Adobe Creative Suite 2.0?

[h'biki]

Avid better than FCP?
AE is on its way out - Motion is just too powerful - that gap will be closed within 6 months

Hahahahaaaha! So powerful it only works in 8 bit colourspace. So powerful that you can't do anything in z-space. So powerful that you can't queue renders. Power isn't about being real time.Motion complements After Effects nicely, but if I had to choose one over the other, it'd be After Effects every time. I can't see this changing for a while yet - AE is the standard visual effects swiss army knife for a reason.

 

[wdlove]

ATTENTION:

I can confirm that Adobe Creative Suite will be launching at the same time as Tiger. CS 2 will take advantage of Core Image in Tiger and the announcement will be made next week.

Launch date: March 2005.

My professor works at Adobe and I got all this info by first asking her if CS2 would have Tiger features which she confirmed. I then proposed that CS2 would have to be launched after or at the same time as Tiger. She agreed. I then speculated to when CS2 would be launched: March 2005. She confirmed. So not only do we have a launch date for CS2, we also have a launch for OS X Tiger!

That is very interesting. We don't have all that long to find out if it's true. There has also been talk that the Power Mac might be upgraded in March. As for Tiger, we may know next week.

 

[~Shard~]

ATTENTION:

I can confirm that Adobe Creative Suite will be launching at the same time as Tiger. CS 2 will take advantage of Core Image in Tiger and the announcement will be made next week.

Launch date: March 2005.

My professor works at Adobe and I got all this info by first asking her if CS2 would have Tiger features which she confirmed. I then proposed that CS2 would have to be launched after or at the same time as Tiger. She agreed. I then speculated to when CS2 would be lauched: March 2005. She confirmed. So not only do we have a launch date for CS2, we also have a launch for OS X Tiger!

Wow, your professor must be pretty foolish to violate an NDA like that. Glad she's not my prof...

 

[alexf]

Now if only Adobe would resurrect LiveMotion for the CS 2.0 release and surprise us with a new version that could actually compete with Flash...

LiveMotion was a great application - much more intuitive than Flash - but just couldn't keep up with it and lacked a lot of its features.

Yes, I know, LiveMotion is probably gone for all eternity, but at least I can dream.

 

[Colonel Panik]

I have two points to add to this news:

As a license holder (i.e. I paid for it) of Illustrator/Photoshop/Acrobat/PageMaker, I don't really mind if they have a product activation, but they should bring the price down if they do that. They over-charge for the product, and this fuels the piracy. Almost everyone I know has a copy of Photoshop on their PC/Mac, and yet none of them are photographers or design/print professionals. I just throw my hands up in the air when they ask for help, telling them how long I trained on the application, and how they should downgrade to a program more suited to their needs - e.g. 'Photofaff - for people who want to faff around with photos'. I, however, need these apps to do my work.
It would be better for Adobe if they would move to a modular design, like the plug-ins, but for the core engine itself. Instead, we get more and more features which are turning Photoshop into a MS Office application. But I'm not a software engineer, so I'll stop there.

I really like the Adobe products, and the advances they make with each release, and I'm dependent on their capabilities for my work, however, I do wish that they would fix their bugs as a main priority, rather than introducing new features. It's great to talk about Acrobat 7, but I still have to use Acrobat 4 for some work, because of bugs in later releases, and the fact that generally printers are slower to move to new technology. I was pissed by the fact that Acrobat 5, for example, only had 'Classic' Distiller. WTF? And they never addressed that fact, instead releasing Acrobat 6 and wanting money for an upgrade when it should have been free. And we can guarantee that Acrobat 7 Distiller will have some killer bug in it which will prevent hoards of people adopting it straight away. With such a strong programming team, it shouldn't be that way.

 

[Lain.v2]

I remember this time last year Adobe was making a presentation at our school and the rep was making a big deal that with CS they abandoned version numbers... I asked "What happens when its time to upgrade CS to a new version?" - "We are not going to release such information." He replied in a wise ass way... So if u are cournered in front of a crowd with no real answer be a wise a.ss

 

[iGav]

Now if only Adobe would resurrect LiveMotion for the CS 2.0 release and surprise us with a new version that could actually compete with Flash...

LiveMotion was a great application - much more intuitive than Flash - but just couldn't keep up with it and lacked a lot of its features.

Yes, I know, LiveMotion is probably gone for all eternity, but at least I can dream.

I'm totally with ya' on that! LiveMotion was a quality app, even now I still have V2 installed on my PowerBook because I still find it handles bitmap animation waayyyyyy better than Flash.

They just needed to push it further, GoLive is suffering the same apathy from Adobe at the moment, which is a shame because I still think it's the better WYSIWYG app.

