Adobe to shut down Contribute, Director, and Shockwave beginning February

A lot has changed since Adobe programs Director, Contribute, and Shockwave came out. And with Adobe putting its focus on its Creative Cloud suite, it looks like it wants to close some doors it’s opened in the past. The three aforementioned apps will be shut down starting February 1^st for the Director and Contribute software, while Shockwave for Mac will stop getting support my March 14^th. This marks the end of Macromedia software, a company Adobe acquired back in 2005. You can read the full official statement here.

Adobe Photoshop is finally Touch Bar-ready

As you probably know, Apple’s new MacBook Pro does away with physical function keys to make space for the swipe-friendly Touch Bar. Apple claims this will make it easier to do things such as making edits with apps like Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. These apps weren’t ready yet when the new laptops came out but now Adobe’s photo-editing app has finally brought new Touch Bar-ready features to its space.

Photoshop now gives you quick access to tools from the Touch Bar and eve provide a contextual next step depending on the task you just completed. The features introduced with the Touch Bar are divided into three parts: Layer Properties, Brushes, and Favorites. You have access to blend modes, scrubbing through a file’s history, clipping layers, etc. with the Layer Properties section. For Brushes, you get a slider that lets you adjust things such as color, size, and opacity, among others. And Favorites, as the name suggests, brings you the most used Touch Bar features so you can access these quickly. This isn’t the final iteration, though, as Adobe says it intends to “continue to evolve” Touch Bar support, meaning we could be seeing more features in the future.

Source: Engadget

Adobe makes it easier to edit speech with Project VoCo

Adobe’s new experimental project might change the way we look at, or rather listen to, speeches. Introduced at its annual MAX conference in San Diego, Project VoCo allows you to edit speech like you would a word document. And it isn’t just about editing existing recordings, you can even use the same voice model to create completely new recordings. Project VoCo just needs around 20 minutes of voice samples from a particular speaker. It’ll then analyze and break down this speech into phonemes, transcribe this, and create the voice model. According to TechCrunch, if you listen closely now, you’ll be able to hear when a word is changed but we won’t be surprised if there comes a time when you won’t be able to distinguish the actual recording from the edited/fake one.

Adobe didn’t use traditional speech synthesis technology with this but used what they call “voice conversion.” And it requires hardly any manual intervention. You can edit the auto-generated transcript but there is no need to set timestamps. The algorithms will figure this out themselves. While this could raise a lot of questions, especially since it’ll become harder to trust recordings now. It’s still a pretty cool technological advancement. Adobe won’t commit to shipping this technology but who knows if this’ll show up in any of their products? They’ve done a lot of that in the past.

Adobe and Microsoft join forces on cloud and marketing services

Two of the biggest software and services companies have teamed up to collaborate and share their strengths. One of the key announcements at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta today is that Adobe Systems Incorporated and Microsoft Corp. announced a strategic partnership to help enterprise companies embrace digital transformation and deliver compelling, personalized experiences through every phase of their customer relationships.

Together, the two companies will enable businesses to dramatically strengthen their brands through solutions with Microsoft Azure, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

“Business leaders in every industry are focused on how to better engage their digital customers, wherever they are,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Together, Adobe and Microsoft are bringing the most advanced marketing capabilities on the most powerful and intelligent cloud to help companies digitally transform and engage customers in new ways.”

“Customers today expect a well-designed, personalized and consistent experience every time they engage with a brand,” said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe president and chief executive officer. “Adobe and Microsoft will bring together the cloud horsepower and end-to-end capabilities brands need to design and deliver great digital experiences.”

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