You’ve probably read this about a hundred times already today but just in case you missed it: Creative Cloud has been updated!

Before I joined Adobe (can’t believe it’s been more than 6 years already) I was a freelance multi-media do-it-all. I did everything from DVD authoring to video & audio editing to 3D animations to Flash development to interactive museum installation and more. Creative Cloud is like a dream come true for me. For one low monthly price you get every creative app Adobe makes. Even if you’re currently not a do-it-all having access to all those apps gives you the opportunity to get your feet wet and learn something new. Creative Cloud even offers you online tutorials that will help get you started in no time.

So what are my favorite features of Creative Cloud?

1. All the new Edge Tools & Services

I spend a lot of time with web standards these days and our new Edge tools & services are a blessing. Edge Code is constantly open on my desktop. I love how easy it is to quickly look up a CSS class, make changes and immediately see the result in your browser and on connected devices using Edge Inspect. Edge Animate makes it easy to do animations with web standards and with motion paths, templates, and more this update is the best yet! The star of the Edge Tools & Services is really Edge Reflow. While Reflow is still in preview it already is the best tool out there that will help you create beautiful and responsive designs for the web. More about the Edge Tools & Services on http://html.adobe.com/edge/

2. Cinema 4D Lite

Cinema 4D Lite is now included in your Creative Cloud membership and has a direct pipeline to After Effects. I love playing around with After Effects & 3D and this makes it so much easier.

3. Refine Edge in After Effects

This has to be magic. I’m going to have to track down the person who built this ‘cause I think it may be voodoo magic. The Rotobrush was already an amazing tool but now with the addition of the Refine Edge tool you can create great looking masks in no time.

4. Shake Reduction in Photoshop CC

More magic…! It was previewed (and a big hit) at MAX 2011 and now it’s available for all Creative Cloud members.

5. Creative Cloud

You know what… I really can’t pick 5 favorites. There is so much cool stuff in the new versions of our creative apps and I wouldn’t do them justice by only picking a handful of favorites. Adobe TV has a whole bunch of videos that will show you all the new goodies in the new Creative Cloud apps but the best way to experience them is to try them. More info on creative.adobe.com!

While you can create stunning visual effects with After Effects visual effects don’t always have to be digital. In this video they try to recreate the Start Trek teleport effect using nothing more than a bunch of Christmas lights. I think it’s spot on!

This has to be one of the most creative uses of Photoshop ever.

Erik Johansson was one of the keynote speakers at MAX a couple of weeks ago. His work is truly inspiring.

When I grow up I want to be @joshuadavis #w3conf

— Serge Jespers (@sjespers) February 22, 2013

That’s what I Tweeted after I saw his presentation at W3Conf last week. I’ve seen him present a couple bunch of times now. I think I first saw him at FlashForward in San Francisco (Or was it New York? Or both?) in 2000. I remember being envious of and inspired by the type of work he was doing and felt exactly the same after last week’s session. Check it out below. (FYI: If you’ve never seen Joshua present… His language can get ehm… colorful (his own words) :) ).

Check out his work on joshuadavis.com.

I know that over the last couple of weeks I’ve been teasing you a bit with notes about some of the new technology Adobe is working on. PixelTone is one of those technologies.

PixelTone is a proof-of-concept program that lets users adjust images using a combination of gestures and their own voices. Adobe Research collaborated with the University of Michigan to create PixelTone, which made the news last week after a post on John Nack’s blog. Learn more about the thinking and the team behind this fascinating innovation in this blog post.

For more peeks behind the scenes at Adobe make sure you check out peek.adobe.com. Peek is a glimpse inside Adobe, at what we make and how we make it and a place to share the very best of what inspires us to build great software.

Yikes… I was just looking at my calendar and realized that MAX is only about 10 weeks away… 10 weeks! I hear screams in the office. I think I may have just freaked out a bunch of people… Including myself ;-) Internally we’ve seen a bunch of sneak peeks over the last couple of weeks. Adobe is working on some pretty amazing new things. Some of which I think is just plain voodoo magic!

So… 10 weeks. I better start coding up this new game I’m building for MAX. If you attended last year you may have seen those QR codes all over the venue. We’re going to repeat that this year but the app itself will be more of a real game. By scanning the QR codes at the venue you’ll get power ups, extra levels, etc., and of course you can win some cool prizes! More on that later!

