Adobe Releases Creative Suite 5.5 and Pro Version of DPS

Adobe has officially launched their Creative Suite 5.5 release, bringing with it new HTML5 and app-development features, along with more Flash authoring features, improved jQuery support, expanded support for mobile platforms and devices, improved workflows, performance boosts, improved rich e-reading features, an enhanced multi-screen preview panel and Adobe Flash Builder v4.5 Premium, among other changes. The company has also unveiled a subscription plan aimed at making the products more affordable to occasional users or novices.

The company also launched a Professional Edition of their Digital Publishing Suite (DPS), a separate product that provides hosted services and viewer technology to allow publishers to easily re-purpose content across the three major tablet platforms: Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Blackberry’s Tablet OS. The suite is tightly integrated with CS 5.5 to provide creation, distribution, monetization and analysis of traditional publications and other periodicals (including catalogs, product guides, annual reports and magazines) being read on desktop computers and tablets.

The Professional Edition is aimed at smaller media, educational and business publishers that need to convert existing printed content into app format for mobile and tablet devices, as well as be able to collect statistical information about readers and usage via the Adobe Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

Creative Suite 5.5 marks the beginning of what the company calls “regular mid-cycle releases,” meaning minor upgrades every other year alternating with major upgrades, a move the company says it has made in order to keep up with the accelerating pace of changes in the publishing and tablet market. Creations can now more easily be converted for use on a wider variety of platforms and technologies, ranging from traditional print and video to pro-level audio, smartphones, web browsers, operating systems and other devices like tablets and e-readers.

Among the changes are much-improved support for HTML5 content in the browser, and updated versions of Flash Builder Premium and Flex, both now at version 4.5. The company has worked closely with major media publishers in advance of the release to enable best-practice workflows and greater efficiency.

The release also mark’s Adobe’s unveiling of a subscription plan, allowing users to pay for products they want on a “regular monthly payment” option or a “pay as you use” option. Prices range from $19 per month for Dreamweaver on a one-year plan (per month) to $129 per month for the Adobe Master Collection on the same plan.

Occasional users would pay more, but only for the months they actually use the products. Under those terms, Dreamweaver would cost $29 per month of use, while the Master Collection would cost $195. Any updates or upgrades would be included in the pricing, but as activation would play a greater role in the process the applications would rely on a regular internet connection.

Pricing for the Digital Publishing Suite is set at $500 per month for the core services ($6,000 per year), but also requires a service fee for hosting, OMS and other services provided by Adobe that scales upwards depending on the number of issues downloaded. Average cost per issue ranges from 22 cents per issue for up to 25,000 downloads up to 12 cents per issue for up to a half-million downloads.