Home
Subscribe
KSDD.com
Adobe CS4: Six Things to Keep In Mind
Just a few observations to tide you over until shipping time
Such is the nature of the upgrade cycle: just as creative types were getting used to the CS3 line, Adobe goes and announces CS4. And while you've likely seen myriad press releases and first looks and other introductory stuff by now, here are a few "below the fold" observations based on the the experiences I've had with the CS4 betas over the last several weeks.
1) The new design interface is profoundly good, especially on the Mac.
If you've used any of the CS3 products, you've probably noticed by now that Adobe has been trending towards two distinct interfaces. There's the one for the production products like After Effects and Premiere (fig. 1): darker, task-oriented, steeped in the tradition of the video production world. Then there's the design interface found in Photoshop and Flash (for example), which has been more of an iterative process. Sure, things like tabbed panels and docks have crept in over the years (fig. 2), but there hasn't really been a fundamental shift in how these products have looked and behaved. And while the CS4 design interface may not qualify as a true fundamental shift, it is clearly a reflection of today's needs, especially on the Mac.
Figure 1: The Premiere interface.
Figure 2: Photoshop CS3's tabbed and docked panels.
For the moment, let's ignore the elephant in the room by talking about how flexible the newest tabbed/docked interface is. Adobe has built upon the awesomeness of the docked panels introduced in CS3 by extending that concept to documents themselves (fig. 3). You can rearrange these documents in myriad ways -- from the straight-up tabbed layout to splitting your workspace into multiple viewports to dragging documents into their own window, you definitely have a lot of options (fig. 4). Combine this with the configurable workspace menu (present in many CS3 products but streamlined for CS4), and you can work pretty much however you like across the CS4 design programs.
Figure 3: Photoshop CS4's interface, featuring a tabbed document area (here, arranged into four quadrants).
Figure 4: Here's a much different look at working with the same documents in Photoshop CS4, with floating images and panels instead of a single docked window area.
As for the aforementioned pachyderm in the immediate area, let us speak of the Application Frame and Application Bar (AF/AB) and what it means to Mac users. (Windows users, as you were: you've had single window interfaces since the dawn of Windows, so this silly argument largely doesn't apply to you.) Now, Mac purists have had their virtual shorts in a bunch ever since seeing the Fireworks CS4 Beta interface this past Spring (fig. 5), working themselves into a veritable frenzy because the single-window mode, which is being adopted by the majority of the CS4 design products (save Dreamweaver, to its great detriment), is, in their estimation, decidedly un-Mac-like.
Figure 5: Fireworks CS4's new interface, in all its single window glory.
In fact, to take the argument a step further, the AF/AB combo makes the CS4 design interface most definitely Windows-like, a statement which, to some, deserves a hearty "oh, snap!" You've got this huge bar running across the width of the window, taking up space, with all your documents and palettes crammed together in this single, monolithic area. And to add to the distastefulness, Adobe seems to be using custom button widgets. The horror! It's blasphemy, they say. And while it may be a futile effort to argue over something as subjective as an interface, I respectfully say bollocks to all that. Here are three reasons why:
A) First and foremost, and this can't be too emphatically said, YOU CAN TURN IT OFF. You don't have to use it. So don't. Adobe doesn't seem to be in the business of ignoring a common customer issue, so if enough people object, this will remain a preference on the Mac for many versions hence. Just turn it off and go back to work. Or, if the philosophical divide is too great for you to even accept, you can always vote with your wallet and not upgrade at all.
B) In this age of 24"+ monitors quickly becoming standard in creative environments, many users have a whole lot of screen real estate, and not all of it needs to be dedicated to a single program. It is indeed quite nice to have a single window containing the entire application, rather than stray palettes strewn about, flung to all corners of the screen (or worse, stuck in the middle of it). Tabbed interfaces work for Web browsers, they work for text editors, they even work for other production products, which I'll touch on in my next point. I only wish Dreamweaver had adopted AF/AB, since it was arguably the program that could have benefited most from a single window interface, but that's an issue for the full Dreamweaver review.
C) Have you seen some of Apple's very own Pro Apps lately? Single window environment. You pretty much have to have it as at least an option in order to handle the explosion of palettes any professional level application has these days. Plus, let's keep in mind that Adobe has been moving in this direction anyway; the last couple versions of the production apps (e.g., After Effects and Premiere) have had these monolithic windows, and we've all managed to soldier on.
