Adobe is releasing Creative Suite 2 almost in tandem with Apple’s Tiger upgrade. Creative Suite 2 justifies not just a review but a series of reviews; that’s how important I deem it to be. In the next days and weeks, you can expect IT-Enquirer to cover most if not all of Creative Suite 2.

Both upgrades are equally important, with many new features and improvements. In fact, I don’t believe Adobe has improved its creative applications on such a grand scale ever before. Even the original Creative Suite release did not offer this much in terms of workflow enhancements and support for the creative multi-user process.

Creative Suite 2 revolves around a new file browser, the Adobe Bridge. In previous versions of Adobe’s creative suite, the Bridge was a workflow system for InDesign and InCopy. It offered a solution for very small authoring production environments. The Bridge was an entry-level model for those users who didn’t need or want (or could afford) the likes of K4 or Smart Connection.

In Creative Suite 2, the Bridge is suddenly much more. It’s a visual file browser and a workflow centre from where you can manage and direct everything that you want to make happen in a creative Adobe environment. The Bridge goes even further by offering (limited) support for non-Adobe file formats as well.

The Bridge will be the first part of the review series. Version Cue has become a part of the Bridge. It has been improved and a few features have been added, but the new version really just builds further on the previous one. We will cover Version Cue in the part on the Adobe Bridge.

Not surprisingly, Adobe has given a lot of attention to its flagship products: Photoshop and InDesign. InDesign in particular, has a lot of new features and enhancements. We will cover InDesign in depth in part 2 of the series. Just to spur your appetite: imagine InDesign gaining object styles, for example. Or to put it differently: a lot of plug-in builders will have to think hard to come up with something that beats Adobe’s inclusion of features that previously were only available as plug-ins.

Photoshop and Illustrator will be part 3 of our series. Photoshop integrates with Illustrator and vice versa, so much so that discussing these programs separately would mean an inevitable overlap in the coverage of features.

One application in this suite has already been covered on IT-Enquirer: Acrobat 7 Professional. One other application will not be covered in depth in this series: Golive. Golive is a charming and elegant program, but it somehow loses out on the big improvements that InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat and Illustrator all enjoy.

Golive has improved, without a doubt, but we can’t be really thrilled by seeing those new CSS features that are supported better by Style Master 4, for example. So, if we will discuss Golive, it will only be briefly.

Installing Creative Suite 2 involves one step most users will be wary of: Activation. Except for the license number, you will also need to connect to Adobe’s authentication server, where your copy of the Suite will be Activated. In return for this less than optimal method of making sure nobody copies the programs, you are granted a 30-day trial period.

Although I don’t like program activation, the reason is probably different from most objecters: I simply always forget to “transfer” the activation if I need to reformat my disk. The result is that I get to call a lot for help with re-activating the applications. This has happened to me a number of times with Macromedia’s Activation scheme.

Let’s now start with the first part…

The Bridge

The Bridge is a separate application. Version Cue is an integrated part of the Bridge, but it is still a Preference panel and a menu option on Bridge and all the other Creative Suite 2 applications. Version Cue is now also a menu applet.

If you start working with Creative Suite 2, the best approach is to start by opening the Bridge. When the Bridge opens, the user is presented with a large window containing all the assets of the different projects, a button for creating new projects, a button for setting the colour management options for all Creative Suite applications, a RSS reader, a Tips and Tricks tab, a listing with recently opened files, a link to the Help files, and last but not least: a link to Adobe’s Stock Photo web site.