Adobe has announced the CS4 line of products, and again I feel somewhat slighted. You see, I am the Chief Creative Officer at my company, and I do it all. From web design to video editing, my hands are in everything. I use, regularly, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere, After Effects, OnLocation, Encore and Illustrator. I’d also like to get my hands on Fireworks.
That’s where the problems begin.
They offer four CS4 bundles, and none of them suit my specific needs/wants. All of them offer great products, and one offers everything and more (far more than I would ever use), and that’s CS4 Master Collection.
I currently own Adobe CS3 Production Premium, and Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.
So, I’m at a loss when it comes to upgrading. I was thinking of upgrading Dreamweaver, buying Fireworks, and upgrading to Production Premium CS4.
But when doing a comparison of Adobe Creative Suite 4 editions, you notice something funny at the bottom of the list: Adobe Version Cue® CS4 is a part of every collection except for CS4 Production Premium. Why not, Adobe? It could be fun to give it a shot, and it’s included with every other bundle. Not to mention the fact that there is no price tag associated with it. Granted, I would be getting Adobe Dynamic Link with Production Premium, and that’s a really great thing. But still, what’s up with leaving that one program out of only one bundle?
Another thing that happened, as I was adding things to my cart on Adobe’s website, to see if upgrading to Master Collection was worth doing. I added the upgrade of Dreamweaver, and then when I went to add Fireworks, it wouldn’t even let me select that I didn’t want an upgrade. I don’t currently have any previous version of Fireworks, so getting the upgrade wouldn’t work, as the Fireworks upgrade details require me to have Adobe Fireworks CS3, Macromedia® Fireworks 8, or MX 2004, of which I have none.
But there is some good in all of this.
There’s a site that is pretty new (only a few weeks old), which gained the attention of Adobe within 24 hours of its’ launch. That website is Dear Adobe. There, you can agree with, disagree with and post your own gripes about all of Adobe’s products. You can also mark certain gripes as inaccurate. Adobe got in touch with the site’s owner, and quickly began working with him to devise a way for him to package the gripes in a way that Adobe can use them.
So there is hope that the most popular of the gripes will be addressed in the future, and we have a voice that we can use to help Adobe to better meet our needs. Today, they’ve responded to the top 25 After Effects gripes!
CS4 is really impressive, though.
I am thoroughly impressed with the CS4 line, so far, and can’t wait to get my hands on the software. I’m really hoping that the improvements to the software really do help with performance. I’m also looking forward to the new CSS features in Dreamweaver.
One thing that I would love to see in Dreamweaver’s code view in the future is something that Textmate has (I’ve only seen it second hand, I’m on a PC). The ability to highlight code in columns and rows, without highlighting everything in each row. Then, when typing, it types the same thing in every line that was highlighted. That would save a lot more time when working with code.
Either way, though, the code finder stuff in Dreamweaver CS4 is going to be very fun to use.
I’m looking forward to it.