Introducing Adobe Slate

Today we released Adobe Slate, a new iPad app that will help you become a masterful storyteller. You provide the words, add imagery, select a theme, and Slate turns your thoughts into a highly polished professional looking document, one that is modern and responsive, and which looks great on any device and screen size.If this sounds vaguely familiar, that may be because last year we published another storytelling app, Adobe Voice, which Yahoo's David Pogue called "one of the simplest, most creative, most joyous apps ever written." Voice, an App Store Editor's Choice, has become particularly popular in classrooms (even among first graders!) and thousands of teachers have made Voice a key component of their classroom toolbox. We love Voice, we've updated the app multiple times since it was released, and more updates are on the way. But, back to Slate.

Voice and Slate share a common mission, they are designed to make storytelling fun and simple, while not sacrificing the final experience and output in any way. Where they differ is in the generated output. Voice creates movies, your voice and imagery set to a soundtrack of your choice, all played back in a movie type experience. Slate creates a document, one that uses the latest web technologies and responsive design, allowing your story to be displayed perfectly in any web browser. So, if it's a document you want, use Slate, if it's a movie, use Voice. Either way, you'll get to tell your story as beautifully and as professionally as you can imagine.

Creating a Slate story is simple and fun (here's an example created by my 11-year-old for a school project). To create a story you specify the title, pick a title screen background image, enter the text (you can type, talk, or copy/paste from other documents), optionally select text styles, and add additional images as needed (from your camera roll, Creative Cloud, a Dropbox, and from online Creative Commons searches). When done you select a theme which ensures that colors, fonts, and transitions all work harmoniously together to create a perfectly polished document. And finally, click publish to generate the web page. You can make content private or public, and you can share your creations with the world.

Voice and Slate are both free apps, a Creative Cloud id is needed but it can be a free or paid account. Both Voice and Slate are iPad apps, and yes, we absolutely recognize that we need non-iOS versions, and that is something we are actively exploring.

In the meantime, grab Slate, give it a try, and please share your creations.