This year I had the privilege of attending the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles. This medium sized conference provided classes, keynote speakers, sessions and sneak peaks at upcoming Adobe Technology. I logged my experiences on Twitter, and here are some takeaways of the event.

Adobe New Products and Features:

The biggest announcement at Adobe MAX 2014 was around Adobe’s Creative Cloud and the release of a new line of Mobile software applications. Adobe applications are no longer free-standing apps, the Creative cloud now has Creative Profiles that offer a single source for assets on the cloud for working across desktop and mobile devices. It also has other specific advantages like Cloud Libraries that can be shared across users, and Creative Cloud can extract CSS values to automatically create style guides from a PSD source file.

Adobe Capture is the new product line that allows for new mobile to desktop workflows.

• Illustrator Draw is a vector based drawing program for the iPad. It has a full line of tools that allow for the easy creation of vector shapes on the go.
• Adobe Brush allows for the creation of brushes from images captured on the iPad or iPhone, you can go from your mobile to Photoshop in just a few seconds.
• Photoshop Mix uses the power of Photoshop to separate background images on a mobile device.
• Premier clip allows for video editing on mobile. Clip allows access to videos on the Creative Cloud or stored in saved videos.

Photoshop playground is a new Photoshop UI that is being released that allows for experimentation & that makes Photoshop more touch expressive.

Animal is a new Adobe tool for character animation that does not require keyframing as it has built-in facial recognition. By focusing the camera on a moving face and assigning it to a character it can animate based on recognized movement.

Other Tools:

Codepen – design in CSS

In5 – takes designs from InDesign to HTML5. Click here for more info.

Trends:

Masking with clip paths in CSS for HTML5. Click here for more info.

The Band Okgo uses CSS alpha-channel effects in their viral web music videos.

GitHub as a popular online collaboration tool

#1 Photoshop plug-in: Image Assets. It automatically saves images from Photoshop layers.

Infographics are the #1 medium to communicate a message.