Travis, Joy and Tim added Adobe’s flagship product line to their 2008 list of best new apps. Creative Suite 4 got a significant overhaul this year and, with hundreds of new features spread across seventeen apps, has already streamlined our workflow and significantly boosted productivity.

The simple need for holiday party music inspired the creation of Radio Free Mightybytes, our own Internet radio station.

A collective “Egads!” welled up from the Mightybytes conference room when, a mere day before the maiden mid-December tasting of our homemade Mightybrew, we realized that our holiday shindig would be without music, not because of a lack of tunes (we had plenty) but due to an inadequate delivery system.

I’ll start right off by saying this series of posts about Adobe MAX are loooong overdue. Yeah, I know. Bad blogger. The ‘to do’ list upon my return from San Francisco was daunting, to say the least, and unfortunately posting blog entries didn’t top that list, since we were so busy trying to wrap up projects, prepare for the onslaught of holiday madness, and wind down the year. In these trying economic times I’m certainly not going to complain about having too much work, so in the spirit of ‘better late than never’ here are a few interesting tidbits from this year’s conference.

Limited 3D functions were introduced in several CS3 applications but Adobe really upped the ante with CS4.

Animators can now import 3D models into Photoshop, paint textures directly onto them and export PSD files with 3D objects intact for animating in After Effects. The resulting layers in After Effects retain all properties from the Photoshop document except for lighting, which of course can be re-created in After Effects. It’s a bit of a drawback, yes, but hopefully one that animators will be able to overlook in favor of having these new creative options at their fingertips.

Tone generation is new to ActionScript 3.0 and developers have embraced this feature wholeheartedly to build audio applications that are both impressive and innovative. Hobnox has used this technology in their AudioTool product to build virtual synthesizers, drum machines and effects pedals, effectively creating a network-enabled version of Propellerhead Software’s flagship product Reason within the Flash Player.