[UPDATE (Jan. 2012) – Adobe extends another great offer:  Save 20% on CS5.5 upgrades!]

Just out for the long holiday, quite a rare occurrence – a new promotion code to save 10% storewide on Adobe products (full or upgrade) when your total purchase is US$350 and up. However, this new coupon isn’t just for the USA – it’s for all of North America plus most any­where in Europe as well, including the many countries listed below… The savings also extend to all orders for the just-released new Creative Suite 5.5.

This Adobe Memorial Day Sale runs through Friday, June 3rd and can be applied for any software in the Commercial or Education Stores. It’s one discount per customer and you must use the offer code linked here: Adobe10.

Here are the minimum purchase amounts (order size to qualify) by country:

• USD $350: United States, Canada, and Mexico
• GBP £350: United Kingdom
• Euro €400: Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Finland, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia
• CHF 650: Switzerland
• DKK 3.300: Denmark
• SEK 4.450: Sweden
• NOK 3.650: Norway

Read more…

[UPDATE – Also see our new Photoshop CS6 Giveaway!]

Over the past year we’ve given away a lot of software… Last month we held our biggest giveaway yet – a copy of CS5 Production Premium (see our lucky winner).  This month things get even bigger and better – in partnership with Adobe, we’re offering a free boxed copy of the brand new CS5.5 Design Premium – the #1-selling Creative Suite edition…

Creative Suite 5.5 was officially released just two weeks ago, and contains a large number of new product features and improvements over CS5.  But this prize is not an upgrade or education version – it is the shrinkwrapped, full commercial English version of CS 5.5.

CS5.5 Design Premium sells for $1,899 / €1,899 / £1,509 and includes Photoshop Extended, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash Pro, Illustrator, Acrobat X Pro, among others… (see the complete list of applications it contains)  If you want to try it out first, the free trials also are now available.

This giveaway is open to residents of North America, Europe, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa – and all you need to do for a chance to win is the following three steps:

Read more…

With the release of CS5.5, Adobe is adding an additional option for purchasing the Creative Suite line of products… Presently, there exists Commercial, Education, and Volume choices, which continue as before – and now there are Subscriptions as well, for CS5.5 (only). The customer alignments are as follows:

• Commercial – For home and home office
• Education – For students, teachers and staff
• Volume – For more than one copy, and businesses
• Subscriptions – For time-limited licensing

The subscription editions are rather like renting the software for a set period. You download and install the CS5.5 software on your computer as normal (it’s not online or cloud-based), but instead of paying a single price up-front to use the product forever, you pay 5% to 7.5% of the regular cost per month to use it. While the subscription remains active, you have access to the latest version of the software as well as CS Live online services. Then if/when you cancel or stop paying, the product stops working on the installed computer(s), ceasing access to your Adobe project or data files.

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[UPDATE (March 2012) – Adobe's grace period for free upgrades to CS6 is here!]

Adobe launched Creative Suite 5.5 this week and it is open for preorder but not shipping yet… The company says the release date will be in May, and in the meantime you can still buy Creative Suite 5 (or download the CS5 free trials) if you need something going today.

And, if you bought Adobe CS5 recently (a suite edition or an individual application like InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, After Effects, Premiere Pro) or if you purchase any CS5 product now, you may be entitled to a free upgrade to CS5.5 when it is released.

Historically, Adobe’s policy for major product releases has been that you may qualify for a free upgrade if you buy the previous version near or after the new product has been announced, but before it ships… The advantages are threefold: (1) you get software available for immediate download, (2) you get a more mature release if you prefer and can move up later at your leisure, and (3) you win a lower upgrade cost (e.g., from CS2, CS3, or CS4), because you’re buying fewer steps to go up. For Design Premium it’s $150 less to upgrade now from CS3 to CS5, than to upgrade from CS3 to CS5.5.

