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Creative

YouTube and the new creative class

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Kevin Yen's bio below.

Five years ago, when online video was just getting started, individuals flocked to platforms like YouTube to share their stories with the world under the mantra "Broadcast Yourself."

A half decade after YouTube's birth, the site exceeds 2 billion views a day. It seems that everyone--from music labels to mainstream Hollywood studios to television networks--has joined the movement. Amid this vibrant, fertile, and expanding landscape, a creative class of budding, do-it-yourself media moguls--part distributor, part content creator, part producer, part entertainer-- is emerging.

The … Read more

Cash cow out of the barn: Adobe shipping CS5

The official debut was two weeks ago, and now Adobe Systems is actually delivering its Creative Suite 5 software to customers.

The CS5 software spans a broad range of uses--image editing in Photoshop and Photoshop Extended, video editing in Premiere Pro, Flash application creation in Flash Pro, Web page design in Dreamweaver, and more. New to the suite is Flash Catalyst, geared to let designers without much programming experience convert application mock-ups created in Illustrator or Photoshop into working Flash applications.

Adobe sells these programs alone or packages them up into suites tailored for various market segments. At the … Read more

Creative ships ZiiSound D5 Bluetooth speaker

Images of Creative Labs' new Bluetooth speaker, the ZiiSound D5, have been floating around the Web for the past few months, but the product is now officially available.

Creative is calling the D5 "the flagship" model in its line of wireless speaker systems, which includes the Inspire S2 Wireless system, as well as the D200 and D100. The D5 speaker works with any device that supports stereo Bluetooth and, according to Creative,  it's made with premium components and features a full-frame "monocoque exoskeleton for maximum rigidity." Also, according to company, its ZiiSound D5 has … Read more

Random rumblings about Adobe CS5

You've had months now of teasers and gee-whiz video demos of new features and technologies that Adobe Systems is planning to debut in Creative Suite 5, and there'll be boatloads of people telling you about them over the next 30 days before it ships (here's our summary of Photoshop's new features). But for some of us, the things that Adobe hasn't fixed, and which don't merit viral videos, remain sources of immense frustration.

At the top of my list are the complete lack of upgrade and migration tools. Unlike most applications, Adobe doesn't even provide the option to simply upgrade an existing installation. I know a lot of people need to keep multiple versions of the apps on their systems--I'm one of them--but there are a lot of people who don't, and Adobe's responsible for an amazing amount of hard disk clutter. Furthermore, transferring your settings, presets, Dreamweaver Snippets, Bridge Favorites, and so on is a major pain.

In Photoshop, for example, you have to remember to export styles, Actions, tool presets and other settings before you can manually import them into the newer version, or even into a different installation of the same version. With customization pervading every aspect of the applications, doing this individually for each type of tool is tedious at best. And some things, such as Photoshop's New Document presets and Bridge's Favorites can't be transferred at all as far as I can tell. I expect more from a product that costs almost $700; at the price of the Master Collection, with the concomitant increase in the number of settings you'll want to transfer, well, I'd be pretty annoyed. (We won't really know if the company has fixed the poorly designed updater until the suite's been out for a bit.)

I stress this because there's still time for Adobe to--at the very least--write some scripts to handle settings migration before the product ships. My last communication from them on the subject said that migration tools plans were still "in flux," and I urge everyone who's considering the upgrade to put some pressure on the company to do something about it.… Read more

Creative's Bluetooth PC speakers deliver impressive sound for their size

Over the years, we've seen a handful of Bluetooth speakers make their way into our office for testing, but the category has never taken off despite the appealing nature of wireless audio streaming.

Part of the problem is that Bluetooth speakers tend to cost more than your typical powered PC speakers do. Running about $150, Creative's Inspire S2 Bluetooth speaker system isn't cheap, but it is fairly affordable. It's also very small, especially for a 2.1 speaker package that includes a separate subwoofer.

The idea here is that you'd place the speakers in a … Read more