Adobe to discontinue Muse and Business Catalyst

Today Adobe announced that Adobe Muse and Adobe Business Catalyst will not be developed any further. I’m saddened by this, as I used both products, and believe they filled a specific niche in the industry. But apparently that niche wasn’t profitable or worth pursuing for Adobe.

Muse:

"On March 26, 2018 we will release the final feature improvement release of Adobe Muse. We will continue to offer technical support to all active Creative Cloud customers until May 20, 2019.” Read more here.

It appears that Adobe is considering extending Adobe Spark to allow creation of full Websites:

"Adobe Spark, powered by 30+ years of Adobe’s design intelligence, will soon bring a better way to build websites. Create beautiful, modular, and responsive websites from scratch—in minutes. Just add your text, photos, videos and more, and Spark will give you beautiful results.” Read more here. Oddly, there is no mention of, or link to, this effort in the Muse announcement.

Business Catalyst:

"Adobe is committed to delivering exceptional software and services to our customers. It’s in our nature to innovate and try new things, and it was in this spirit that we acquired Business Catalyst in 2009. As we re-focus on products that broadly provide our customers with the most value, Adobe is announcing the end of development for Business Catalyst as of March 26th, 2018. New sites will no longer be available for purchase starting with June 18th, 2018.  

Adobe will stop hosting existing sites on Business Catalyst on March 26th, 2020. Adobe encourages customers to download their data and migrate to other systems well before March 26th, 2020. Detailed how-to information and assistance is available. Customers' data will be retained by Adobe until March 26th, 2020, after which date the data will be deleted. Data retention is for the sole purpose of allowing customers to export their data and transfer to another platform.” Read more here. 

Color Inspiration

At PePcon today, Erica Gamet showed me a cool blog: 

Check out Movies in Color, "A blog featuring stills from films and their corresponding color palettes."

Now, if only the blog would let me export the wonderful color palettes as ASE files. That would be cool! 

Adobe discontinues BrowserLab

Yesterday, Adobe announced that they are discontinuing the BrowserLab service. BrowserLab was an easy way to quickly preview web pages on multiple browsers. See the official Adobe explanation here.

I previously wrote about BrowserLab here.

Much of the world has shifted from being concerned about previewing content across browsers, and is more concerned with previewing content across browsers on multiple devices. This is where Adobe Edge Inspect comes in.

On a related note, Google recently announced that they are shutting down their Google Reader service on July 1, 2013.

Both of these announcement serve as a reminder that relying on free Web services as part of your workflow is a dangerous proposition. When a service is free, the owner can change, discontinue, or alter the service at any time.

InDesign to HTML5

If you're a frequent reader of this blog, you know that I'm a fan of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite for creating Apps from Adobe InDesign. But DPS isn't always a good fit for all types of projects. The cost may be prohibitive for some, or perhaps you don't want to be beholden to Apple's App Store Review Guidelines. Or perhaps you want to create output that works on desktop browsers as well as multiple tablets and smartphones.

Justin Putney, the designer and developer behind Ajar Productions, has proposed a Kickstarter project called InDesign to HTML5. He is seeking $5000 in funding via Kickstarter to create an InDesign plug-in to convert InDesign layouts to fully formatted HTML5 files.

I've known Justin for a few years, and have been impressed by some of the other products that he has developed. I think he can do it. I've put my money where my mouth is and pledged my financial support. If this sounds like something you could use, consider joining me and supporting Justin in this project.  

See also this article.

IDUG meeting this Thursday evening!

There are 185 people registered so far for the next InDesign User Group meeting this coming Thursday evening. Won't you join us?

Thursday, March 1, 2012, 7:00 PM
Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD
)2501 Stevens Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55404

The meeting is free, but registration is required. Click here to register.

Paul Trani, an Evangelist at Adobe Systems, will be joining us to demonstrate Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge!

Adobe Muse is Adobe's new InDesign-like tool for designing and publishing HTML websites without writing code. Seehttp://muse.adobe.com/

Adobe Edge is Adobe's new tool for creating animated Web content using HTML5. See http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/

What do these two products have to do with InDesign you might ask? As InDesign grows into a layout tool for creating print and screen layouts, you will need to learn to incorporate Web and animated content into your layouts. Muse and Edge are tools that are very accessible to the average designer for creating that content!

Following Paul's Muse and Edge presentation, Keith Gilbert (http://gilbertconsulting.com/) will give a brief demonstration of how to use Muse and Edge content in Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (http://www.adobe.com/products/digital-publishing-suite-family.html). 

