14 DAY TRIAL // Announced last October at Adobe's MAX conference, Project Comet has been launched to the surprise of the design community, who wasn't expecting it for another few months.
Currently available only for Mac users and only in an English version, Adobe also decided to rebrand the app, giving it a new name, Experience Design, or XD for short.
During the past few years, Adobe has been under intense criticism after killing off Fireworks and bloating Photoshop with all kinds of features, forcing many professionals to look for alternative solutions.
While Photoshop has remained the top solution for photo editing and digital painting, many UI and Web designers have moved on to more lightweight solutions that were focused on the particular set of features they need for their craft.
Adobe XD = Sketch + InVision
In the past two years, solutions like Sketch and InVision have become industry standards, making Photoshop an afterthought in the minds of many designers, something considered impossible a decade ago.
Trying to regain its status of market leader, Adobe has now launched XD, which is a combination of a powerful vector-based design system like Sketch, with a fast prototyping platform like InVision.
Stepping lightly and carrying a big stick, Adobe XD looks poised to regain Adobe's position market leader for design-oriented software, providing designers with a project that merges the best features from their two favorite non-Adobe projects.
The first publicly available version is Experience Design CC (Preview) v. 0.5, which brings features such as built-in device design packages (iOS, Material Design, Windows Modern (Metro) ), support for repeat grids, the ability to preview designs, the option to share them via a unique URL, and even record design interactions as movies.
Additionally, the first XD preview version comes with support for exporting content as SVG, multi-screen artboards, special support for creating icons, and the obligatory Photoshop and Illustrator integration.
Adobe has already started publishing small XD tutorials and tips on its official YouTube channel. Keep an eye out for this playlist.
UPDATE: On the same day Adobe launched Experience Design, InVision announced it acquired Silver Flows, a prototyping plugin for Sketch, and is planning to integrate as many InVision features into Sketch as it can. Adobe's competitors are fighting back.
