Today September 23rd 2008 is the date chosen by Adobe to present their new Creative Suite 4. Though the actual applications won’t be available until late October, the Adobe guys have already updated their official website with all the juicy details concerning the new CS4 Suite you’re eager to learn about. Adobe Creative Suite 4 comes in several different editions: Design, Web (with two flavors for each: Premium or Standard), Production and Master Collection. Prices range from the $999 of the Web Standard edition to the $2,499 of the Master Collection, which includes pretty much everything.
Though some discordant voices claim that the new CS4 suite is not that revolutionary after all, the truth is that we’ve read about some exciting new characteristics for all the main CS apps. For example, Dreamweaver boasts a new user interface, a powerful Live View feature that lets you design in actual browser conditions while keeping direct access to source code, integration with Subversion and support for Adobe Air authoring. In fact Adobe Air is an important element in other apps, such as Fireworks, which provides you with the perfect working environment to create Air apps, plus integrated export to CSS and PDF.
Talking about PDF, Acrobat features the so called PDF Portfolios, a document package where you can assemble images, video, audio and more in a totally customizable layout. Plus Acrobat now supports embedded Flash content, allows you to compare different versions of the same document and includes a highly sophisticated form tool. However the most exciting feature for me is undoubtedly the promise to reduce Acrobat’s launching time to under three seconds!
As for Illustrator, the new version brings support for multiple artboards which you can work on at the same time, together with the possibility to edit appearance inside the panel itself and manage gradient transparencies more efficiently.
Finally, Photoshop – which you can tell it’s my favorite CS app by far – features an impressive pan and zoom image rotation tool that lets you smoothly move around the picture and zoom to the pixel if necessary, plus content-aware image scaling and improved RAW photo processing functionalities. I must say I’ve tested the Photoshop CS4 Beta version and I was truly impressed by these new features and also by its clean, sleek interface that makes work much more relaxing and enjoyable.
I don’t know about you, but I have quite high expectations about the upcoming Creative Suite 4. I think it’s going to be a qualitative step forward for the Adobe apps and I’m really looking forward to test all of them and check whether they’re all as promising as the Photoshop Beta. If you want to know more about CS4, take a look at the Adobe site or head over to the Adobe CS4 Launch event (live now!).