The evening will conclude with fantastic door prizes.

As always, Twin Cities InDesign User Group meetings are FREE and open to the public, thanks to generous support from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (http://mcad.edu) and Central Coast Solutions (http://centralcoastweb.com/).

=========================
Agenda
=========================
6:30 - 7:00 p.m. Registration and mingling
7:00 - 7:05 p.m. Welcome and announcements
7:05 - 8:15 p.m. Paul Trani: Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge demonstration
8:15 - 8:45 p.m. Keith Gilbert: How to use Muse and Edge content in Adobe Digital Publishing Suite
8:45 - 9:00 p.m. Drawings for door prizes

 

 

Save the date!

I just scheduled the next meeting of the Twin Cities InDesign User Group for Thursday evening, March 1, 2012 from 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. My friend Paul Trani, an evangelist at Adobe Systems, is going to demonstrate how the new Adobe Muse and Adobe Edge products can make Web and mobile design easy for print designers.

Please sign up here if you plan to attend so that we can expect you. Thanks!

 

Incredible workflow enhancement tool

[The following is a "guest post" by my friend Ed Klemz from Central Coast Solutions.]

There is an incredible FREE web tool you need to know about – Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine. Its a color selection and analysis tool, and so much more!

This web site brings together certified information from EVERYWHERE - all scientific, statistical, mathematical, political, medical, all of it. And this isn't "wiki" data that has no basis in fact, only certified and highly scrutinized data gets to be referenced. See About Wolfram|Alpha to learn more about this tool, and how it came to be.

You present equations or terms to Wolfram|Alpha, and it gives you the answers. The depth of information here is nothing short of ridiculous, and this should be the home page for any research person, marketing trend guru, or anyone who wants to know the most common baby names in the US...

What about color you ask?
Since the entire knowledge base of human experience has been made available us in this tool, what happens if you enter something like "html green"? Why it tells you everything you want to know about it, including complementary colors, values of RGB, HEX, HSB, nearest web and Pantone equivalents...very handy.

Now enter "RGB 249, 86, 2" and see the stats, and note that it is Pantone 1655 - my favorite orange. On the "Representations" block, click the "More" button and see its CMYK value as well. Now we are getting somewhere!

Wolfram|Alpha is a lot more than just information
Its computational, meaning it can do math with your inputs. So red + green = olive. You get the picture.

Its all about workflow
Many top designers, art directors and brand managers have a set of colors worked out for developing their client's branding guidelines that show the RGB, CMYK, HEX (web) and Pantone values of each, and restrict the color set to colors that have equivalents across all four color spaces. This one simple thing streamlines your workflow and makes color perform from print to web with no variations.

Now go and Explore! To say this is the tip of the iceberg is a gross understatement.

-Ed

Adobe Forms Central

Today Adobe announced Adobe FormsCentral. This is a solution for creating HTML forms, distributing them, collecting responses and analyzing the data.

I haven't tried FormsCentral yet, but I know that many of my readers are involved with Acrobat, LiveCycle or HTML forms to one extent or another, so I thought I'd give you an early heads up. It will be interesting to see how this stacks up agains similar cloud-based form and data collection solutions.

For more information, read this post from the Acrobat Solutions team.

Interactive design tutorials and white paper

I've been spending a lot of time lately helping "print" designers get up to speed on designing interactive projects. A few months ago Adobe hired me to create some training resources about interaction design. The result is four free resources that can be found on Adobe.com (click on the "interactive" tab on this page.

All these resources are intended to equip designers with what they need to know to move into interaction design. The resources include:

A comprehensive 17 page white paper titled Interaction design: Designing for interactivity on screens: a primer for print designers (pdf)

Three "Interaction 101" video tutorials on Adobe TV. Each 10-15 minute video covers a single interactive workflow, and includes source files so you can follow along:

Interaction 101: Create an Interactive Guide with InDesign CS5
How to use InDesign CS5 to create an interactive document for the Web.
(related source files)

Interaction 101: Create a simple web application with Flash Catalyst CS5
How to use Illustrator CS5 and Flash Catalyst CS5 to create a web application.
(related source files)

Interaction 101: Create a simple banner ad with Flash Professional CS5
How to use Photoshop CS5 and Flash Professional CS5 to create a web banner ad.
(related source files)

Free Illustrator user interface icons and elements

If you need to create either finished User Interfaces for Web sites and applications, or simply need to create a quick mock up of a user interface or interactive project, check out the User Interface Design Framework from Webalys. This is a free library of hundreds of icons, styles, and UI elements that you can use and modify in your projects. They are presented both as Illustrator files that you can open, and as handy Illustrator Symbol panels. These elements can be used in Illustrator CS2 or newer. [via John Nack].

