I used Illustrator to not suck when I drew this

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at Adobe with NMC CEO Larry Johnson. We talked with folks from Adobe’s higher education division, and we saw some really, really cool stuff. One thing that I loved is Adobe Rome (see the video demo of Rome from MAX 2009 last October). Rome is going to be a fantastic tool for K12 mediamaking and collaboration, I think. It makes it easy to pull together different kinds of media along with text and drawings, and then to output the project in different ways. I really want my son to play with it, because I’m curious about how the tool will feel to a young person. It looked very intuitive to me, but then I’ve been using Photoshop and Illustrator longer than my son’s been alive, so it’s hard to say how a new, inexperienced user would see it. The demo just blew me away because of what could be done with it in schools, if the Big 3 Issues are properly addressed (what does it cost? can I make the kids’ work private? do I need to install and maintain it?). I have high hopes.

We also saw some of the new features coming up in CS5, but I’m not sure which ones have already been revealed so I’ll just say this: Wow. I am so excited about what I saw. Photoshop in particular has some new powerful features that I look forward to playing with, and there are some other treats coming out as well. Keep an eye out for CS5 and Rome!