3 interesting industry news items

Three interesting design-related happenings in the last couple of days:

1. Adobe has announced that it has acquired Behance, "a leading online social media platform that enables creatives to showcase and share their work." Read the press release from Adobe here, a blog post from David Wadhwani here, and the spin from Behance here. Adobe says that "All Creative Cloud members will soon gain access to the base Behance capabilities (like portfolio creation and community features) while paid Creative Cloud members will also have access to premium capabilities (like Behance ProSite)."

2. Adobe axed some of their "Touch Apps" for tablets. In particular, they "will no longer be updating Adobe Debut, Adobe Collage, Adobe Proto, or the Android versions of Adobe Ideas and Adobe Kuler". Read more about this decision here. Obviously, tablets are great for content consumption. But in my opinion, people are still trying to sort out what content creation tasks tablets are good for. These apps may have been ahead of their time. Note that Adobe is continuing to develop Adobe Photoshop Touch and the iOS version of Adobe Ideas, as well as Adobe Revel.

3. Microsoft has phased out its Expression suite of Web and design-oriented tools. See the explanation from Microsoft here. According to this excellent article at ArsTechnica, "Microsoft is essentially ending the development of any tooling that is oriented at design professionals rather than developers".