I made a point to attend the Adobe Creative Cloud event in Portland at the wonderfully hip EcoTrust auditorium in the Pearl District near downtown. I try to make events sponsored by the various Portland Adobe User Groups when I can. This time, I was curious to see more of the new work-flows and approaches that Adobe is promoting in the Creative Cloud 2014 release. In particular, I wanted to see if they were addressing some of of the gaps that have appeared with the demise of staple tools Like Fireworks CS6. While there wasn’t a lot of specifics regarding the tools gap, they did demonstrate a number of things that differed from the Adobe keynote last month.

Probably the overarching theme in the CC 2014 release is the integration of the various apps with each other. Integration keeps getting tighter and new technologies leveraging things like HTML5, SVG, and more are being peppered throughout the new releases. While Adobe is making some concessions to designers who need more complex features, a lot of the emphasis is on reducing complexity. While that is good in itself, it is a bit disappointing for us who work as part of a team, or need ways to layout and design more complex UI/UX interactions, flows, etc.

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