Adobe may launch new Creative Suite application

A digital printing conference in Texas is advertising that Adobe will be announcing a new product that's part of its 'signature suite' in April. Further details were not announced but the event's website says that that this is a brand new application.

Listed as an 'Adobe Technology Preview' by Noha Edell, business development manager for cross media publishing solutions at Adobe, the site for the Emerge conference on April 21-22 says that "Adobe will unveil a brand new application as part of its signature suite of services. Be among the first to see why this is sure to surprise even the most "in the know" Adobe fans".

Adobe's "signature suite" is a clear reference to the Creative Suite. There's no indication if the new product is part of the next version of Creative Suite (which may or may not be called CS5), but Adobe is well known to work to an 18-month release schedule, and April 2010 is 18 months since the release of Creative Suite 4. It's also not necessarily a creative tool, though it is listed under the 'Design' stream of seminars, and considering where the launch is happening, could well be a new version of Acrobat.

So far Adobe has given a few sneak peeks of tools expected to be included in 'CS5': including a Painter-style paint system and an After Effects-inspired Puppet tool to Photoshop; and iPhone, iPad and Blackberry app development tools to Flash.

Emerge also sees talks from execs from HP, Kodak, and Xerox.