On September 23, 2008, Adobe will announce when CS4 is coming out. No, it’s not being released on September 23rd, they are announcing when they will be releasing the CS4 suite. Still, this is exciting. I can’t wait. I love CS3 and I think CS4 is probably going to be a huge step forward, both in features and inter-application integration.

Adobe announced via Adobe Labs their beta release of Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4 and Soundbooth CS4. You can go right now and download each of the applications to play with and try out.

Adobe releases Flash Player 10 beta supporting 3D effects, custom filters, advanced text layout, plus much more…

Adobe has released Lightroom 1.4 and quickly removed it from it’s download sites due to bugs that were found in 1.4 after it’s initial release. Adobe recommends that any users that download and installed 1.4 to uninstall it and re-install 1.3.1.

Adobe.com today released Adobe Lightroom 1.3.1, which addresses many issues with Mac OS X Leopard including:

Adobe Premiere Pro 3.1.1 is now Leopard compatible. The Genesis Project blog site reports that Adobe just released version 3.1.1 for Premiere Pro CS3.

The Adobe Lighroom Journal is reporting that Adobe Lightroom will be updated to version 1.3.1 within the next week.

Man! They just don’t stop (thank goodness…continues improvement). There was a flurry of updates last night between Apple and Adobe.

I had the opportunity to upgrade not one, not two, but 5 ColdFusion boxes we own in ColdFusion (dev and production). Most of the installs were great and without any major issues, but there were a couple of the installs I had some issues with.

Adobe released today version 1.2 of Adobe Photoshop Lighroom, their incredible Photography post-production application.

Adobe released a beta version update for Flash Player 9 with the following features:

So I took the plunge and migrated my ColdFusion MX 7 server into Adobe ColdFusion 8. Below, I’ve detailed the steps I took.

I did not uninstall MX 7 prior to installing 8 (this is the developer version since I did this first on my local machine before doing development and/or production to make sure that all of our websites work ok with version 8…I highly recommend you do the same.)

After downloading the developer version from Adobe.com, I went ahead and double clicked ColdFusion-8-win.exe. I then followed the wizard.

Shut down all CFMX 7 services, especially Verify, if you have any collections that need to be transferred over to version 8.
Make sure you have installed JDK 1.6 or above.
Splash screen - Choose language and click OK.
Introduction - Click next.
License Agreement - Accept and click next.
Configure Installer - Enter Serial #, select trial, or select developer edition and click next.

Wow! I can’t belive Coldfusion is in version 8 (and this version comes from Adobe).

I remember when I first used ColdFusion it came with O’Reilly’s Website web server (this is a long time ago). It was known as DBML back then. Before version 1. Then I went through version 1.5, 2, 3, 3.01, 3.11, 4, 4.01, 5, 6, 7 and now 8 (I skipped a few of the .01 and other updates in between).

The product started with Allaire (the original Allaire brothers created it), then it was purchased by Macromedia, and finally, of course, by Adobe (as part of the entire Macromedia merger with Adobe)

For those of you that don’t know ColdFusion, it’s a back end scripting language to create dynamic websites. If you heard of ASP.net (from Microsoft), then think of it as that, except, 10,000 times better (do you think I’m a ColdFusion fan?).

Here is a cool site I learned about when I attended the Adobe CS3 Conference:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=homepage&productId=1&loc=en_US

This is the CSS Advisor site, where you can learn about all things “CSS”. For those of you who have no clue what CSS is, let me give you a quick explanation.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it’s used in conjunction with HTML to create websites. With CSS you create the “look and feel” of your site and with HTML, you define your content (or display it). That way, you can keep the look and feel separate from the content of your site, which in turn, allows you to easily change and update how your site looks without having to redesign the content as well.

Looks like they won’t be needing my services any longer if Adobe has a say in it. That is, my editing services. Adobe Premiere Express is an “online hosted” video editing (or as they like to call it…video remix) application that users can use to edit their online videos easily.

Ok, so they will still need professionals to do the good stuff, but the trend (and the rumors I heard at the Adobe CS3 Conference) is that all of Adobe’s “consumer” video (and image) editing applications will be going “online” and converted into “hosted” applications.

This means that there will be 2 types of media editing applications. The professional kind, such as Final Cut Studio, Adobe Production Studio and the “consumer” type that will be hosted on a server somewhere (read…no installation on the consumer side….automatic updates…ease of online publishing).