All Things Digital

Adobe (ADBE) this morning officially launched the latest version of its flagship software package, Creative Suite 4. The announcements included a variety of versions and slices of the new software: There are Design, Web and Production versions, a “Master Collection” with all versions of the new software, 13 standalone products, including new versions of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Dreamweaver, among others, along with “14 integrated technologies and seven services.” Whatever that means.

Adobe said street prices are expected to be $1,799 for CS4 Design Premium edition, $1,699 for the CS4 Web Premium and Production Premium, and $2,499 for CS4 Master Collection.

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During a recent earnings call, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said that his company will “work with Apple” to ensure that Flash apps would run on the iPhone. This after Steve Jobs publicly dissed Flash as being “too slow to be useful” and its stepsister Flash Lite as “not capable of being used with the Web.”

But like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” Flash is not going to be ignored.

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On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won’t be Flash on the iPhone. This is a real bummer for Adobe and many users and developers, because most of the world’s casual games are written for Flash. Just go over to game site Kongregate. Or, look at the world’s video like that on YouTube (or any other video site like the Qik one that I use on my cellphone). Almost all of it is done in Flash. Now developers at those sites will need to find some other method to get those games and videos onto the iPhone. This is a HUGE opening for Microsoft to take momentum and mind share away from Flash/Flex/AIR with its Silverlight set of technologies (which, based on my Twitter conversations, is winning developers over at a pretty good pace).

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The line between software that people access over the Internet and software that resides on their PCs will blur over the next several years, as an announcement from Adobe reminds us.

Adobe today introduced AIR, an application that lets people access Web sites even when they aren’t online. Someone who wants to put an item up for bid on eBay, for example, could fill out the form through the AIR software while the PC isn’t connected to the Web. The software would automatically post the information to eBay the next time the computer is connected to the Internet.

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