Software : ABOBE CS4 COLLECTIONS

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Adobe Fireworks CS4 review



Adobe Fireworks CS3 was a revelation.

In one fell swoop, Adobe transformed Fireworks from a Photoshop wannabe to a prototyping tool for web designers, offering a raft of new workflow features.

The most obvious change to Fireworks CS4 is the interface, which showcases the best and worst of interface design. Adobe's non-standard window widgets make the application look shoddy and cheap and slows things down.

The Application bar is a waste of space and confusingly duplicates tools from the toolbar, but uses different icons. However, the streamlined palettes work nicely, and the Application Window model works better with Fireworks than Photoshop – just as well since palettes overlap when you turn it off.

Overall, Fireworks CS4 feels less robust than its predecessor.

Disappointing updates

Most other changes appear centred around pinching things from other Adobe applications and updating export functionality. Of the former, Illustrator-like smart guides assist with positioning elements, and type handling is improved a little, although Photoshop-like fields for font selection via typing would be nice.

Getting PSD files into Fireworks is still hit-and-miss, but the new PDF export feature is impressive, enabling you to create an offline site prototype that a client can then comment on using the likes of Acrobat.

We didn't find the new CSS export feature nearly as solid, however, and our dreams of one-touch export of standards-based websites were left in tatters.

As a new purchase, Fireworks CS4 has much to recommend it, but CS3 users should wait for Fireworks CS5.

Specifications

MPN     65011663

Price at Launch    276

Description    Vector and Bitmap Graphics editor

Features    - Adobe AIR authoring / PDF export / CSS export / Customizable and reusable assets / Styles panel upgrades / Improved performance / Workspace improvements / New user interface / Adobe Kuler integration / Enhanced type handling / Adobe ConnectNow integration

Platform    MacOS/Windows

Distribution Media    DVD ROM

Licence Type    Complete Package

Recommended Peripherals - 512MB of RAM (1GB recommended) / 1GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on flash-based storage devices) / 1,024x768 display (1,280x800 recommended) with 16-bit video card / DVD-ROM drive

Recommended Software - Mac OS X v10.4.11–10.5.4 / Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended) or Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (certified for 32-bit Windows XP and Windows Vista)

Upgrade Price    140

Year    2008

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Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro CS4 review

Acrobat Pro is included with CS4 Design Standard, Design Premium and Web Premium.

Its job is to create, edit and share PDFs originating from the other CS4 apps or from scratch. PDF is obviously becoming an increasingly flexible format.

Differing from its CS4 companions, Acrobat keeps its own user interface. A new Multimedia menu houses the Flash Tool, which lets you add Flash files to any PDF; Flash playback is built into both Acrobat 9 Pro and the free Acrobat 9 Reader. You can also import other multimedia files, such as MOV video, which are automatically converted.

Collaborate

A PDF can bring different kinds of document into one, but if you just want to deliver separate documents tidily, the new PDF Portfolio feature can help.

Your recipient will access the files from a self-running Flash-based browser, for which various templates are supplied. For example, Revolve looks a bit like Apple's Cover Flow. The results look more professional than emailing a zip file.

A new Collaborate menu goes further than the Share My Screen option elsewhere in CS4, using Adobe's www.acrobat.com to let you upload files for other users, allowing you to access a file at the same time as a remote colleague, turning pages and zooming to show each other items.

If you use Acrobat to check and tweak InDesign output on the way to press, there are several useful enhancements in this version. Overprint Preview is now smarter and integrated into Output Preview, which also gains an Object Inspector that tells you all about any page item, including the effective resolution of an image.

Acrobat also has an Extended edition aimed at business and technical users and, like the cut-down Standard edition, is only available for Windows. For those who need Pro, version 9 is a significant upgrade.


Speecifications

MPN     22020762

Price at Launch    470

Description    PDF Creation Software

Features    Create and reliably share PDF documents / Easily convert files to PDF / Scan to PDF with OCR / Convert e-mail to PDF / Capture web pages as PDF / Enable others to access design data / Easily share video in PDF / Create PDF maps / Work with Acrobat.com

Platform    MacOS/Windows

Distribution Media    DVD ROM

Licence Type    Complete Package

Recommended Peripherals    G5 or Intel, 256MB RAM (512MB recommended), 1.42GB disk space, 1024x768 display
Recommended Software    Mac OS X v10.4.11 / Microsoft® Windows® XP Home, Professional, or Tablet PC Edition with Service Pack 2 or 3 (32-bit and 64-bit); Windows Server® 2003 (with Service Pack 2 for 64-bit); or Windows Vista® Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with or without Service Pack 1 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Software Version    9

Upgrade Price    182

Year    2008

[ganeshbala]

Adobe Illustrator CS4 review

This upgrade offers little comfort to vector virgins, but a few new tricks for old-timers.

