Understanding and managing applications with Creative Cloud (CC 2014.1)

- Now before we dive headfirst into learning about Adobe After Effects, it's important to understand that it's just one application and offering that is Adobe Creative Cloud. Now the idea behind Creative Cloud is that you can actually subscribe to software on a month to month basis. Now when you do that, it gives you the ability to stay up to date with current features, and it allows Adobe to actually roll out new features much more quickly. Now that being said, it's that much more important to actually make sure that your software is up to date, and there is a specific application I highly recommend you use to make sure that that task is as easy as possible.

So I'm going to switch tabs here in my Safari browser, and I want you to go to creative.adobe.com/products/creative-cloud. Once you go there, you'll see a download button where you can actually download the Creative Cloud desktop application. Once you've downloaded the application, you can install it on your system. Once it's installed on your system, you should be able to access it either from the menu bar here in the Mac OS, or the task bar under Windows. Let me go ahead and minimize my web browser here, and I'm going to click on my Creative Cloud icon here under my desktop application.

Notice how it's divided into four sections. I have a home section, apps, assets, and community. The most important section I want you to pay attention to is apps. In here you'll see all of the different installed apps that are installed on your computer, and it will tell you whether the applications are up to date. Now if you have an update, you can choose to update an individual application just by clicking on the update button, or if you want to update everything, just go ahead and click update all. It's really important that you actually use the desktop manager to keep your software up to date.

The reason I'm bringing this up, in the past there were multiple installs of the same application. So I'll talk more about that in depth in the next video, but for right now, I want you to understand how important the desktop application is to Adobe Creative Cloud. Now I'll continue to update individual movies within this training title as new features get rolled out within the application. As long as you're keeping your software updated with the most current version, you should have no problems moving throughout the rest of this training.

So now that you know how to keep your software up to date, you can definitely feel free to click through some of these other areas within the desktop application and continue exploring Adobe Creative Cloud.