The all new Adobe Spark Freemium Edition

Adobe Spark is a fun and creative way to share ideas quickly and beautifully. With Adobe Spark you are able to create three types of content: Web pages, social media content and video.
This new software replaces Adobe’s previous creative social apps (Adobe Slate, Adobe Post and Adobe Voice) with this three-tool utility that is able to create social memes, mini websites, and narrated tutorials. Spark’s fresh tools are now called Spark Post, Spark Page and Spark Video. Adobe has also kindly released companion mobile apps (Currently only for iOS) to go along with the web based tool.

• Spark Page

Page allows you to create a story using text, images, and video. When your story is complete, Adobe Spark transforms it into a responsive web page that can be viewed in any web browser.

• Spark Post

Spark Post can be used to create images that are optimized for social media. Your content is crafted in a way that tweaks the media into the right shape and size for any social media platform you need.

• Spark Video

Spark Video is used to turn your icons, images, music, and voiceover recordings to create vibrant video media. The great thing about Adobe Spark is that all the tools available are interchangeable with each other. For instance, you can create individual Pages, Posts, and Videos, or you can include a Post image in a Video, or a Video in a Page etc.

• Pricing

Adobe Spark uses a freemium pricing model. This means both the website and the supporting iOS apps, are totally free to use.

• Bottom Line

Adobe Spark is a great way to create engaging content that stands out from the crowd. If you don’t mind taking the time to get to grips with the software, then it really is a useful set of tools to create good graphics and visual stories for social media.

• Sighning Up

You can visit the official adobe spark page here.

No more flash updates on android and Google products

Google to block non-essential Adobe Flash content on Sept 1, but will continue autoplaying important videos

Starting from today, September 1, 2015, Google will stop some Flash content from automatically playing in a move to better browser performance that was decided earlier this year.

Still largely used for multimedia content, Flash made by Adobe Systems has been facing performance and security issues that has made Google take this decision. The recent discovery of Flash zero-day susceptibilities has led to browsers such as Firefox blocking all Flash content, and seeing major websites such as Twitch making the jump to HTML5. Also, the susceptibilities in Flash are one of the most common ways that malware ends up on computers.

Moving forward, Google’s Chrome browser will automatically freeze Flash files that are not important. This means that you will have to click on the files you wish to see so that you can manually enable them, otherwise they will be frozen by default.

Earlier this year, Google announced that they would auto-pause unnecessary Flash content on websites viewed in its Chrome browser, but allow other content such as videos to autoplay. The users will need to adjust the browser’s settings to automatically play content requiring a Flash plugin. It also said that Flash can drain a user’s laptop battery faster.

According to Google, “In June, we announced that Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default to improve performance for users. This change is scheduled to start rolling out on September 1, 2015.”

In recent years, Adobe has taken measures to improve Flash’s security with code reviews and faster updates, and still is a widely used attack vector.

The tech giant said that the change will take effect from Sept. 1 for its Chrome browsers. Google already converts Flash-based advertising content to HTML5, which does not require additional software plugins to allow certain types of videos to be played remotely in Web browsers.

The company is also encouraging advertisers who are uploading ads to its Display Network to make sure that their ads can be converted to HTML5.

However, the unusual thing is that Adobe’s programmers were being helped by security engineers from Google to support Flash against attacks from hackers.