The applications promise better integration to enable content to be moved between - for example - Photoshop and Flash or from Dreamweaver to Fireworks. Both Photoshop and the Flash IDE have been enhanced for simpler operations on 3D objects and Adobe’s InDesign DTP program adds features such as ‘conditional text’ to support the creation of multi-version documents (e.g. multi-lingual or teacher/student versions) as well as the ability to export layouts to Flash.
I get the feeling that Flash is increasingly defining the future face of Adobe products. It wasn’t so long ago that Flash (the ubiquitous streaming graphics technology) didn’t even belong to Adobe. Along with the web design IDE Dreamweaver, and the Web graphics software Fireworks, Flash was developed by a rival company, Macromedia. It’s been just over three years since Adobe acquired Macromedia and ever since that time Flash and all that goes with it (such as the Flash IDE and the Flex development framework) have been increasingly gaining in importance to Adobe.
One of the things that’s been noticeable up to now is that the user interfaces of the Macromedia products such as Dreamweaver and Fireworks, has been significantly different from those of Adobe products such as Photoshop and Illustrator. In the CS4 release, their user interfaces are being brought more into line with the other Adobe applications. Which, for long-term Dreamweaver and Fireworks user like me, is slightly worrying news.
Based on my experiences in (the admittedly rather short) time I’ve been using pre-release versions of Fireworks and Dreamweaver, I have to say that my initial worries may have been misplaced. The user interfaces certainly have changed a bit but the changes are by no means as huge or confusing as those which Microsoft made in the last version of Office. In Dreamweaver, for example, there is an extra menu to save and load named user interface configurations (with different arrangements of windows and panels) and there are ‘css’ and ‘JavaScript’ buttons to navigate to style sheets and scripts. And the general ‘look and feel’ has been slightly spiffed up. But overall this is the same user interface which I know so well from previous versions.
Dreamweaver CS4 also has a neat ‘live preview’ mode which displays dynamic sites more or less as they will appear in the browser - so, for example, JavaScript widgets (such as calendars and menus) and effects (such as glows and rollovers) will become ‘live’; and PHP scripts will be processed into HTML. This is not foolproof, however - design time and runtime paths to files and graphics may result in ‘blank holes’ showing up in place of content - but it’s a good compromise when working with dynamic sites.
Adobe undoubtedly has a formidable suite of applications here. Microsoft has nothing to compare with Photoshop or Illustrator and even though Microsoft is now attempting to make inroads into web development with its ’Expression’ range of products, Adobe dominates this market. On the basis of this first look at the CS4 product line, I’d say the company seems set fair to continue that domination for the foreseeable future.
We’ll have a more in-depth look at Adobe CS4 after the release of the final product. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is scheduled to ship later this month. For more detailed information see: http://www.adobe.co.uk/creativesuite.
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