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Adobe officially announces CS4
Earlier this month, Adobe announced that they would be holding a streaming webcast to officially introduce Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) to the public. Adobe calls CS4 its "biggest software release to date," but then, they claim that with every version (I think CS3 was its "largest release ever" or something to that effect).Having had the opportunity to play around with some of the CS4 betas, I will say that the jump in magnitude from CS3 to CS4 is much more substantial than what we saw with CS2 to CS3. Performance is snappier and it is easier to complete tasks, but really, what makes CS4 a worthy upgrade is that the product line is much more integrated. The Macromedia acquisition came mid-release cycle, and while product integration wasn't a complete hack job -- they did a really good job with Flash -- Dreamweaver, Fireworks and suite integration with Flash was far from perfect.
Individual applications have all received a bevy of new features and innovations. Searching throughout a project or document for meta-data has been greatly enhanced, for instance. Adobe AIR has also been integrated across applications, meaning plugin developers can potentially take advantage of the AIR platform for easy in-program access to outside data (a la Adobe's Kuler app and its integration with Photoshop and Illustrator).
CS4 will be available in 64-bit builds for Windows users (Mac users have to wait until CS5 to get 64-bit Photoshop love), but both platform take advantage of GPU acceleration.
Like its predecessors, the 13 CS4 point releases can be purchased individually, or in one of six bundled suites: Design Standard CS4, Design Premium CS4, Web Standard CS4, Web Premium CS4, Production Premium CS4 and the Master Collection, which at $2499 US, pretty much gets you everything Adobe offers.
Unfortunately, the insanely complicated upgrade structure is still around too. Pricing starts at $599 for the Premium suite upgrades, but price depends on components owned, time purchased, etc., so check with your Adobe dealer or retailer for exact information.
Adobe stuff doesn't come cheap, but for those of us who rely on its products to do our creative work, the updates and new features in CS4 look to worth the price. CS4 will ship in October for Windows and OS X.
Comments
3
Subscribe to comments3tearSep 23rd 2008 4:08PM
I can haz bloat?
meOct 2nd 2008 10:27AM
Isn't OS X 64-bit? Why wouldn't they make the software for it 64-bit in the first place?...
Christina WarrenSep 24th 2008 8:26AM
OS X Leopard IS 64-bit (and actually, most of Tiger is too), but the Carbon API that Photoshop was written in is only 32-bit, and the 64-bit version was scrapped. So to do a fully 64-bit program, developers need to use the Cocoa API. The problem is, it takes a lot of time to rewrite a very, very large codebase like Photoshop into Cocoa, while still maintaining integrity with the Windows equivalent for stuff like shortcuts (so that the same key combinations work in both programs), menu locations, etc. Adobe won't be able to do this until CS5, so Photoshop CS4 is 32-bit in OS X.