Unexpected instabilities forced Adobe Systems to hasten a planned outage for its Creative Cloud Connection, a service that keeps files made on mobile devices or uploaded to the Web in sync with customers' PCs. Adobe launched it a half year ago in a preview version, and had planned to take it offline this week to update the interfaces the software uses to communicate with Adobe's servers.

Adobe is announcing new predictive capabilities for Adobe Social — capabilities that should be particularly helpful to marketers wondering why some social media posts take off while others fall flat. Bill Ingram, vice president for Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, walked Anthony Ha through the new features in advance of the Adobe Summit in London. Adobe is using historical data — both in aggregate and at the customer-specific level — to predict the likely engagement level and sentiment around a specific Facebook post, and it can recommend keywords, content types and timing that might lead to a better response.

Adobe has changed the way it sells technology used to enable high-quality streaming services from TV networks and other video providers. With the launch of Adobe Primetime — previously know as Project Primetime — the technology company is providing a suite of tools for video delivery. And it has signed up a couple of big new clients for the suite of products.

Adobe Systems has released Lightroom 4.4 with support for two mainstream SLRs, Nikon's new D7100 and Canon's Rebel SL1, and with better image quality for a Fujifilm cameras with unusual sensors. Lightroom is designed for editing and cataloging photos, especially those shot in cameras' proprietary raw image formats that offer higher quality but impose an image-processing burden on photographers. Adobe periodically updates the software to support new cameras -- and in the case of version 4.4 to fix problems with existing cameras such as the Fujifilm models.

Getting to easily store and share content online as well as immediate access to new updates are benefits of using cloud-based software that should be at a subscription price which "well and truly" supports this real value. That's how Adobe Systems hopes to convince more customers to use the cloud version of its creative media and digital marketing software, according to Craig Tegel, regional president of Adobe Japan and Asia-Pacific.

Adobe Systems Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch announced plans today to leave the company and is headed for Apple to become its vice president of technologies. Adobe says it's not replacing the CTO position, and instead is assigning those responsibilities to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and SVP Bryan Lamkin. News of the resignation came inside of a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, though not the move to Apple, which was reported earlier by CNBC.

Adobe released emergency patches for Adobe Reader and Acrobat 11, 10 and 9 on Wednesday that address two critical vulnerabilities being actively exploited by attackers. The exploit was discovered by researchers from security firm FireEye in active attacks last Tuesday and was confirmed by Adobe one day later. It's particularly dangerous because it bypasses the sandbox anti-exploitation mechanism in Adobe Reader 10 and 11.

Adobe released security updates for Flash Player and Shockwave Player on Tuesday in order to address a total of 19 vulnerabilities affecting the two products. New stand-alone versions of Flash Player 11 were released for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. The Flash Player plug-ins bundled with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 will be automatically updated through the update mechanisms of the two browsers.

Security flaws in Adobe Flash, Reader, and Acrobat could have been the cause of computer crashes recently. The software company announced yesterday that it sent out updates for these three programs, which are meant to patch security vulnerabilities that cause such system crashes. The company wrote in a security bulletin that these updates address a vulnerability that could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

Adobe has made good on its promise to deliver Retina Display support to two of its most-used graphics programs, Photoshop and Illustrator CS6. That means owners of Apple’s Retina MacBook Pro (both the 13- and 15-inch versions) will now be able to edit and create graphics using the programs in native resolution, instead of seeing the admittedly ugly non-optimized visual resources both previously provided.