The bottom line here is that the interface enhancements may be debatable as to whether or not they are, indeed, enhancements, but I, for one, think the new interface is spot-on. And all I can say to the skeptical Mac user is to give it a real chance before you choose to disable the Application Frame and/or the Application Bar -- those little buggers just may grow on you.
2) After Effects no longer supports PowerPC processors.
I didn't see much written or complained about when this information became available, but as a public service, I feel it necessary to remind everyone that if you have a PowerPC-based Mac, such as a PowerMac G5, you won't be able to run After Effects CS4. As an Intel Mac user, I don't have particularly strong thoughts on this matter, but I am sensitive to the feelings of those who believe that this kind of stinks. However, seeing as Premiere and Soundbooth were Intel-only for CS3, it really shouldn't come as a huge shock that the first formerly Universal program is now an Intel-only one. Disappointment, sure, but not a shock. What it comes down to is balancing new features against maintaining a codebase for what is in effect a dead architecture, so while the dropping of PowerPC support may not be a welcome revelation for some, it certainly is an understandable one.
3) What 64-bit Photoshop is good for.
On the flip side, there was a fair amount of hullabaloo with the announcement that the next version of Photoshop (which we now know is CS4) would only be 64-bit native on the Windows platform. Mac users would only get 32-bits of goodness, even though Tiger and Leopard both support 64-bit programs, and there may be a lot of confusion out there as to what this would actually mean in terms of real-world ramifications. Now that Photoshop CS4 is almost upon us, it's probably a good idea to point you all at a blog post made by Adobe's John Nack back in May:
The full post is definitely worth a read, but here's my take on things: The vast majority of Photoshop users (regardless of platform) won't notice any difference between 32-bit and 64-bit Photoshop. Period. There may be a slight performance advantage (hovering around 10% in the best case scenario), but it seems the only real, tangible benefit to the 64-bit version of Photoshop is that it can address more memory (> 4 GB), and can therefore "give" more memory to individual images (read: really, really huge ones). If you've never run into memory issues before, or don't work on very, very large images, you really have nothing to worry about. Now, if the opposite is true for you, then your only recourse is to use the Windows version of Photoshop CS4 on a 64-bit CPU running Vista x64. So while it may suck to be a Mac user who needs to throw huge amounts of RAM Photoshop's way, those of use who work on Web sites or create screen-based images should, in theory, never notice the difference, no matter which platform we work on.
4) This is the release CS3 really should have been, but here's why I think it wasn't.
I've been playing around with the CS4 betas for a while now, and my general impression is that while you can't expect huge changes across the board, there are enough new and major features to run contrary to the rumors bandied about recently that CS4 contains only "minor" improvements. Regardless of what your particular needs are and whether or not an upgrade from CS3 makes sense for you, a natural question would be, "hey, why wasn't this what we got for CS3?" I'm with you. CS4 is much more what I had expected CS3 to be, but after having a chance to chat up a good number of Adobe product managers over the years, I'm starting to get a feel for how things may have shaken out. The crux of my thinking is boils down to the fact that at the time of the development of CS3, there were three major shifts happening simultaneously:
- Adobe was still in the middle of the process of absorbing Macromedia
- Apple was transitioning to Intel processors
- Microsoft was getting ready to roll out Windows Vista
Any single one of those would have been a tall order during the normal production cycle, but when the perfect storm of technological and organizational transition comes along, it's a wonder that anything shipped at all. Now, I think that, on balance, CS3 was a fairly solid suite (an arguable statement to be sure), sporting definite golden glimpses of what the future held, but that it just wasn't as far along as I would have liked. CS4 is the product of all three of those major transitions having been by and large completed (emphasis on the by and large), with the folks at Adobe having been able to herd many of the cats and put out what is a remarkably well integrated suite this time around. Maybe not groundbreaking features everywhere you turn, but we're starting to see the promise of all these products feeding off of each other. Am I making excuses for Adobe here? Maybe to definitely, if you ask some of the CS3 haters floating around out there, but I wanted to throw out the situation as I think it went down. Take it how you will, but for my money the takeaway here is that CS4 is a big step in the right direction, though perhaps one version too late for some.
5) Adobe actually does have competition.
I'm not ashamed to admit that I had concerns about what the Adobe takeover of Macromedia would mean for the quality of future products. After all, it appeared that Adobe had a virtual stranglehold over pretty much all the major pieces of software used in creative production, and as exciting as the prospect of tight integration between Adobe and Macromedia products was, one had to wonder what the incentive was for the combined company to continue to put out worthwhile upgrades. Now, some may argue that Adobe hasn't delivered since the takeover; that they have, in fact, created more bloated products and dubious upgrades while charging outrageous sums of money for product bundles. Of course, that's an arguable position, and a valid one at that. However, I'm of the mind that the subject of point four in this particular piece is the culprit for some products not being as far along as they should be, rather than some sort of laziness or inertia on the part of Adobe. Why am I defending here? It's simple: Adobe does, in fact, have a lot of competition, and CS4 proves to me (for whatever that's worth) that the competition is being taken very seriously.