 

[Platform]

I'm totally with ya' on that! LiveMotion was a quality app, even now I still have V2 installed on my PowerBook because I still find it handles bitmap animation waayyyyyy better than Flash.

They just needed to push it further, GoLive is suffering the same apathy from Adobe at the moment, which is a shame because I still think it's the better WYSIWYG app.

So are you saying that flash is going down or

 

[Photorun]

I need to start using Illustrator but I'm only familiar with Photoshop CS and from what I can see of Illustrator CS it's pretty confusing... this is good news to me!!

Hob

And bad news to any of us power Illustrator users (like me) who've gotten used to the current set up. If they're changing key commands (like they did between V6 and V7 and a couple between V9 and V10) they best have a way of setting the options to use old key commands.

 

[Photorun]

So are you saying that flash is going down or

Uhhh, not sure how you picked that up from what he said, considering he didn't. LiveMotion did some things better than Flash, which some rabit zealot Flashhead wouldn't understand. Flash is not the be-all end-all in SWF, sadly now it's the only app left which is too bad. It's nice that there's Illustrator AND Freehand, ImageReady AND Fireworks, etc. etc., and I own (NOT steal) both for the simple reasons though both apps are good, some have features and do things better than the other... not to mention, competition is gooood!

 

[iGav]

So are you saying that flash is going down or

No not at all, as Photorun said LiveMotion was better at some things, and worse at others. It was bitmapped based, so it handled bitmap images way better than Flash did or indeed does. Flash whipped it with Vectors.

It's nice that there's Illustrator AND Freehand, ImageReady AND Fireworks, etc. etc., and I own both for the simple reasons though both apps are good, some have features and do things better than the other... not to mention, competition is gooood!

Exactly...

 

[rmac1979]

Wish List

First of all, what is the deal with Core-Imaging? Why does everyone think it would make a big difference (speed?).

Curious about others' wish lists for Photoshop. Here are mine:

The in-destructive scaling sounds like a great feature. Will make it easier to place multiple images in the same file for printing to large format printers.

I wonder if they could do the same thing for the Free Transform function. That is, if I'm trying to match the perspective in two images and get close the first try but later realize I need to tweak it a little more, if it could calculate the transform from the original and the resulting composite transform (just matrix multiplication, right).

Or better yet, make it so that I can select 4 points in the image I want to transform, and have those be the transform handles I drag around. Then all I'd have to do is drag those points onto the corresponding points of the other picture. It'd be so much simpler that way. Yes, I've used PTMac and all that stuff, but the beauty of Photoshop is that I can preview what I'm doing as I'm doing it. This is especially important when the pictures aren't carefully taken with a tripod.

An unsharp adjustment filter would be awesome! I like to leave my files as layers of the original images with as few permanent changes as possible, so I never save the unsharp settings with the flattened image I make to print.

In defense of Photoshop CS, it did add some nice features. One of my favorites is in the non-window display modes the image can be dragged anywhere at any time with the hand tool. Working with 48-bit images with multiple layers is also great, though it seems really slow (maybe it's just my computer). Better File Browser and Shadow Highlight are nice touches. Speaking of which, better make the latter an adjustment layer in the next version.

 

[DrGruv1]

Now if only Adobe would resurrect LiveMotion for the CS 2.0 release and surprise us with a new version that could actually compete with Flash...

LiveMotion was a great application - much more intuitive than Flash - but just couldn't keep up with it and lacked a lot of its features.

Yes, I know, LiveMotion is probably gone for all eternity, but at least I can dream.

I'm still using livemotion - great little app

 

[Blue Velvet]

...I don't really mind if they have a product activation, but they should bring the price down if they do that. They over-charge for the product, and this fuels the piracy.

What?

Adobe CS is just excellent, superb, amaaazing value if you make your living from design. I just can't believe how you can justify that statement... it borders on the insane.

Compare the cost of the entire CS with everything in it against a new shrink-wrapped version of QuarkXpress...

 

[alexf]

They just needed to push it further, GoLive is suffering the same apathy from Adobe at the moment, which is a shame because I still think it's the better WYSIWYG app.

Yes, apathy is the right word... The lack of attention and refinement that Adobe gave to the current GoLive release is shameful (it's actually the only instance where I have bought an upgrade and then had to go back to the previous version - in this case v.6).

If Adobe doesn't watch out, Macromedia may soon have a monopoly on the Web development side of graphics applications (OK, that's an exaggeration, but I'm trying to make a point...).

 

[guifa]

Not 2.0, 1.3

The SUPe Store at the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa) is advertising that CS 1.3 will be available later this month. Somehow I think that if 1.3 is released in January that 2.0 won't be released in March.

 

[stephenli]

CS is a nightmare to me: InDesign being a heavy resources eater, Photoshop always have filter not working without any reason, and mostly, ZERO compatibility(nearly) of Illustrator CS to old versions, and the devoluted Text Engine.....
well....lets pray for the next....

