Adobe CS4 - Shortcut to Brilliant
What’s up, guys and gals? This here is the first post by Dan Hauk. I will try to hit up some awesome stuff as often as I can throughout the work day. There’s not really anything in particular I’ll be focusing on, but a niche may develop later on. We’ll see.
It’s all over every blog, tech and non-tech alike. Adobe Creative Suite 4. After over a year, Adobe is updating all their wonderful graphics programs everyone loves to pirate… before purchasing of course. Gotta’ save up some dough for the hefty price tag on these things: $1,399 for Design Standard and $2,499 Master Collection.
Read on for a quick overview of new features and updates.
From what I’ve read there aren’t a whole lot of new updates, mostly small tweaks and interface changes. But the big updates that are there are pretty good. First of all, it can finally run in 64-bit mode. This can improve performance by 8-12 percent, and up to 10x improvement when working with bigger files. Quite a relief for all the graphic designers working with tight deadlines.
The second big improvement is the new Pixel Bender. Adobe programs can now access your graphics card directly, speeding up any graphics rendering needed. A multiple Artboard feature lets you keep track of more than one project at a time. All the programs, except Premiere Pro, get an “interfacelife” (like that?). InDesign is apparently easier to navigate, Photoshop gets tabbed document viewing, and Dreamweaver has linked documents grouped together.
This update sounds pretty sweet. It will certainly make things much easier and streamlined during the whole design process, whether you’re using one program or three. Cnet got a chance to play around with the beta code, with a video to boot.
If you’re interested in Photoshop’s little tweaks, check out John Nack’s blog post about it. He’s a production manager at Adobe, so we can trust him. Overall I think these updates are a good direction, but I’m not sure they’re enough to justify me paying over $1k just yet.
EDIT: Check out this first look of Illustrator CS4 over at GoMediaZine. ♥ Tabs and gradient color to transparent ♥
