Part one in a series of articles about Adobe CS4
Earlier this week I attended an Adobe CS4 tour, to check out the cool features of this new release. After picking my jaw off the ground for the fiftieth time, I decided that I really must upgrade, as it’s a fantastic release.
So, the new stuff. Bearing in mind I’m a web developer by trade, I’m only going to be going into those products that affect (and therefore excite) me personally. These are Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks.
Photoshop CS4
There’s three things that excite me about Photoshop: the new smooth zoom which looks simply brilliant, the on-image adjustments, and the canvas rotation.
- Smooth zoom — It may be little more than eye candy, but there’s something about it that draws me in (pun not intended). I’ve always found the zoom in CS2 to be a lot to be desired, and finally it’s been improved and looks good in non-standard zoom levels. I also really like the new grid that is shown at deep zoom levels
- On-image adjustments — is probably the feature I’ll make the most use out of. I’ve always been a tad scared by the graphs in some of the adjustments, and now it can all be done on-screen. I’ve yet to actually play with this feature, but going by the demo it looks extremely cool and very easy to make changes
Dreamweaver CS4
What can I say, this is the update that excites me the most. In the past, Dreamweaver has always been a so-so application for me, with my preferred editor being Komodo Edit. However, this new update contains a ton of updates that I really am very excited about: stuff that Komodo can’t do. I think the only thing holding me back from going completely to Dreamweaver is Komodo’s superior auto-complete.
So, what are these cool new features I’m so excited over?
- Live design view — Webkit (the engine behind Safari and Google Chrome) is now used to show the design view, which means that things such as javascript now appear and the view is standards compliant. Personally I might not find much use behind it because I mostly write webpages in php, but still, it’s nice to have
- Live code view — How was this never thought of before? How did we ever accept not being able to view the changes to HTML that javascript makes? Amazing stuff
- Smart Objects — This one made me wow. If you’re importing a graphic into Dreamweaver, you now no longer have to go through the hassle of loading up Photoshop, exporting for web, going back into Dreamweaver, importing the graphic… you can now do it all inside Dreamweaver. What also makes it great is it also exports it to the size you want: if you only need a small thumbnail, then a small thumbnail file you will get
- Subversion integration — Every web developer knows that we should be using versioning control, but it just never happens. The applications are just too complicated, and it’s such a pain having to check in and out all the time. This wasn’t demo’d on the day, but I’m still very excited by this feature and I really do hope it works intuitively. Maybe this is the kick I need to actually start using subversion
Next time
In the next article I’ll be taking a look at some more of the CS4 suite, including Illustrator, Flash, and maybe even Fireworks.