 

[Blue Velvet]

CS is a nightmare to me: InDesign being a heavy resources eater, Photoshop always have filter not working without any reason, and mostly, ZERO compatibility(nearly) of Illustrator CS to old versions, and the devoluted Text Engine.....
well....lets pray for the next....

1) Many filters will only work in 8 bit RGB mode.
2) Illustrator CS backward compatibilty by choosing File>Export, not 'Save As'

 

[gastroboy]

Adobe is not the Apple of DTP

By that I mean it does not need users to reverently defer to it.

(Come to that Apple should be shaken off its Olympian perch)

Adobe appears to me an ever clumsier bureaucracy in which different departments don't talk to each other but conspire to project an image of unity for the public's sake.

Particularly annoying are the UI committees that hash key commands and user methods in the increasingly clumsier (I'll excuse Photoshop here) hodge podge of apps.

They never manage to use clean mnemonic shortcuts or group them on the keyboard as Quark sensibly did, nor retain them in perpetuity. They've all been bitten by a rabid pallette and are doomed forever to roam the world of the undead surrounded by more pallettes than will fit on 3 monitors.

Illustrator particularly feels like those ballpoints where the tip has broken through the surrounding plastic. Since version 6 I spend all my time trying to get it to stay where I want it. At least with the biro you can throw them away, with Illustrator you can't even update it cleanly.

 

[decksnap]

While I agree that different key commands across different companies' programs is annoying as hell, I can't believe anyone would defend Quark's implementation. They are truly the odd duck- as most of their commands are just way off the typical conventions. And again, I think Macromedia gets the worst marks in this category also, as they feel the need to change key commands from one version of the program to the next.

 

[Blue Velvet]

By that I mean it does not need users to reverently defer to it.

(Come to that Apple should be shaken off its Olympian perch)

Adobe appears to me an ever clumsier bureaucracy in which different departments don't talk to each other but conspire to project an image of unity for the public's sake.

Particularly annoying are the UI committees that hash key commands and user methods in the increasingly clumsier (I'll excuse Photoshop here) hodge podge of apps.

They never manage to use clean mnemonic shortcuts or group them on the keyboard as Quark sensibly did, nor retain them in perpetuity. They've all been bitten by a rabid pallette and are doomed forever to roam the world of the undead surrounded by more pallettes than will fit on 3 monitors.

Illustrator particularly feels like those ballpoints where the tip has broken through the surrounding plastic. Since version 6 I spend all my time trying to get it to stay where I want it. At least with the biro you can throw them away, with Illustrator you can't even update it cleanly.

In my case, it's not about being reverent about PS. Just recognising that I couldn't get my work done without it -- it's seen off the competition and is now the de facto gold standard of image manipulation. It may be imperfect but it's still a pretty decent program... and it continues to improve.

Illustrator, I definitely agree on that. It's a mess... I thought earlier versions of Freehand were more intuitive to use.

My beef is with Acrobat -- it feels, looks and works like none of the others.

I think we will see increasing harmonisation between the Adobe design apps. If only to enable easy switching from Quark to InDesign... this, as I see it, is the entire thrust behind the CS. To leverage InDesign onto your machine and to drop Quark and Quark seem to be helping Adobe in every way they can...

InDesign is being practically given away for free in the CS, such is the value of the suite...

 

[decksnap]

And bad news to any of us power Illustrator users (like me) who've gotten used to the current set up. If they're changing key commands (like they did between V6 and V7 and a couple between V9 and V10) they best have a way of setting the options to use old key commands.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. Illustrator is one of the few programs that I feel is 'complete', and does everything I ask it to do. I don't want them changing the pallettes or tool configuration, and I don't want them changing the key commands. I hated the merging of Photoshop style raster features into Illustrator or the ability to slice web graphics and such- it seems every app is overlapping more and more with their buddies in the suite and trying to do what eachother already does- and I don't think it's necessary. It just bloats everything up.

 

[gastroboy]

My beef is with Acrobat -- it feels, looks and works like none of the others.

My favorite in Acrobat is Find was CMD N.

Well why not as the Adobe rep explained to me, it was available and not being used for anything else.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Illustrator is one of the few programs that I feel is 'complete', and does everything I ask it to do.

I very much would like to see a hugely improved graphing tool.

I have an academic reference book to do later this year with 140+ graphs of different flavours in spot colours all from Excel worksheets... just want to get a bit of interest into them painlessly.

 

[iGav]

I have an academic reference book to do later this year with 140+ graphs of different flavours in spot colours all from Excel worksheets... just want to get a bit of interest into them painlessly.

Isn't it work placement time soon.... heheheh