These tweaks reveal that Premiere is trying to appeal to the budding videographer.
Adobe InDesign CS4
The flagship page layout program for professional designers, InDesign CS4 also benefits from a facelift: it's now much easier to navigate around the screen.
Palettes are more streamlined (they even ghost out when you move them around) so that options are just one or two clicks away. For example, on the new Preflight dialog box, you can quickly scan through any colour or font treatment issues. Preferences for the dialog box are not buried in a general window but can be found right on the dialog box itself.
There's also a new conditional text option that works remarkably similarly to the layers in Photoshop: you can create one document for web and print and then hide or show individual elements with just a radio click.
Smart guides that help you line up objects, task-based workspace views, an amazing 'rotate spread' option and SWF support, including export to Flash, are all key enhancements.
Performance in InDesign seemed about 20 per cent faster than the CS3 applications during complex chores such as re-paginating a long document.
Other big applications
With all the fanfare over Photoshop and how it can now access a girth of RAM on 64-bit machines, the other apps in the Master Collection suite play a 'me too' role. However, they also run in 64-bit mode, use Pixel Bender to access your GPU and feature a new streamlined interface.
Dreamweaver CS4 now provides a powerful Live View feature. This is absolutely amazing for coders who work in JavaScript and other languages because it approximates browser compatibility. In our tests, Live View worked flawlessly when emulating Internet Explorer and only had marginal positioning errors when used to emulate Firefox.
New Photoshop Smart Objects save a tremendous amount of time in workflow production. You can drag-and-drop them directly into Dreamweaver, encouraging dualmonitor use like never before.
Dreamweaver also adds Adobe AIR support for creating rich web apps. Think of it as the PDF for the web: applications can be fully developed for use in a browser in the same way that a rich document can be formatted as a PDF, without concern over program compatibility.
Adobe Illustrator CS4 finally adds multi-artboard support, which means that it has inched a bit closer to being a page layout tool. You can now view multiple pages of a document in all shapes and sizes. Illustrator also adds a new blob brush for creating artistic-looking objects. Its performance on a 64-bit computer with 4GB of RAM was phenomenal.
Long-time Illustrator fans will know that there is sometimes a pause or stutter when rotating, resizing or even just moving very complex objects around the screen. Even when using a sample Japanese menu with hundreds of lines of text and graphics, adjustments in Illustrator CS4 were instantaneous.
Flash CS4 – a tool for creating web animations – benefits the most from the new Adobe CS4 interface shift. There is now far less clutter found on the screen, and you can step animations by adjusting objects incrementally rather than using keyframe animation (where you make adjustments to each frame). Flash also supports more 3D animation-editing tools, inverse kinematics and Adobe AIR support.
After Effects, Fireworks, Contribute and Soundbooth have all been updated with a new user interface design and features that unify CS4, making each application more powerful. Overall, CS4 is a major milestone because it's the first legitimate, powerful graphics suite to run in 64-bit mode. It points to a future where memory addressing, graphics utilisation, fluid design and technically superior features will rule the desktop.
As a final caveat: we should remember that the power of the desktop may yet be overshadowed by the extreme flexibility of web apps. And when that happens, we'll get to start all over again on the continuum towards cloud computing and online data warehousing.
First published in PC Plus 274
