New Creative Cloud Applications are Coming. What You Need to Know.

Let’s  think back for a moment to the days of Creative Suite. Every 12 to 24 months, depending up the release, Adobe would announce and ship new versions of its creative software. It was left to the users to decide if they wanted to buy the upgrade or not and when. In 2012 Adobe announced Creative Cloud while simultaneously continuing the sale of Creative Suite on a perpetually licensed basis. After what amounted to a one year experiment, a decision was made to move to a subscription only plan. Part of the promise of that plan was faster rollout of new features and the inclusion of new versions of the applications all at a set monthly price.

For the past year, Adobe has kept the promise of new features, steadily rolling out improvements, and on June 18, they will be webcasting the announcement of their newest release of Creative Cloud. That’s right, all new versions of your favorite Adobe applications such as InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Muse. The reason for this post is to alert you to the fact that this coming and to explain the difference between this and the past Creative Cloud updates.

In a webcast scheduled for June 18, Adobe will be revealing the next generation of Creative Cloud.

First the webcast will be held at 1:00pm ET on June 18 and you can sign up for a reminder email. Secondly, in the past, subscribers have received though the Creative Cloud desktop app, alerts that bug fixes and feature enhancements were available. The choice of when or if to install them has been left up to the user.

With this release, subscribers will still have the choice of when or if to install but because these are all new versions they will not replace or alter the currently installed versions. To put it in Creative Suite terms, this would have been CS8. It will be up to you to decide if you want to uninstall the current versions but as long as you have enough room on your harddrive, there’s no harm in keeping them there while you get comfortable with the new ones.

Finally, I know there are people out there that have held out hope that Adobe would return to offering perpetual licenses but there are currently somewhere in the neighborhood of two million subscribers and this will be the second release of subscription only versions. That possibility is becoming less and less realistic.