cs4, your thoughts?

[Jared]

I am still trying to be impressed by the new adobe releases, am I the only one who is a little underwhelmed?

[Sean]

I feel pretty meh about everything other than Flash.
The new animation model and bones may inspire me
to take up an animation project.

Fireworks export to Air may prove useful for software prototyping.
As awesome as AS3 is, making simple click-through demos
is much more difficult than it was in AS2.
Fireworks may become my tool of choice for simple demos.

And on a geeky note, I'm curious and hopeful
about Photoshops OpenGL rendering engine.
It could make it feel much more snappy.
Wait and see on that one.

[Sean]

Oh looking back at that, I think my entire existence is geeky.

[Jared]

Ok the bones in Flash is pretty awesome. I agree with you Sean on how small tasks in flash are a little more tedious now that AS is more OOP focused, so Fireworks to air for quick demos would be a nice time saver. Photoshop 3d painting look fun too. I'll upgrade for sure, but still Adobe could have been nice and just gave us a really great update to cs3.

Three cheers for living a geeky existence.

[Mike Torosian]

I don't know too much about it, I saw some screenshots of new Illustrator features, that was about it.

Personally I feel like Adobe is taking advantage of their position and pushing out products too fast, I'm sure many would disagree, it's obvious there is a demand for it if they keep doing it, for now though I have no intentions on upgrading right away. Especially if there isn't enough features to justify the $$$

[Jared]

Print has a review of the whole cs4 suite and they seem to give it a thumbs up.

http://www.printmag.com/design_articles/AdobeCreativeSuiteReview4/t...

[Jeff Chandler]

AI's multiple artboards are a cool idea, but practically how it plays out for vendors should be interesting. Could be a huge mess with every "page" being a different size.
What do you guys think? Is it that useful to have a bunch of different parts in one file?

[Jeff Barkema]

I think Adobe needs to take a cue from Apple and look at what they are doing before their next OS release. They are taking longer between releases and focusing on stability and speed. I know this may be slightly off topic, but I would rather wait a bit longer for something that is fast and reliable vs. work with something that was chucked together with features I don't need/want. (I'm still waiting to use that birds feet pattern) The apps are just getting ridiculously huge.

I have used CS4 just briefly and so far so good, will be interesting to see how it works in the long run.

[Jorge Castillo]

All I can say is, "I just got CS3!", and coming out with a new Suite is not fair to the consumer (especially us freelancers). I usually tend to wait to upgrade, I like to give Adobe some time so they can work out any "kinks" within the suite.

However, we recently bought CS4 on one of the machines at work... and besides layout of palettes, I really didn't see anything that made me say "Wow, I want this." On a similar note though: for those of you who know me, know, that I don't like Dreamweaver (I still use it though), but they seem to be removing some functions within Dreamweaver CS4 making the average designer learn more html, not that its a bad thing, I'm no programmer but I can hold my own ;).

And, they seem to have elaborated more on using 3D within photoshop.

[Jared]

Down with bulky and bloated dreamweaver!!!(even though I still use it sometimes at work)
Long live TextMate, the best damn text editing program out there. Any sort of coding is much more enjoyable in Text Mate. Plus there is a lot of cool bundles out there for it, which add some nice shortcuts, but you definitely need to know how to code to use it. I highly recommend it if you haven't checked it out.

[Sean]

I havn't tried TextMate, Ill cehck it out. I have a crush on Panic's Coda. I recommend web coders take a look at that.

[Jared]

coda is awesome too, i think you showed that to me back at state once, but I just cant get away from textmate. I've heard really good things about CssEdit for css work.

[Layne Lev]

CSSEdit is awesome. Once you use it, you'll hate ever not using it. They're also working on a web editor in the same vein as Coda (which I also use a lot) called Espresso. I've played with an alpha version, but it's still rough at this point. But you should definitely check out CSSEdit.