At its MAX conference in Los Angeles today, Adobe announced the public beta launch of its Creative SDK. The Creative SDK, which the company first revealed a few months ago, brings some of Photoshop’s editing features, as well as the ability to easily work with PSD files, access Adobe’s new Creative Market and use the company’s recently launched hardware products to third-party mobile applications.
When Adobe first announced the SDK, it only made it available to a select number of developers in a private beta test. With today’s public launch of version 1.0, more developers will be able to access Adobe’s Creative Cloud feature set from their applications.
Some of the applications that already use the service include the dynamic drawing engine Fabrika, the presentation app Flowboard and many of Adobe’s own mobile apps.
One of the questions Adobe always gets asked at any press conference related to mobile apps is when it plans to launch Android versions of its services. For its new suite of apps, that’s probably still a while out, but the Creative SDK for Android is now in private beta, it seems, and Adobe is looking for Android apps to include in its program.
The Creative SDK is a good example of Adobe’s shift away from shrink-wrapped applications to offering its applications as services and giving developers access to its tools through this new platform. What’s unclear, though, is how (and if) Adobe plans to charge for the Creative SDK in the long run.