Adobe Unveils Creative Suite Four (CS4)
For a number of weeks now, Adobe has been tantalizing their loving horde of followers with the promise of a “Brilliant Event” taking place on the 23rd of September – that’s today. It wasn’t really too much of a mystery though, as it was clear from the start that the big event is the unveiling of the long-awaited next installment in their multi-purpose creative design software package: Creative Suite 4. Interestingly, Adobe has chosen to call this their biggest software release to date, and when someone like Adobe says that, people take note.
Officially unveiled in a large-scale public webcast at 9AM Eastern Time this morning, CS4 will be available in a number of different packages: Master Collection, Production Premium, Web Standard, Web Premium, Design Standard and Design Premium. Each of these is a suite of applications specifically tailored to the needs of professionals in that field. Existing users of CS3 (or earlier versions) can also choose to upgrade or purchase any of their existing stand-alone elements individually.
Released in March of 2007, CS3 continued the legacy of industry-standard creative development applications and remains the staple for most design needs. Its successor comes trumpeting in with a number of new features for their 13 stand-alone products, 14 integrated technologies, and seven services. But the best part of CS4 isn’t its individual parts, but its apparently seamless integration between all products in the line.
This is achieved primarily through Adobe ConnectNow, an online service for real-time collaboration that can be accessed from many of the CS4 applications.
There are a number of feature updates for each of the individual applications in the suites, including the ability to use “tweens” instead of keyframes in Flash CS4 to facilitate precise control over animation attributes. Flash also sports a new tool called the “Bones” tool which allows for realistic animation of linked objects. InDesign users will be happy with the new Live PreFlight tool that can make catching minor errors easier, and Photoshop fans should enjoy the new Content-Aware Scaling tool that can automatically re-compose an image on the fly as you resize it.
Speaking of Photoshop, CS4 offers it in two flavours, the standard and “Extended” versions, which differ slightly in functionality and price. The added features of the “Extended” edition are mainly geared toward those who work in film and other mediums where advanced 3D image manipulation is important. Some of the most exciting “Extended” features are the ability to paint directly on 3D images, rotate and scale 3D models freely, and adjust lighting, meshes, and materials for any of your models.
On the negative side for us Mac folks, Adobe is not shipping 64-bit versions of its CS4 applications for the Mac OS, and is not expected to until CS5 shows up. This is apparently because the applications were originally written in Carbon rather than the Cocoa application framework. And since Apple decided to scrap plans for a 64-bit version of Carbon, all the applications must now be ported to Cocoa before they can continue on their way to a 64-bit release. Adobe is working on it, but they say that it’s no small undertaking and will not be something they will achieve for the release of CS4. I guess that means a few more months of letting Windows users have a 10% performance advantage on us. Darn.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 is scheduled to ship in October, and until then we can enjoy the betas of a couple of the applications including the new Flash Player 10, all of which are now available as free downloads. For more information on the features and functionality of CS4, check out the official site.
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