More details on Adobe CS4
There’s a feature tour of Photoshop CS4 on Adobe TV and also a piece by Jack Nack giving a detailed list of the new features. Both are worth a look.
If you are interested there are also videos on Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop Extended and Illustrator. Be warned, some of these are quite long.
Flash CS4 has some great new features, a lot of my ‘wants’ have been added. Such as much improved animation editing, H.264 video support and a better user interface. It also has some great new features such as 3D animations, inverse kinematics and AIR support.
In the case of Dreamweaver, I’ve just finished developing a website with the CS3 version and I can’t say I find the programme that great in that version. I’ve been giving serious thought towards changing this site to a much improved version and currently I’m strongly leaning towards a CMS such as Expression Engine. However, since my update may be cheaper if I buy a package, I could get Dreamweaver and Contribute CS4 for ‘free’.
They have improved Dreamweaver to have a better live view using the Mac’s webkit (ie Safari browser), the old render was awful and frequently failed to render the page in anything like a realistic state, particularly if you imbedded PHP code. CSS editing is improved but it’s unclear if it allows multiple classes on a tag or not.
There’s improve code editing for JavaScript and DOM but doesn’t show any support for PHP. They have (at last) implemented SubVersion support - something which CS3 made very difficult. It even has built in version differencing.
They also seem to have proper support for Photoshop live-objects but there’s no information about links and colours being ‘live’ instead of the (less useful) static ones in CS3. These were features in GoLive a long time ago.
Unfortunately, the interface does not seem to have had the major overhaul that the other packages have. I’m also not convinced it’s going to give me as much as a CMS would or ‘play nice’ with a CMS written in PHP.
Illustrator has support for multiple pages and they have simplified some of the tools, making them easier to use. There’s also some nice new tools including the ‘Blob Brush’, the ability to edit compound objects without breaking them apart, a tabbed view for multiple documents and ’spring-loaded’ tool pallets.
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