Opens Incubator
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups.
- ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard
ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications.
- Dynamics NAV 2009 ERP Coming Next Month
Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.
