We're down to the last major pieces of Adobe CS5 Web Premium, but last doesn't always mean least. OR DOES IT??? HMMMM??? With that as a spectacular teaser, let's spend our final installment looking at two holdovers from those halcyon Macromedia days of yore: Dreamweaver, the venerable web site building tool, and Fireworks, the oft-overlooked prototyping and vector/bitmap editing powerhouse.

Honesty time, dear readers: I don't think this is going to be an actual review. As Velveeta is to real cheese, there may be some review-like qualities to what follows, but considering the current all-out assault on Flash and everything it stands for, it may be beneficial to take a larger view of what Adobe has done in Web Premium CS5, namely the inclusion of not one, not two, but three separate tools for creating Flash content.

Adobe CS5 is finally shipping, so over the next few weeks we'll looking at the major programs which comprise the Web Premium package, starting off with the old stalwarts of the group. Now, it's somewhat hard to believe that 2010 marks Photoshop's 20th anniversary, with Illustrator having been around for a few years even before that, but here we are. Both products have certainly seen a lot of design trends and operating systems come and go in their time, but lest I take a long, nostalgic detour down software memory lane, let's simply get to the latest and greatest.

Eighteen months, seemingly like clockwork. A mere year-and-a-half after CS4 was released (which itself was a mere year-and-a-half after the release of CS3), Adobe has unveiled the CS5 lineup. Having had a chance to see and try the new versions for myself over the past several weeks, here are some general observations about the latest versions of Adobe's software überbundles.

It's been a while, but Adobe's announcement of Flash Platform Services for Distribution (which we'll shorten to AFPSD for the duration) begs for the not-quite-famous "fake FAQ" treatment, where your humble host asks made-up questions of, well, himself in an attempt to make further sense of the official AFPSD press release. With that as the setup, let's get to those "frequently asked questions."

In the spirit of the four year hiatus between versions (and accompanying uncertainty as to the dead/not dead status of the product), it's only fitting I let almost a year roll by between the announcement/release of Director 11 and finally getting around to reviewing it. In any event, Director is back from its long slumber, so let's take a look at what the eleventh release of the former king of the multimedia hill brings to the table.

Last summer I got curious. With the advent of Intel Macs, Boot Camp, and Universal builds of After Effects, for the first time it was possible to forget about all the Intel vs. PowerPC benchmarks that had been run to that point and effectively remove hardware from the equation, focusing solely on the OS and how well AE was tuned to it. XP took the prize back then, but I'm curious again, and with Mac OS X Leopard, 64-bit Vista, and After Effects CS4 at my disposal, it's time to find out where things stand today.

I have a confession to make: while I covered the initial announcement of Adobe Fireworks CS3 in the spring of last year, I never followed up with a full review. Why? Because, frankly, there wasn't much to it. It seemed like a quick port, done under duress and ultimately boasting only a thimbleful of largely forgettable features, not to mention the seemingly halfhearted attempt to give Fireworks a new purpose as a prototyping tool. The good news is that the situation couldn't be more different with the latest version of the former Macromedia stalwart, so let us count the ways.

It only took the better part of a decade, but Dreamweaver CS4 finally adds enough features and enhancements to earn a reprieve from what I thought would be the inevitable call to nuke it from orbit. And while it doesn't get all the way to where I'd personally like to see the product, Dreamweaver CS4 seems to have reversed its slow (and sad) decline, and for the first time in a very, very long time, I've come to like where things are going.

I have bad news for those out there who were expecting Flash CS4 to, well, suck: It doesn't. Far from it. Adobe certainly seems to have responded to the pressure of having viable Flash competition by delivering a polished upgrade that is chock full of thoughtful improvements and useful new features. So despite the fact that I've spoiled the ending, I hope you'll come along as we explore the latest and greatest in the most recent release of the Flash authoring tool.