Adobe believes that the discontinue of its one-time flagship Website creation product, i.e. Adobe GoLive will better serve the needs of the Web designer market. Clearly, it will pave an even brighter future for Adobe Dreamweaver, which users can create HTML, ColdFusion, PHP, ASP VBScript, CSS, JavaScript, or Ruby (through plugin) with this software.

Devin Fernandez, GoLive’s Product Manager believed Dreamweaver is a better fit for today’s Web developer, he told Macworld, “Even after GoLive 9 came out people were drawn to Dreamweaver, especially around features and support for technology like AJAX and CSS Starter Points. Dreamweaver also supports dynamic content, while GoLive doesn’t.”

To compensate the existing GoLive registered users, Adobe is offering a Switch plan, a special plan of $199, with a goal to help them switch to Dreamweaver product.

I’m not sure this is a good news for Adobe, as its flagship product, i.e. Photoshop’s future release has been leaked on the torrent sites. As the pictures shown in the below, one can find the torrent of Adobe Photoshop CS4 beta 11 and the download file is weigh in at 454MB.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging people to download softwares on the torrent sites, as I’m now actively promoting legitimate softwares in my home country. But this issue send a reminder to the software vendors that when they sent the beta versions to their testers, selecting their group of testers carefully and effectively.

Pic 1: Adobe Photoshop CS4 leaked on torrent site

Pic 2: Screencast of Adobe Photoshop CS4 codenamed Stonehenge

Adobe has recently launched its new open source site, a significant move that reflect the extension of its open source focus. There are several positive effects on this site, particularly users can find a total number of nine (9) projects, with the notable one Flex 3 SDK, as well as the intention to put its applications that support Linux platform. On this site, users will access to available projects, source, documentation, but notice carefully will know that Adobe is demonstrated a strengthened focus on Flex 3 and BlazeDS. Additionally, this site also keep users in touch with some of our favorite bloggers by providing a blogroll on the sidebar of the site.

It should be noted that Adobe’s new open source site will help speed both the Adobe and Linux growth through application support. They definitely trying to improve the existing Adobe Reader and Flash on the Linux distributions.

It seems that most Web developers, or people involving in new startups like to challenge themselves in preparing and developing new Web 2.0 sites in a supreme short timeframe. Skillbit, still under rapidly development, is a new project that is still underway at the Adobe offices. This project was also sponsor by Adobe, amongst some other sponsors, created as a Web 2.0 targeted at businesses where they can set up a network that employees can use to share their skills, and learn more about their coworkers. It is created as part of the Startup Weekend, despite the fact that not much information can be found on the Skillbit site, at the time of my writing, but we probably know that the people involved in Skiibit are excited and working very hard in delivering this project on time.

According to Startup Weekend, there are 122 were in attendance before decided on Skillbit project. We probably know what are the problems that they are facing when they started this project, such as keyword research, Website architecture, writing content for the Web pages and splash pages, and etc. from one of the their posts in addition to the definition of Skillbit.

Skillbit is planned to be launched at 9pm tonight. Given the short time frame, we can conclude that an exciting project can also be delivered in a couple of hours if we see this site goes live by then.

What can Adobe do about a static PDF file, now that they have found a newer solution to this established document file standard, i.e. to monetize it. Today Adobe and Yahoo! have jointly launched a program called “Ads for Adobe PDF, Powered by Yahoo!” I see this is a first step for Adobe to push all its established products as Web products that could help them made a lot of dough on the Web. For Yahoo!, it’s more than a milestone for them, since this partnership will put them right back in the online advertising game against Google. In fact, it’s interesting to see how Yahoo! pursue this game, they changed the platform for advertisement, i.e. from Web page to static document, can they make it this time? On the other hand, will Buzzword, the word processor of Adobe, will Adobe put the advertisement onto the Buzzword in near future?

This Ads for Adobe PDF is currently in beta phase, only invite-only beta testers can enjoy the benefits of upload the PDF files to the Yahoo!/Adobe portal, and the vendors will then send the files back to the publishers with the advertisement functionality are enabled for the PDF documents. Since the Adobe PDF has now became the long-tail inventory for Yahoo! Publisher Network, and this network is only open to US publishers, we will not see this kind of advertisement in any of the publishers outside of the US by end of this year. Currently, publishers that participated in this beta program include: IDG InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation, Reed Elsevier, just to name a few. They’re the first batch of publishers with the golden opportunity to generate another stream of revenue in a radically different approach. However, advertisement can only be displayed on Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat document. As you know, PDF document is static, and the advertisement for the PDF is contextual, which mean Yahoo! serve the advertisement based on the content of the PDF document, it offers an entirely new way to view a static document that appeared advertisement in a dynamic way.

My sense for this move is that it is a forward-looking strategy for Yahoo! and Adobe, but they definitely face the challenges of integrating lot of PDF files into the Yahoo! Publishers Network, and assuring the pay-per-click reports for the publishers are concise, and real-time.

According to Adobe’s press release, Adobe has appointed Shantanu Narayen as the president and chief executive officer, with effective from December 1, 2007. The Hyderabad-born Mr. Narayen, holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, Bowling Green State University and Osmania University in India is the current president and COO of Adobe. He will replace the existing CEO Bruce Chizen and manage all the development for Adobe. While, Mr. Chizen will continue to serve as adviser to the company through the end of fiscal year 2008.

This change comes amid Adobe want to move its line of products to the Web, as Mr. Narayen had co-founded Pictra, a digital photo sharing software company instilled confidence with management and consumer in Adobe’s future Web strategy.

In a world increasingly dominated by the rise of the Internet, Adobe has confirmed that a beta version of its Photoshop Express to be released by end of this year, and the final version will available in 2008, reported by CNET. Photoshop Express, perceived as an online version of Adobe Photoshop, will perform some photo-editing tasks such as adjust color, crop picture, etc. However, it certainly offer limited functionality when compared to the Photoshop Web Premium.

Not much information about the features of Photoshop Express at this moment, but this Web software would be made available through partners such as Shutterfly and Photobucket at the time of release.

Last month, Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity and many people including me had questioned the future of this product, since Buzzword, Virtual Ubiquity’s Flash-based word processor might bundle with some other Adobe products. Now, one month later, it looked like Adobe will only make this Web-based application for the better, new features are work in progress. On top of that, Buzzword is now opens to all the users without requiring any invitation code.

An user simply need to submit her name, email address and password, and Buzzword is ready to go. To get Buzzword, it is on the web at http://preview.getbuzzword.com. Meanwhile, I just typed a short document using Buzzword, as shown in the above picture.