Adobe Creative Suite 4 Launch Broadcast
Today I watched Adobe’s web cast launch of Adobe’s Creative Suite 4. They covered a lot of information quickly but here are my highlights. Some of the things that I am most excited about is how CSS is finally integrated into Dreamweaver and the revised Photoshop work flow.
Video, video, video!
A major emphasis with CS4 is video. The broadcast started off highlighting how customers were using Adobe to integrate video. Direct TV has set up an entire interactive viewer experience and still protecting their digital rights. Disney has created one of their sites entirely with actionscript.
Multi-device compatibility: mobile devices to Pc to living room. They estimate 98% of PCs have flash.
Customer expectations have raised and that has put pressure on developers to raise the bar for creating dynamic experiences with HD quality video and DVD quality sound.
Creative Suite 4 has focused on time saving, integration and innovation in bringing together 13 products and 14 technologies. These technologies, Like Adobe Bridge, are only available in suites and not available for standalone purchase. These are packaged into six suites: Master, Web Standard, Web Premium, Design Premium, Design Standard and Production Premium. Adobe Creative Suite 4 will be available in 19 languages, more than ever before. In addition, Adobe is planning seven services that will offer support like Adobe TV. Over 10,000 people participated in beta testing of these products.
Video Productions
Changes to the Video portions of the suite include an emphasis on beng able to monetize your video investments and working with Tapeless workflows.
One of the highly lauded new features is the ability to search transcripts of weeks of video to find just the right clip for your product. After Effects new search features save lots of time in rendering updates, which can be extremely time consuming.
Interactive Web Design:
Interactive prototype in fireworks can be password protected, limit printing, enable commenting very similar to pdf but it is interactive! Once approved this firework prototype can be imported directly into Flash. The new inverse kinematics in Flash is a very cool means of animating objects. Flash also has 3D effects as well and works similar to AfterEffects. Animation tasks that used to require a lot of coding can now be handled on the designer end, conserving expensive programming resources for other tasks to maximize the user experience.
Dreamweaver CS4 now scours the site to find related page instead of having to do it dynamically. Related files will save a lot of time in updating web sites. Webkit rendering has been incorporated so you can see real time design in your pane instead of uploading and checking the site in the browser. The other push in the new Dreamweaver has been improved and increased AJAX functionality.
Print to Web
Illustrator will now contain multiple art boards to allow new ways of organizing your work, including placing into InDesign. The Illustrator blob brush will allow you to change paths without activating your pen and having to manipulate points individually. InDesign files can now be imported into Flash to start the print to web process. The objects in InDesign are imported in as symbols for you.
Photoshop
Ability to handle huge files, even 2gb files with speed and ease.
Extended PS allows you to create 3D images from 2D images.
Content aware scaling: This allows you to scale from one dimension without sacrificing the important elements of your image.
Check out the relatively new Adobe TV for lots more information about Adobe CS4.
