Web Design and SEO News and Tips » archive for April, 2007

Hands-on with Adobe Creative Suite 3

  • April 2nd, 2007

March 27th saw the biggest ever software launch in Adobe’s history. I always get excited about Adobe software launches, and this was no exception. One of the first things I did that day was go to the ASN site and see if anything was available for download. It was! Sitting there waiting for my grubby paws was a pre-release version of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium. I downloaded and installed it on two computers (yes, Adobe does allow you to install and use a single user licensed copy of any of its programs on no more than two computers).

I’m extremely happy to report that CS3 runs fine on both my home G4 dual 1ghz MDD and even better on the company’s G5 dual 2ghz. Hardly anything in the way of crashes, bugs or lock-ups to report so far! (I did repair permissions on both machines after installing, but that’s standard procedure after a major software install).

The programs I was most interested in checking out were the new versions of InDesign and Dreamweaver (I’ve been using the beta preview of Photoshop CS3 for weeks now). InDesign just keeps getting better. At first I didn’t like the totally new interface (standard across InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator) with docking “panels” (where are my side-docking palettes! I thought), but the whole concept has really grown on me and I’m staring to actually prefer them over the old palette system! Wow!

What I like most about InDesign CS3 so far are the new effects, and the fact that you can apply these effects independently to different parts of an object. So for instance, if you have a text box, you can easily apply a stroke that has 90% opacity, a fill that has 75% opacity, and text that has 100% opacity. Other effects, such as feather, drop shadow, inner glow, outer glow or bevel & emboss can also be added to any part of the object or text independently. Now that’s what I call cool. And it’s so easy to do with the new Effects panel–which is much like Photoshop’s layer styles panel in appearance.

And did you catch that I just mentioned you can now do Bevel & Emboss, Inner Glow, Outer Glow etc. right in InDesign? Wow! These affects are sometimes inferior to those found in Photoshop, but for many purposes they’ll be all you need.

So what about Dreamweaver CS3? To be honest, I haven’t used it too much yet, but I hear it has all kinds of good stuff. I did notice that it previews CSS layouts better than Dreamweaver 8. And it seems to be just as stable as its predecessor, which is something I really appreciate. Maybe I’ll post more on the new Dreamweaver in a week or two when I’ve been able to put it through its paces a little more.