The good news is this post-announce free upgrade policy remains in effect, according to an Adobe Q&A Session earlier this week… So it looks like you can get the best of both worlds and buy or upgrade to CS5, and then later get a free update to CS 5.5 when you — and it — are ready. (Just look for “Can’t wait? Order the previous version today” on Adobe’s page…)

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Similar to how they did before the launch of CS5, Adobe has been quietly slipping out a bevy of “sneaks” (now numbering 16 videos) for new features that may be in a forthcoming release of the Creative Suite…

“Check out what new technologies, features and innovations the Adobe product teams are working on behind the scenes. Stay tuned to get an early glimpse of what could be next from Adobe.”

The products covered include: InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Audition, Adobe Story, Media Encoder, Flex, Flash Pro, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst.

Given the recent news of a “mid-cycle release to CS5″ (e.g., CS5.5), and a forecast for when CS6 could be out, one question might be in which future version might we see these new capabilities?

Well, Adobe tips their hand once again – because at the end of a couple of these videos they flash the graphic, “CS5 is Evolving: April 11th, 2011″……
Which says to us, you might expect some of these features soon, in fact you might expect more about them next week!

The company has scheduled a special session with Creative Suite Evangelists on Monday, and is tweeting: “CS5 is getting even better. Stay tuned to #Adobe.com on 4/11, and join this Q&A“

Read more…

[UPDATE (April 11th) – Adobe CS5.5 is out!]

We just got confirmation from Adobe that a “mid-cycle release” of Creative Suite 5 will be out later this year, perhaps in the coming months.

The definitive word came from a conference call on Tuesday afternoon with financial analysts, where the Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen stated:

We will continue to expand our content authoring offerings by providing a mid-cycle release to CS5.

[ Read the full transcript here ]

We’ve known for some time now (see our October piece) that a “dot release” of Creative Suite 5 would be coming and due to incorporate the new version of Acrobat X Pro – similarly to how CS2 and CS3 had mid-cycle upgrades for that exact reason…

But here Adobe has been working quite a bit harder and longer, with no “CS5.3″ at the November ship date of Acrobat X… So instead, we have clear indications of a larger upgrade in store – and here’s what’s going to be in it:

Read more…

[UPDATE (April 11th) – Adobe CS5.5 is out!  See also when CS6 is penciled.]

Last week Adobe held a private briefing for partners under non-disclosure agreement, where they gave “an overview of the upcoming Creative Suite release”… While we can’t speak to what transpired within the presentation, the invitation itself is publicly available.

Given that the next release of Adobe Acrobat is due out within a matter of weeks (see why and when, or get a chance to win a free upgrade to Acrobat 10 Pro), and given the two year age of Acrobat 9, it’s likely Adobe would be refreshing CS5 with the addition of the new Acrobat X. When Acrobat moved from version 7 to version 8, Adobe subsequently updated the Creative Suite and issued CS2.3 – and then once again when Acrobat revisioned from 8 to 9, Adobe incorporated the new version into CS3.3 in 2008. Acrobat 9 is still what we have today in CS5 – but since it’s obviously way too early for CS6, it seems a safe bet we’ll be seeing a point release (CS 5.3?) that would incorporate the new Acrobat 10.

But from reading the briefing invitation, it looks like there will be more in store for this next release than “just” integrating the new version Acrobat X Pro. It says, “… an overview of the upcoming CS release with a focus on InDesign and ePublishing…” Adobe has been hard at work on a new Digital Publishing Platform (you may have seen or read about the tablet editions of WIRED or The New Yorker magazines) that ties in with InDesign, and is (over)due to be made available on Adobe Labs. It seems logical that this would also be part of a CS5 point release, as it is a major deal for magazine and print publishers to deliver their content to the iPad, iPhone, Android, and other mobile devices, and has been quite successful thus far… But since the publishing tools haven’t yet been released in beta form on the Labs, it could be a while longer before the final version of this new technology is ready for the world at large.

Read more…