I’ll also have to start preparing my MAX session. In this session you’ll learn how to work with Adobe Edge Tools & Services to design and create content for mobile devices. I’ll walk you through building a mobile application using the tools and services in the Edge family. In this 1 hour session we’ll go from Edge Animate, to Edge Reflow, to Edge Code, to adding PhoneGap API calls, to testing the app with Edge Inspect and finally building the application installer with PhoneGap Build. I’m really excited about this session even though I must be crazy to try and cover all of that in 1 hour but I think it’s important to show you how all these new tools can work together!

So… Have you registered for MAX yet? The conference pass includes 1 year of Creative Cloud for free! Early bird pricing ends next week! See you there!

This week is Adobe’s Tech Summit. Tech Summit is a yearly internal event where Adobe engineers from all over the world gather and show what they are working on. If what I saw today is any indication of what we’ll be showing at MAX (and I have a strong suspicion it is) I can only recommend you register today!

This morning we got a sneak peek of all the new goodies the Creative Cloud team is working on. I guarantee you’re going to love it! The Creative Cloud team is working on [redacted]. Oh… Yeah… I guess I’m not allowed to tell you just yet. What I can tell you is that it’s very obvious that the Creative Cloud team is just getting started and with the recent acquisition of Behance I’m sure you can imagine some of the work that’s going on.

The last session of the day was just pure Adobe magic… It was an hour long sneak peek session of new imaging technology. I’m sure you’ll see a lot of these demos during the sneak peeks at MAX.

And this was just day 1 of our Tech Summit. I can’t wait to see what they’ll serve us tomorrow!

So… Have you registered for Adobe MAX yet?

It’s hard to believe but After Effects is 20 years old today! To celebrate After Effects’ birthday Adobe TV just published a set of testimonial videos from users that showcase how After Effects has impacted their careers.

The After Effects blog also has a few stories from users and employees and they would love to hear your After Effects story as well!

But that’s not all. We will actually be celebrating the next 3 months. Keep an eye on our Facebook page to access all the festivities!

By the way… Did you know that After Effects is also available in the Creative Cloud? Oh… And you can still get 40% off your first year on Creative Cloud!

One of the last things you want to read in an email on a Sunday morning is that your Wordpress install has been compromised. Sadly… That’s the exact thing that happened to me yesterday.

I’ve always been careful to update my Wordpress installation whenever a new update was available. I’ve also been very careful about which plugins and theme I use and making sure they are up to date as well but someone still found a hole somewhere and injected some malware resulting in a Google malware notification. And so it was time to do something else.

I know I haven’t been very active on my blog lately but I really want to get back into it. That said… Wordpress has been bothering me for a while now. Not only the constant security risks but also the fact that it has become really really slow. I should note that my Wordpress blog was hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Before moving my blog there I had my own dedicated server. While I loved being able to install and do whatever I wanted on my server it also was a bit too time consuming. And so I moved everything to Rackspace a few years ago. Cloud Sites definitely had it’s flaws from the start but I just didn’t want to spend too much time on keeping my server up to date. Over the years I saw Cloud Sites’ “node unavailable” message more and more (The Rackspace support reps kept saying it was Wordpress’ fault) and eventually I just got fed up with it. I had originally planned on moving my Wordpress blog to an Amazon EC2 instance but that plan has now also changed.

When I took my blog offline I tweeted about my Wordpress disapointment. It was Kevin Suttle who pointed me to Octopress. Octopress (built on top of Jekyll and runs on Ruby) definitely isn’t for everyone. They call it a “blogging framework for hackers” and you should take that very literally. I got everything up and running on my Mac thanks to this post.

The biggest advantage about Octopress is that it generates static HTML pages. So no more need for a server side language or databases. In fact… My blog is now hosted on Amazon S3. So it should be blazing fast now (and probably/hopefully a lot cheaper too). It’s also secure as the actual page generation happens on my local Octopress install. Adding & editing posts is very different than in Wordpress but luckily Sublime Text understands markdown so I can now actually write my posts in Sublime Text.

It’s probably going to take a bit of getting used to but so far I really like it. I’m currently using the Slash theme but I’ll probably make something custom over the next coming weeks. I’m not sure whether or not I should try to import my old Wordpress posts. If you think I should do that then make sure you make your voice heard by posting a comment (using Disqus) on this post.

I’ve been working on this video for a while and I’m glad it’s live now. I always wanted to do a “kinetic typography” video and this was the perfect opportunity.

Brackets is a new open source project founded by Adobe to push tooling on the web forward. Brackets is completely open source and built in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. But… Just watch the video ;-)

For more information about Brackets check out the Brackets blog.