acidlabs

I’ve been looking a little bit around Adobe Labs the past couple of days as I await the availability of Creative Suite 3.  I’ll definitely be buying Design Premium or Web Premium, as I use several of the tools (despite the fact that the cost terrifies me).  In doing so, and looking more closely at several of the products on Labs, I’ve gotten pretty excited about the social networking aspects Adobe are putting into several of these upcoming products.  In particular, I’m impressed with:

• knowhow, which incorporates social bookmarking from del.icio.us (see the knowhow account here) with task/tool-based contextual help.  This is incredibly smart!  There’s no sensible way any software vendor can keep up with all the tricks and tips the user community comes up with as they use their tools, and keep that knowledge a part of the tool itself.  knowhow looks to be a huge step in this direction and I’m really looking forward to using it.  Not least because my Photoshop and Illustrator skills suck at best.  I really hope Adobe add knowhow to Lightroom - it’s one of my favorite Adobe tools (see Michael’s rave about it, which pretty much matches my experience);
• JamJar, which I’ve only looked at briefly, but looks to offer a lot of promise in the collaborative workspace realm.  And all with a really good-looking Flex-driven interface.  I think there are a few IA/usability issues to overcome, as the base, empty interface isn’t exactly intuitive about what the user ought to be doing, but it’s preview technology, so plenty of room yet (if Adobe want someone to help out with IA/UX stuff, I’m always available);
• myFeedz, that also needs time for me to get my head around, but looks really promising.  Currently, I’ve thrown my Google Reader OPML at it, so it will be interesting to see what falls out as I use it over the next few days.

That Adobe are choosing to incorporate these Web 2.0/semantic/contextual/community-based features into their mainstream products is very exciting.  Macromedia always got the community aspect of its user base and the value they could leverage from interacting with that base.  After the Adobe takeover, that seemed to go adrift for a little while, but it’s been back on track recently.  Now the next step has been taken, with that community and collaborative value being directly incorporated into desktop tools.

It will be interesting to see where Adobe can take us from here.  They’re definitely on the right track.

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