A major product refresh cycle is under way at Adobe Systems, and Wall Street is optimistic that it will provide significant growth for the company.

Source: Investor’s Business Daily via Yahoo! News

San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE - News) plans to release Acrobat 8, its latest software for electronic documents and work flow, in early November.

Adobe plans to release Creative Suite 3, the next version of its popular collection of graphic design applications, in the first half of 2007.

I’m back from my trip to Santa Fe and I’ll be reporting of the class and the bike trip later, but in the meantime, it seems a bunch of stuff happened while I was gone. Here’s a roundup of some of the more important happenings…

Just when Seetharaman Narayanan (aka Seetha) thought he was safe, he goes and does an interview with David Friedman of IconicSans. In the interview, he talks about his fan club, history with Photoshop, and enjoyment of “Playboy’s number one Party School in 1987″ (Seetha received a Masters Degree from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale). Even Boing Boing picked up on the interview.

It all started in December of 2004 on a thread on CONCEPTART.ORG and was flamed by Jeff Schewe’s photos of Seetha in his feature story A Visit to Adobe last summer. The story continued with an article on PSN last August called Seetha’s Fan Club.

Source: Adobe Support Knowledgebase

Issue: When you start Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Update Manager returns the error “The Adobe Updater could not be started, please reinstall application and components.”

Adobe has released Adobe Lightroom Beta 4 for Macintosh and Windows now available for download at: Labs.Adobe.com. Windows users can now access more of the module features that were previously unavailable in the PC version of public Beta 3. But the main changes in Beta 4 have all taken place in the Library and Develop modules. In this second part review we are going to concentrate on what’s new in the Library module, such as the new interface changes to the grid layout, the ability to batch rename images, and convert to DNG and CD/DVD archiving. Read the rest of this story for an in-depth look at the Beta 4 Develop module.

Aperture 1.5 delivers more than 20 new and enhanced features that improve file management, metadata handling, and image adjustment. This update also addresses numerous issues related to overall reliability, performance, and compatibility.
The Update is available through Software Updates or as a download from Apple.

The 10.4.8 Update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for the following applications and technologies: