{"id":12294,"date":"2007-03-27T19:42:41","date_gmt":"2007-03-27T19:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2007\/03\/adobe-macromedia-integration-cornucopia.html"},"modified":"2007-03-27T19:42:41","modified_gmt":"2007-03-27T19:42:41","slug":"adobe_macromedia_integration_cornucopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/27\/adobe_macromedia_integration_cornucopia\/","title":{"rendered":"Adobe-Macromedia: Integration cornucopia!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I came to Adobe largely because integration between Flash and Photoshop just <u><em>sucked<\/em><\/u>&#8211;a situation that burned me every day as a designer.  Back in 1999, when I learned that Adobe was planning a Web animation tool, I wrote to my contacts there and at Macromedia to suggest a &quot;Flash Interchange Format&quot; that would let everyone play nicely together.&nbsp; I just wanted the tools to get the garbage tasks out of my way so that I could do my job.&nbsp; Despite <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jnack.com\/adobe\/flash\/pslayers.html\">many<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.medialab.com\/psd2fla\/\">assorted<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/movielibrary.lynda.com\/html\/modPage.asp?ID=142\">efforts<\/a>, however, the stars just never aligned. <\/p>\n<p>Fast forward to the present: we&#8217;re now starting to realize some of these long-sought benefits.&nbsp; In just over a year of Adobe and Macromedia being a single company, here&#8217;s new integration we&#8217;ve been able to deliver (continued below\/in the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/2007\/03\/adobe_mm_cornucopia.html#more\">extended entry<\/a>): <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Photoshop<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><u>Flash does rich import of PSD files for the first time<\/u>.&nbsp; I once calculated that getting a 20-layer PSD into Flash intact took <strong>168 steps<\/strong>; now it&#8217;s more like <strong><em>two<\/em><\/strong>, and the results are far richer.&nbsp; Not only does Flash preserve layers and their names; it also can handle layer nesting, blending modes, layer effects, and more&#8211;even preserving live text. Check out <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/files\/images\/ps_into_flash.jpg\">the screenshot<\/a>. If you use Photoshop and Flash, there&#8217;s your upgrade right there. <\/li>\n<li><u>Copy\/paste to Dreamweaver<\/u>: Want to move a chunk of a design to Dreamweaver?&nbsp; Copy it in Photoshop, paste in DW, and the latter will pop up its embedded Fireworks optimization engine (equivalent to Save for Web).&nbsp; Once you save the resulting JPEG\/GIF\/PNG, you can select it and jump back to Photoshop, where the original PSD will open up.&nbsp; Copy and paste again to update the optimized image. <\/li>\n<li><u>Export of high-res imagery to Flash via Zoomify<\/u>: Photographers are laying out hundreds of dollars for 8, 10, or more megapixels, then paying for the data in storage and processing time, only to chuck 90% of when going to the Web.&nbsp; That&#8217;s some <em>weak sauce<\/em>.&nbsp; I&#8217;ve posted <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/2007\/02\/panopalooza_fro.html\">tons of examples<\/a> of how Zoomify export from Photoshop lets you work around screen &amp; bandwidth limitations. <\/li>\n<li><u>Fireworks does better PSD import and export<\/u>: <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/2006\/02\/photoshop_fireworks.html\">We heard you<\/a>. In addition, Fireworks&#8217; new Pages feature works great with multiple imported Photoshop files.<\/li>\n<li><u>Photoshop embeds the Flash Player<\/u>: You can now use SWF files as the front ends to Photoshop scripts, opening a huge door to the Web. <\/li>\n<li><u>Export of Flash Video (FLV)<\/u>: If you&#8217;re using Photoshop CS3 Extended and Flash CS3 Professional, you can now export video from Photoshop as streaming Flash video.&nbsp; If this doesn&#8217;t tell you we&#8217;re in a whole new world, I don&#8217;t know what will! <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\n<strong>Illustrator<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><u>Symbols work more like Flash<\/u>.&nbsp; Did you even know that Illustrator <em>had<\/em> symbols?&nbsp; Probably not, because creating them was subtle &amp; editing them was a real pain (sorry, guys&#8211;but I know you know).&nbsp; Now they work just like they do in Flash: Select artwork and hit F8 to create a symbol.&nbsp; To edit it, double-click it and you&#8217;ll be editing right there, on the artboard, with the rest of the document ghosted out.&nbsp; You can even specify whether it&#8217;s a graphic or a movie clip &amp; give it an instance name. <\/li>\n<li><u>Flash does high-quality AI import<\/u>.&nbsp; Now when you import an Illustrator file into Flash, you&#8217;ll get&nbsp;options for preserving layers, layer and object names, symbols, blending modes&#8211;the works.&nbsp; It even gives you a little object-by-object incompatibility report when it hits things that don&#8217;t map well (e.g. really complex nested blending in Illustrator).&nbsp; Here&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/files\/images\/ai_into_flash.gif\">screenshot<\/a>. <\/li>\n<li><u>Copy\/paste from Illustrator to Flash<\/u>:&nbsp; Just as important (maybe more so), these same import hooks work when you copy and paste from AI to Flash.&nbsp; Even blending modes and symbol names are carried over.&nbsp; Damn!&nbsp; (Sorry if I&#8217;m a little breathless, but I suffered through this workflow sucking for <em>years.<\/em>)<\/li>\n<li><u>Support for SWF panels<\/u>*: Illustrator can now be extended with SWF from Flash and\/or Flex, providing integration with <a href=\"http:\/\/kuler.adobe.com\/\">kuler<\/a> as well as a new technology called knowhow.&nbsp; Mordy Golding&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/rwillustrator.blogspot.com\/2007\/03\/illustrator-cs3-features-cool.html\">got details<\/a>.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\n<strong>Flash<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In addition to what&#8217;s mentioned above&#8230; <\/li>\n<li><u>New Adobe panel system<\/u>: The Flash interface has been revised to use <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/2006\/12\/exploring_the_new_ui.html\">the new panel system<\/a> that&#8217;s shared with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.&nbsp; (The teams plans to bring the system to apps like Dreamweaver and Fireworks in the future, but time didn&#8217;t permit it for CS3.) <\/li>\n<li><u>More Illustrator-like pen tool<\/u>: I don&#8217;t have all the details here, but the pen tool in Flash should now be more powerful &amp; more consistent with what&#8217;s in Illustrator.&nbsp; At the same time, Illustrator has added a Flash-like Eraser tool (on the heels of the Flash-inspired Live Paint introduced in CS2). \n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s more going on (mobile integration via Adobe Device Central; XHTML export from InDesign; Web presets in Illustrator; Photoshop layer styles &amp; video layers in After Effects; video-oriented crop overlays in Illustrator&#8230;), but I&#8217;ve got to cut myself off at some point. \ud83d\ude42\n<\/p>\n<p><i>* A note about nomenclature: The word &#8220;palette&#8221; has been replaced by &#8220;panel&#8221; across the Suite, but the two are interchangeable.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came to Adobe largely because integration between Flash and Photoshop just sucked&#8211;a situation that burned me every day as a designer. Back in 1999, when I learned that Adobe was planning a Web animation tool, I wrote to my contacts there and at Macromedia to suggest a &quot;Flash Interchange Format&quot; that would let everyone [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32,39],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12294"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}