Adobe, the leading developer of professional media creation and editing software, today announced a slew of updates and new products at an event at New York's Lincoln Center.

Not only are all the applications in the Creative Cloud suite getting significant updates, but for the first time ever, the company is offering hardware gadgets: a stylus called Adobe Ink and a ruler called Slide, which lets you draw perfectly straight lines.

The devices work in concert with two new iPad apps, Sketch and Line. The first, as its name implies, is all about creative pencil, marker or brush drawing, while the latter is more in line with the draftsman's trade.

New to the Suite

With this update, officially dubbed Creative Cloud 2014, Adobe makes a good case for its subscription model, with significant updates to its photography, design, video, audio, and Web development applications.

Photoshop gets new Blur Gallery motion effects, a Focus Mask tool that lets you create a mask based on the part of the photo that's in focus. Perspective Warp tool lets you correct perspective in only select areas of a photo, while Smart Objects get smarter, with the ability to be linked across multiple documents. Everything is sped up with an updated Mercury Graphics Engine underneath.

The updated program supports Windows 8.1 touch input like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet.

The designer apps—Illustrator, InDesign, and Muse—also get updates and speed boosts, including a new Live Shapes that can transform rectangles into more complex shapes.

The video and audio tools (Premiere, After Effects, SpeedGrade, and Audition) get Live Text Templates and Masking and Tracking tools and better integration between After Effects, Premiere Pro, and SpeedGrade. The Dreamweaver website-building app now has an Element Quick View for easier HTML page-structure modification, along with other new tools.

New Mobile Apps

Adobe Photoshop Mix joins Sketch and Line as the third new iPad app. Mix gives anyone with an iPad some of Photoshop's most impressive tools: Content-Aware Fill, Camera Shake Reduction, and Upright, which corrects distorted perspectives. Also released at the big event today is a Creative Cloud app for iPad and iPhone, which gives users access to their media collection while they're on the run.

Part of this explosion of new Creative Cloud apps comes thanks to a new Adobe Creative SDK, which gives developers access to the software house's vast store of capabilities. The SDK is currently in private beta, but a company rep said it's expected to launch at the Adobe MAX event in October.

New Photography Creative Cloud Plan

For several months, Adobe had offered a $9.99 special offer that gets shutterbugs the two big programs they're most interested in—Photoshop CC and Lightroom—along with the photo-related mobile apps, and Web galleries courtesy of Lightroom.com. The company today announced that this Photography Plan would be a permanent offering, while the Lightroom Mobile app is now available for iPhone in addition to iPad.

Photographers aren't the only ones who can take advantage of new Creative Cloud pricing plans: A Student plan gets those in education the entire suite of programs for $19.99 a month, compared with the regular price of $49.99 a month.

A lot of users of Adobe software were skeptical about having to sign up for a recurring subscription pricing plan, but this and previous releases show that the software company is determined to make the subscription model a valuable proposition to its users.

For more, see PCMag's full review of the Adobe Ink and Slide (slideshow above).