For anyone who missed it MacWorld reported that Adobe will host a webcast announcing Creative Suite 4, on September 23 at 9:00 am ET. Adobe offered CS4 beta versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth back in May. Wikipedia, of course, has a nice breakdown of potential updates with CS4.
I just love that Google announced it’s new browser, Chrome, with a 38 page comic book. The comic book is drawn by Scott McCloud. McCloud is probably best known as the creator of Zot!, a manga influenced 1980s comic book series based on a teenage hero from an alternate Earth.
I’ve seen some criticism about the Google comic book, calling too childish for such an announcement. Personally, I think it was an cleaver way to catch even more attention regarding the upcoming release. After all, the open source browser has been all over the web today. Chrome is based on WebKit, the same open source engine as Safari, but I’ll hold off on my opinion of the browser itself until I can download a beta version.
iVerse Media officially announced their upcoming iPhone/iTouch comic book reader, available later this year. According to their press release; iPhone/iPod Touch owners will have the opportunity to download digital comics from established industry professionals and studios, as well as new and rising comic book stars through iVerse Media.
Now, digital comics are nothing new. You’ve been able to buy digital comics on disc for years. Online sites promoting them have been around almost as long. Marvel Entertainment even rolled out a digital comic book subscription service last year with a Flash based reader. Early this year they introduced a Facebook application to promote the service.
And why not, with many comic books available via BitTorrent the comic book industry is facing a similar situation to what the music industry went through. It’s not just the $2.99 price tag, more and more people prefer the online experience.
So what makes iVerse Media’s announcement interesting? First that they plan to have comic books available directly on iTunes. Second, they plan to have comics tailor made specifically for iPhone and/or iTouch distribution. The only competition that I’m aware of is the Clickwheel Comic Reader, which is for iPods and not the new touch devices.
If this catches on it certainly could change the comic book industry. Print comics would be designed to immediately be transferred to the iPhone and/or iTouch. Gone would be the panoramic panels covering multiple pages. Each comic would be a more about the intimacy of the touch device screen and the resulting transitions.
More likely what will happen is an explosion of independent comic book creations, along the lines of the various podcasts that exist. Ranging in quality from mind blowing visual stories to utter crap. Hopefully a side effect of this will be more interest and development of digital comics as a whole.
FMWebschool recently introduced FMTouch, enabling you to deploy FileMaker on your iPhone or iPod Touch devices. FMTouch fills the whole left when FileMaker stopped developing FileMaker Mobile (the last version was 8). Now you can easily have instant access to your database solutions.
You’ll need FileMaker Advanced to generate a DDR (Database Design Report) file, though FMWebshool is planning on providing a service to create a DDR for those who don’t have Advanced. The DDR file will need to be under 10MB, so you might need to clone and make adjustments to larger databases. Unlike FileMaker Mobel, FMTouch is a relational application. FMTouch also supports multiple layouts, portals and value lists.
Though still early, FMTouch is getting great reviews. The initial price tag of $99.99 was even reduced to $69.99 after feedback from the FileMaker community. Having used FileMaker Mobile in the past, I am looking forward to getting my hands on this new program. FMTouch is available through the business application section of iTunes.