Over two years ago I wrote about the free Yahoo Developer Network Design Stencil Kit. Check that out also.

Dreamweaver seminar in Minneapolis

My friend Chris Converse is coming to Minneapolis on October 7, 2010 for an all-day Dreamweaver/CSS seminar. Chris is the best in the business. I have no doubt that this will be an excellent seminar. If you do Web design, or want to learn more about Web design, check it out!

Preview Web sites across browsers with Adobe Browserlab

If you design Web sites, particularly with CSS, you know the frustration of trying to make a page look the way you want in different browsers. This is a constant battle for Web designers.

Adobe is showing a cool new technology at Adobe Labs called Adobe BrowserLab. Currently in "free preview" status, BrowserLab lets you quickly preview what a Web page looks like in several different browsers. When you enter a url into the address field in BrowserLab, this address is sent to a "server farm" of real computers running clean installations of the browsers and operating system you choose. A screen shot of the result is sent back to you for viewing and comparison. You can easily save these screen shots as jpeg files for client presentation.

Adobe isn't the one doing this. Competitors include BrowserShots, BrowserCam, Browsrcamp, Total Validator, AnyBrowser and NetMechanic. However, what really sets Adobe Browserlab apart from the competition is integration with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. If you download the BrowserLab Extensions for Dreamweaver, you can easily view various states of dynamically built pages in different browsers.

For example, if I want to see what a particular drop-down menu looks like on my Web site, I can open the page in Dreamweaver, click on the Live View button, pull down a menu, and hit F6 to "freeze" the JavaScript. Then, I choose command-shift-F12 to preview the page in BrowserLab, and within a few seconds, I get the result shown below.

Flash Good or Flash Bad?

Apple's introduction of the iPad has created controversy because of its inability (along with the iPhone) to show or play any Flash content from Web sites. This has ignited a firestorm of articles, opinions, blog posts and lengthy comment threads on the Web about the pros and cons of including Flash content on a Web site, as well as the merits of Flash vs. competing technologies for delivering vector animation and video playback on the Web.

This controversy should be of interest to every designer today. Increasingly, designers are either already creating Flash content or are wanting to learn how to create Flash content. It's obvious that Adobe wants to provide tools for designers to allow them to create interactive design without coding, judging by projects like Flash Catalyst and the new Flash export capabilities found in InDesign CS4.

Here are a few recent links about this controversy:

• Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO, shares his thoughts here and here.
  
  
• John Nack, Principal Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop and frequent and eloquent blogger, has interesting posts here and here.
  
  
• Mike Rankin weighs in here.

If you're wondering..."How bad could it be? How would my browsing experience change without Flash?" see this post from Seattle's CreativeTechs for a discussion of browser add-ons that will allow you to temporarily block Flash content while you browse. This is a quick way to get a feel for how many Web sites that you visit contain Flash content.

Three local educational opportunities

The InDesignSecrets Live, 2010 Tour with Anne-Marie Concepción is coming to Minneapolis on March 17. (I'll be one of the speakers at the InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference May 12-14 2010 at the Adobe Campus in Seattle, WA.) Contact me for a discount code for either of these events.

Flashbelt, a conference for "new media designers, developers and enthusiasts" is scheduled for June 13-16 2010 in Minneapolis.

An Event Apart, "an intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design" is coming to Minneapolis July 26-27 2010.

New web site

I just spent the last few days hunkered down in my office wrestling with the intricacies of CSS while rebuilding the Gilbert Consulting web site. My previous web site used tables for layout and positioning. I decided to join the 21st century and bring my site up to modern standards with CSS. Hopefully the new site also does a better job of explaining who I am, what I do and how I do it.

A few interesting items I ran across while sweating through the web site rebuild:

• Adobe's Dreamweaver Developer Center houses all kinds of CSS goodness, tutorials and links.
  
  
• I found Pop Menu Magic 2 from Project Seven very helpful for creating the menu system. The newsgroups run by Project Seven at forums.projectseven.com were invaluable for troubleshooting a couple of thorny issues with the menus and CSS.
  
  
• The inclusion of the O'Reilly CSS Reference Guide in the Dreamweaver CS4 Reference panel is great. Concise O'Reilly guides for HTML, JavaScript, XML, PHP and other syntax are also included in the Reference panel.