The most obvious is support for multiple artboards. Although this can be used for multipage documents, it's better for including, say, all the elements of a corporate identity in one file.

Appearance panel

Artboards may be of different sizes, and can be nested to lay out multiple items on a large sheet. When exporting to PDF, you can create a single file or one for each artboard. This is all good, but Macromedia FreeHand offered multiple pages years ago, before Adobe killed it off.

Just as significant is the ability to adjust the transparency of colour stops within a gradient fill. This avoids the need for fiddly workarounds that previously hampered creative effects. The very useful new Blob brush draws a filled vector shape rather than a stroke.

The Appearance panel links more attributes directly to panels where you can edit them, and you can apply more than one Graphic Style to each object for complex styling. You can also preview colour separations and overprinting, but honestly this was overdue.

Awkward zoom

There's no Rotate View, though, and when you zoom in to a graphic (the old-fashioned way), Illustrator – unlike InDesign – ignores the current selection, which may go out of view altogether.

We didn't see any significant bugs in this version, but performance overall was disappointing, with complex artwork still previewing slowly on a 3GHz Intel iMac.

Illustrator is a great drawing program, and arguably the professional choice, but we can't get excited about this upgrade. Still, serious users will want it for multiple artboards and gradient transparency.

Specifications

Price at Launch     563

Description    Desktop Publishing Suite

Features    Multiple artboards / Transparency in gradients / In-panel appearance editing / Blob Brush tool / Refined graphic styles / Gradients exposed / Clipping masks demystified / Integration and delivery / Separations Preview

Min Processor Speed (GHz)    2

Platform    MacOS/Windows

Distribution Media    DVD ROM

Licence Type    Complete Package

Recommended Peripherals    512MB of RAM (1GB recommended) / 1GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on flash-based storage devices) / 1,024x768 display (1,280x800 recommended) with 16-bit video card / DVD-ROM drive

Recommended Software    Mac OS X v10.4.11–10.5.4 / Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended) or Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (certified for 32-bit Windows XP and Windows Vista)

Upgrade Price    181

Year    2008

[ganeshbala]

Adobe InDesign CS4 review

Smart Guides

Illustrator's Smart Guides have been much coveted by InDesign users, and are finally here. Green guides appear when the item you're dragging matches the position, rotation or spacing of others.

This is a lovely quick way of imposing some order. Smart Guides also appear when you're using the preview cursor, or 'place gun', introduced in CS3, making it easy to size, position and rotate a new picture to match others.

Clicking with C+S' pressed also arranges multiple placed images into a grid. This is very well done, except for one glaring fault: you can't ensure the grid spaces are the right shape for the images, even if they all match.

Rotate your artwork

Rotate View lets you temporarily turn your artwork in 90 degree increments. This is incredibly useful for editing rotated elements, whether landscape tables in books or side panels on packaging.

There are a few text handling additions. Nested styles, which let you automatically vary text formatting within a paragraph, can now apply to a number of lines as well as a number of words. Conditional Text lets you set alternative tagged versions of words or phrases anywhere in text and choose which version is output, which looks handy for things like varying prices in a catalogue.

Live Preflight is a simple but revolutionary new feature. Previously, File > Preflight would check your document against a list of potential print cock-ups, such as low-res images or wrong colour spaces. Now, these checks happen as you work, with a green blob at the foot of the window changing to red if anything's amiss. It couldn't be more convenient.

Export to Flash

Pages can now be exported to Flash, supported by the ability to add buttons, links and page transitions. It's no substitute for an interactive design application, but useful if you're producing documents that you also want to deliver online. Both existing SWF and new XFL formats are offered.

Some items on our wish list have been ticked off. The origin for rulers and grids now correctly defaults to the middle of a double-page spread without screwing up on single pages. When you right-click a placed item to edit it, you can choose which application it opens in.

The Pathfinder panel gains buttons to open, close and reverse paths. And you can output data-merged documents as PDFs rather than InDesign files.

Fixed expression

Other omissions remain, such as a History panel for the app's unlimited undo, better control over grids and guides, and Preferences changes that apply without clicking OK.

Despite a few excellent additions, this feels like a tidy-up release. If you need Flash export, that'll be reason to upgrade, though there's scope for a lot more functionality.


