Adobe CS 3 Just Released

Sholom Sandalow, Friday, March 30, 2007 @ 7:30 pm

Adobe released its 2007 product suite this past week.  As soon as I heard the news I jumped onto the website (adobe.com) to get a glimpse of some of the new product enhancements featured in this new release, dubbed CS 3. 

Although I’ve used all of Adobe’s big ticket products at some point in my career as a designer (and I hope to  one day be professionally reintroduced to After Effects), on the job I work primarily in Photoshop Illustrator Flash and GoLive.  So I set off to get a look at what is in store for the CS 3 version of these tools.

My first destination was to Photoshop, where I got a glimpse at some interesting new features.  The most striking of them being the new tables interface (which I can’t judge because I haven’t used it yet) and the radically enhanced selection toolset, which, judging from the online demo seems almost spooky in its intelligence and it’s uncanny ability to recognize objects in images the way we do.

Next, I visited the Illustrator page.  I was really impressed with the new features in this release, especially since Adobe has a history in recent years of productizing minor enhancements to illustrator so it can keep up with its big brother. 
The most impressive feature in any one of the products I reviewed is Illustrators new Live Color tool.  This revolutionary tool lets you adjust color across your entire canvas by selecting groups of colors and moving them synchronously across the color palette, maintaining relative relationships between each of the colors.  Updates are viewable in real time on the canvas as you drag your change your colors.  Job well done, Adobe.

Flash CS 3 looks like it received the most extensive makeover, and this comes as no surprise, given it’s popularity as a web development tool, and this being the first chance Adobe could get it’s hands on it.  The most expected, and most beneficial enhancements are to Flash’s integration with the other adobe products, specifically Illustrator and Photoshop.  You can now import both AI and PSD files directly into Flash while preserving layers and structure..  Other enhancements include enhancements to  Actionscript 3.0 as well as the ability to save and reuse animations, just like symbols.

I don’t use Dreamweaver currently, having found my mojo in GoLive.  However I will be making the switch eventually, Adobe has made sure of that.  They’ve discontinued the GoLive line in favor of the more popular Dreamweaver, which they inherited along with Flash when they bough Macromedia last year.

Adobe has enhanced Dreamweaver’s support for CSS based web page creation in this release.  Included with the product is a set of CSS layout templates from which you can start building pages.  Also new are the CSS managements tools which allow you to, among other things, quickly move styles between documents and between inline and external style sheets.

Dreamweaver also comes with support for Adobe’s Spry framework, which is a set of components that use Ajax and other dynamic clients side techniques to allow web designers to more easily build rich web sites. 

user experience design

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