Around the Office: Adobe CS6 Beta, AdSense Second Thoughts, More

Our resident Adobe Photoshop artist, Eva, is excited about the new features to be included in Adobe Creative Suite 6. In addition to its new white-on-gray interface, CS6 features some clever tools such as an adaptive wide angle filter that helps fix problems with perspective and wide-angle lens distortion, and GPU-accelerated image processing. A CS6 beta is available for download, and some speculate that the full version will be released in May 2012.

Roberto found it interesting that, Google’s head of location and local services and all around genius Marissa Mayer could have blocked the company’s multi-million-dollar Google AdSense business from getting started. In a candid presentation in New York, she explained how she had second thoughts about targeting text ads with content, making for more contextually relevant ads. This idea and service now accounts for about $5 to $7 billion in annual revenue for Google.

Having visited Berlin just a couple years ago, David was fascinated by a New York Times online feature that shows what the city looked like before the Wall fell, and what it looks like now. This visually powerful, split-screen effect was created using Flash, but some developers suggested a more elegant way to do the same thing using CSS Clip and jQuery. It’s certainly not as dramatic nor profound as the fall of the Berlin Wall, but Flash’s dominance in the realm of rich online experiences is showing cracks of its own.