Specifications

MPN     65024380

Min Processor Speed (GHz)    1.5

OS Requirements    Apple OS X 10.4.10 or later, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows XP SP 2

Platform    MacOS/Windows

Processor Type Required    Intel, Power Mac G5

RAM Recommended (MB)    1024

Ram Required (MB)    512

Recommended Hard Disk Space (GB)    1.8

Graphics Requirements    1024x768 resolution

Internet Connection    Broadband

Licence Type    Complete Package

Required Peripherals    DVD-ROM Drive

Required Software    Quicktime 7

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Image Editing : Adobe Captivate 2 : Software Review

As with so many of Adobe's more recent programs, the word that best sums up the Captivate 2 interface is 'stylish'.

Suiting itself to both basic presentations and more interactive projects, the main viewing window for the design stage has three separate tabs: for Storyboard, Edit and Branching.

This makes it easy to switch between getting a overview of your project, editing individual slides, and sorting out interactivity elements. The last of these is particularly useful, because interactivity often tends to get quite tricky alarmingly early on in the design process.

Seamless integration with the Macromedia Flash platform, both at the input and output stage, make Captivate projects ideally suited to online distribution, and across networks or via disc.

It's also easy to pick up and run with, even for beginners, with its main strengths lying in presentation design rather than massively complex multimedia projects.

Specifications

Price at Launch     386

Price at Launch (EURO)    600

OS Requirements    Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP

Platform    Microsoft Windows

Processor Type Required    Pentium III

RAM Recommended (MB)    512

Ram Required (MB)    256

Required Hard Disk Space (MB)    100

Additional Requirements    Macromedia Flash Player 6 through Adobe Flash Player 9

Graphics Requirements    800x600 resolution

Required Peripherals    CD-ROM Drive

[dhilipkumar]

First Look: Photoshop CS4 with GPU acceleration


Review – Adobe is set to release the next generation of its professional image editing software and will release first details about the software today. TG Daily had the opportunity to play with the beta version of CS4, code-named Stonehenge, for several days and we have to admit that we are deeply impressed. It is the first commercial software we are aware of that leverages GPU acceleration, which dramatically improves the performance of certain components of the application. Features such as Camera Raw support and image blending were improved, 64-bit and 3D support added and components such as Bridge thoroughly reworked. Read our impressions of the CS4 beta for Windows here.


Introduction

I have been using Photoshop since version 2.0 and CS4, the 11th generation of the image editing software, will be the sixth version I am reviewing. With every new version, there is a clear anticipation of finding new features and determining the value for users. Over the past 15 years, Photoshop's focus has changed and continues to depart from print-focused features (they are still there) to cater to the needs of an increasingly digital world, but it remained the application of choice for anyone who depends on image editing as a professional or enthusiast user.

Any such application faces an evolutionary challenge – what do you improve, add or change to create a reason for customers to upgrade? There were several releases of Photoshop that offered too little new value to justify the price for upgrade and Adobe occasionally had a tough time adjusting the software to emerging needs of graphic designers.

A few months ago, we had a tiny clash with Adobe when we reported that the software would be called CS4, that it would include GPGPU acceleration and that it would be announced in early October. Adobe reacted upset, which was surprising to us since the information was based on a press demonstration provided by the company, and I wasn't particularly happy either that the company accused us of negligent reporting. That clash has been resolved and today we know that we were right on target on all three claims. Most importantly, the key feature we were excited about – GPGPU acceleration – in fact made it into the final. But let's look at the user interface first.


Look & feel: A thorough overhaul

Adding new features always brings the challenge of re-organizing and updating the interface of the application to avoid increased complexity and avoid an application with overloaded menus. The GUI of Photoshop CS4 won't win any beauty contests with its very simplistic and grey-themed layout that stands out from your average Windows Vista application. But it is much more lightweight than CS3 and improved in key areas. For example, multiple image files are now organized in tabs in the main window – much like you are using tabs in a web browser. It takes some time getting used to, but switching between full-size windows simply via tabs is a very effective addition and I don't want to miss it anymore, even if Adobe could have gone all the way and included tab grouping for users who may open dozens of images at the same time.


Workspaces have been expanded with a few new options (you can create your own workspace as well) and include a "What's new" option that makes it easy to find the new features you may not be familiar with. If you have used a recent version of Photoshop, you will feel right at home in a matter of a few hours, even without studying the help file. That may seem a lot, but let's not forget that Photoshop is an extremely complicated software.


GP GPU acceleration only applies to certain components of CS4, but I noticed that CS4 loads about 20% faster on my Gateway GT5628 (Core 2 Quad Q6600, 3 GB memory, 1 TB HDD, Nvidia GeForce 8500GT) than CS3, which indicates that the program code has been overhauled. Some components, such as image blending, also worked noticeably faster.