So I’ve upgraded to Adobe’s CS4. Overall it has been a good upgrade. Here are some of my random thoughts on it – perhaps they may be useful to others out there.
First off – I passionately hate the new “we’re going to stick this amazingly huge, limited-purpose bar over everything” UI. Very un-cool. And it afflicts the entire suite, meaning I lose at least a good quarter inch off the top of my screen. For a menu bar that serves no purpose then to tell me which app I’m using. This is not a good change. Other commentators do a much better job of explaining the arguments against this new UI approach – use Google and see all the hate. The tabbed document approach also does not work as well for me as the previous cascading document approach. But it may be too late to revert back as it seems Adobe wants to make everything look the same regardless of which Operating System is used. I think this is my biggest beef with CS4.
Photoshop – the ability to utilize the graphics card to make for smooth zooms and movement across the document is very cool. The biggest highlight is the ability to arbitrarily rotate the canvas. Digital artists and illustrators are going to love it. If anything this sold Photoshop for me. I’ve already been able to utilize it for an illustration project. Awesome. But there are some issues – on my laptop (1st gen. MacBook Pro) Photoshop usually can use the built-in graphics card – but occasionally it will “forget” that I have a capable graphics card and pop-up a dialogue box that says it will turn off those nice GPU settings because my card isn’t supported. To get Photoshop to “remember”, requires setting the preferences correctly again, quitting and restarting Photoshop. It also helps to limit how many background processes and windows one has open on the laptop. Everything else works fine so far and it’s been a pleasure to use.
Illustrator – perhaps the most dramatic improvements out of the entire suite. The blob brush is – well it’s just “wow!” Illustrators will love it. Perhaps in the future Illustrator could include the arbitrary rotate stuff Photoshop has. That would be even more awesome. Illustrator also gained support for multiple artboards (that’s multiple pages folks!). The artboards can even be different sizes from each other. Also the “Appearance” panel has become super cool allowing you to even more quickly edit an objects appearance. Click on the fill color, and the color palette flips open for you to quickly change the color. It’s been fun to work in.
InDesign – nothing to report on yet, still haven’t had much chance to work/play in it.
Dreamweaver – loving the “Liveview” ability that 1) renders accurately and 2) allows one to even see JS functionality work. You can even view the JS effecting your code in real time – you see the DOM as it’s getting worked on! Then you can freeze the JS right after it’s fired an event so you can edit some CSS class that is inserted right then. Awesomeness. DW also allows you to use Widgets to quickly insert neat functionality like YUI Calendars or JQuery sliders – and DW will handle pulling together all the dependencies. There’s a lot of cool stuff within DW. With great standards support, all these new features will help streamline web development.
Flash – A disappointment. The help files which are so crucial for learning ActionScript 3 are now all located online. Which basically means you have to use a 2nd app (your browser) to view the help. The motion presets are also disappointing – they are next to impossible to edit – the motion editor panel sucks. Trying to edit one of the applied motion presets actually caused Flash to crash. Not good. The timeline has some changes applied as far as how keyframes within a tween appear. Even the tweening methods have changed – so previously easy animations are now very difficult. Does one use the classic tweening or the new tween method? So far classic is winning because it’s the way Flash used to work. The bone tool is useful for getting realistic joint animations. The deco tool has potential but it’s not there yet. Maybe more patterns to use. The 3D tools are…hard to use and seem frankly to have just been thrown on without a whole lot of thought into really making them useful and functional. Frankly Flash appears to be having an identity crisis. Adobe is turning Flash into a development platform (see Flex and AIR to see what I mean), which, although not bad in itself, means less resources are being devoted to improving Flash as an animation and easy scripting tool. This release seems to highlight how little resources were devoted as well as possible lapses in quality control. Quite a shame. It definitely leaves an opening for Microsoft if they want to win that part of the market from Adobe. Flash could have been so much better…I hate seeing the potential that was missed.
Fireworks – It’s nice to have you back in the suite Fireworks! CS3 Design Premium didn’t come with FW. I guess Adobe thought us Graphic Designers don’t do prototyping! Well they must have heard the complaints because they’ve included Fireworks this time ’round. I haven’t really gotten into Fireworks yet so I’ll probably post my thoughts on it later. It seems to play nice with PS and Illy though so that’s a good sign.
Acrobat – I like the new Acrobat.com services. Buzzword is a great way to collaboratively work with others, Share is pretty cool – a great way to share those larger-then-email-possible files. And the ability to create more interactive and rich experiences within Acrobat – pretty cool. I’m still worried about how including Flash into Acrobat might be abused though. I still think Acrobat takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Photoshop, the app, is actually smaller then Acrobat. By 700 mb. Adobe might want to look into optimizing that. Of course it could be seriously optimized, in which case I don’t know what to think!
Bridge – is very useful. Has been since CS3. Wasn’t really before that though. It now has a method to easily output your selected files into a web/flash presentation or a PDF. *BUT* that output feature is not scriptable! So I can’t, as yet, create a handy script to output the selected files to a PDF from one click – instead I have to go through the process of the output panel – how many images to a page, titles, borders, etc. A bit more hassle. But at least it’s there!
Extension Manager – meh – it’s an AIR app.
Device Central – I haven’t used it. I don’t know anyone who has used it. But it must be useful for app developers in the cell phones/smart-phones industry. Because they keep installing it with the suites.
Adobe Media Player – another AIR app I believe. At first I was not really impressed. But after actually running a search and finding some interesting programs…well I still prefer Hulu.com and tv.adobe.com but some folks may find it useful.
Adobe Updater – there’s nothing quite like watching the updater download an update for itself – I’ll call it a mixed message. I’ve set it to only run when I click on it. That way I’m never disrupted while working by dialog boxes asking me to quite Safari or something.
Overall CS4 has been useful and worth the price to update for me. The biggest disapointment I have is with Flash. It could have been better. It should have been better. But for everything else that I’ve uesd so far, it’s been a good update.