Five Minutes with Adobe

Joe Karkour - Adobe Systems

With Adobe Creative Suite launching in a few hours today, I got a chance to talk to Joe Karkour, the Regional Business Development Manager, Middle East & North Africa for Adobe Systems. Expectantly, Joe was quite excited about the launch calling it the biggest launch Adobe has ever done. I asked him what makes this the biggest launch to which he replied:

“We’re launching the product Worldwide in 22 different languages and the new CS suite has over 250 new features.” Unfortunately, Arabic isn’t one of those languages, however, Joe mentioned that we should see the localized version within two weeks which is good enough.

So what makes it special CS5 special?

“Adobe has focused on bridging the gap between creativity to web — CS5 allows publishing on multiple screens so you will be able to design for everything from the desktop to the smartphone. Most of the applications have been updated for CS5 such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver while there are a couple of new applications that have been added such as Flash Catalyst that allows you to create interactive apps without any coding whatsoever. Also being introduced is Flash builder which is a higher-end and more comprehensive version of the building tool.” I asked him about Acrobat, however, that continues to remain on version 9 for now.

On the subject of piracy rate on Adobe products in the region, he commented:

“Piracy is indeed quite high in the Middle East and we arrange lots of activities to make the consumer aware of the risks involved with pirated applications. Adobe is quite active in the education market offering students and teachers almost 80% off the retail prices along with organizing tons of workshops. In fact, Adobe is quite big on training- working with lots of certified Adobe institutes that offer programs in learning the applications.”

Coming back to CS5, he said “the new versions are fully 64-bit on both the Mac and the PC and GPU acceleration is also utilized in applications like Premiere, After-effect and Photoshop to tremendously speed-up certain procedures.”

I asked him which ones were his favorite features from CS5 and he mentioned two. “Content Aware Fill allows users to remove elements and fill it with contents around it making it extremely easy to populate an image without making it look unnatural while Puppet Warp allows you to drop anchor points in an image and manipulate it to create effects such as stretching it.”

I would like to thank Joe Karkour for his time and wish Adobe the best on their upcoming CS5.