When I first heard about Adobe’s Creative Cloud concept a few years ago I immediately turned my nose up. Initially, I felt that the monthly fee associated with the product was just another way for the software giant to suck some more coin from the user. Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to utilize the Creative Cloud on Alter Imaging’s dime. However, at current promo rate of $30 a month it’s pretty comparable to the cost of upgrades that Adobe was releasing about every two years in the past. After a month of use our team and I have only scratched the surface but there are definitely some things that I/we really like about this latest Adobe innovation.

New Creative Cloud App for the Desktop

Adobe’s full Creative Cloud subscription gives you access to every single one of their products (now apps). This was pretty exciting for me. I had always wanted to dabble in apps like After Effects but could never justify purchasing a license. All of the apps are all tied into one creative cloud app that also has some great features.

The Creative Cloud app has five panels to choose from. Our team now has access to more information about their account and more control over their applications. Recent and past downloads; updates and file installations are visible on the home panel. The app panels reveal the current status of each Creative Cloud app.

Adobe Typekit is soon to make a big splash that has us all very excited. In the next couple weeks we will be able to activate any webfont and use them in our Photoshop comps. This will take all the guesswork out of trying to match a font in the static comps that’s close to the web version on Typekit.

Behance has also been integrated into the Creative Cloud app and allows account users to display their work and receive feedback, without ever accessing the browser

Cloud Update Features

One of the great things about the Cloud is that we’re no longer plagued with keeping up with serials, constantly buying updates to keep our team on the same version or being limited to how many computers you can put the apps on. This is a great benefit for us because it allows us to work remotely and not have to worry about not having the latest Adobe version at home. We simply log into our Creative Cloud accounts and we’re good to go. By logging into our accounts, we can transfer settings from one computer to another and save files directly to the Cloud. We don’t use this because of our server that’s already in place but is an awesome feature.

Adobe Edge Apps

The new line of Edge apps is a great, new toolset that really hones-in on maximizing efficiency and starts breaking-down some of the barriers between design and development.

Edge Animate is a pretty awesome app that basically builds animations in a Flash-like, timeline-based interface. The benefit is that it writes all the java and jquery for you. Animation is making a comeback.

Also added in the Edge Series is the Reflow app. Reflow is a great tool for looking at responsive content. It’s often hard to relay to clients how a responsive page’s content will resize, or reflow, to other device sizes. Reflow has an easy-to-use, designer-like interface that allows you to place content and set anchors for when elements are to shift to a smaller size.

Bigger Better Changes in Dreamweaver CC

Dreamweaver has made some changes as well—nothing huge, but worth noting. The app now handles HTML 5 layouts and elements much better and allows HTML 5 and Edge Animate compositions to be imported directly.

Live Search in Mac OS has been linked to the spotlight API and allows us to search the entire computer/network for files.

New Flash CC

Flash also has some new features but who cares, it’s Flash. Okay I regress — it’s great to build some web banners.

Photoshop CC

Photoshop has also seen some added perks. Some of our favs are the rounded shape corner feature which can be inserted and removed, without distorting the core shape. Smart objects are now even more powerful and allow more styles like pucker, bloat, push, and pull. One of the real jewels of the Creative Cloud release that will get our developers to get the design right the first time is the ability to copy a layer style directly into CSS. Never again will the text’s drop shadow be fff and not 333.

That’s our run-down so far. We’ve got a lot more to dive into and are constantly trying to find new ways to improve our processes and put these new apps to work for us—and ultimately our wonderful clients!

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