There are two sources of pressure that seem to matter here, at least for the purposes of my arguments today. The first is the obvious external ones: Microsoft comes immediately to mind, attempting to grab market and mindshare away from Flash with its Silverlight push, as well as the accompanying tools aimed at designers and developers alike. There's also the open source/free software part of the equation, as the rise of things such as mature JavaScript and a focus on Web standards threatens to diminish the importance of the Flash platform and specific tools like Dreamweaver. Indeed, if you look across the CS4 product line, arguably the programs which received the most care and feeding are Flash and Dreamweaver. But even Photoshop and Illustrator have challengers, and while the maturity and overall usefulness of tools like the Gimp, Pixelmator, Paint.NET, Vector Designer, Inkscape, and others can be questioned, there certainly seems to be a market for competing solutions across the line of products that Adobe offers, and the appeal of adopting a product with a shorter history (read: less bloat) is certainly, well, appealing.
These external pressures have given rise to internal ones, which is the second source I alluded to. Let's brush aside the obvious desire on the part of Adobe personnel to create software they are proud to have worked on, because I'm willing to take that as a given based on conversations I've had with various Adobe folk over the years. Let's look instead at what Adobe has done to put themselves into a position where they're betting the farm on their ability to create the kinds of tools that designers and developers want to use, rather than have to use. For example, no outsider can truly know the forces behind the creation of the Open Screen Project, but the upshot is that the restrictions governing the use of the SWF and FLV/F4V protocols (which form the foundation of the the Flash platform) have been eliminated. Now, whether the motivation for such a move was rooted simply in beating Silverlight, or is just an extension of what was behind earlier moves such as opening up the PDF specification, it's clear that Adobe is basing its business on getting behind open (or at least quasi-open) formats and then making their money on creating tools and services around those formats. In effect, Adobe is putting itself in a position to have to compete for every designer and developer by having to create best of breed tools and services, and should they falter on that mission, the market is in a position to move to something better behind the same open format (at least in theory). So I believe that Adobe does, in fact, have competition, that said competition is alive and well, that it's coming from all sides, and that we hopefully will continue to see high-quality products out of Adobe as a result. As it should be.
6) For some, Flash CS4 may eliminate the need for After Effects.
As Mike Downey, Adobe's then-Senior Product Manager for Flash, told me in an interview over two years ago:
I think there were some great ideas introduced in LiveMotion, borrowed from After Effects, and it is not out of the question that lessons learned from both products will influence the decisions that we make about the Flash authoring tool in the future.
Seems like a bit of an understatement now, having seen how Flash CS4 turned out. First and foremost, I don't think it's hyperbole to say that the new object-based timeline and the accompanying Motion Editor is as profound an upgrade as Flash has ever seen (fig. 6). It fundamentally changes how you work with the product, and it's definitely for the better. Then there's the IK engine (fig. 7), which makes character-based animations almost simple. Lastly, there's the "cards in space" pseudo-3D transformations which AE has boasted for many versions now (fig. 8). Needless to say, I'll have more on all of these new features when I review the final shipping version, but in the meantime, let me throw something out there: some of you may have no need for After Effects anymore. Between the aforementioned new additions, the filters and effects introduced in Flash 8, the vastly improved QuickTime export from Flash CS3, and the underlying power of ActionScript (as well extensions and external ActionScript libraries) to aid in animation, you have an incredibly powerful suite of motion graphics tools at your disposal. Of course, what Flash offers is just a subset of what AE ultimately can do, but there's no reason you can't use Flash -- a program you already may be intimately familiar with -- as a pure motion graphics tool (and a surprisingly capable one) in place of AE. And it won't surprise me at all if many folks decide to do just that.
Figure 6: Flash CS4's new Motion Editor in action.
Figure 7: Adding bones to an object in Flash CS4 is simple and intuitive.
Figure 8: CARDS IN SPAAAAAAACE!
So there you have it -- hopefully some food for thought as we collectively wait for the CS4 line to ship. In any event, be sure to stay tuned in the coming weeks for full reviews of many of the CS4 products once the final bits have been received and digested.
Got Feedback? to send an email. I'll do my best to answer. Really.