After having spent three weeks with the entire Creative Suite 3 for Web and Print Production, there is no longer any sense in denying it: much of CS3 is hypeware. InDesign CS3 is a disappointment, Photoshop CS3 Extended will appeal especially to scientists and medical users but there’s little to entice photographers.

Dreamweaver CS3 is even worse: it looks the same as the previous version, has roughly the same quirks. New to Dreamweaver CS3 is the Spry Framework for creating AJAX, a novelty that is a problem by itself. Fireworks CS3 looks a lot like Fireworks 8, and so does Flash CS3. In fact, the only real awesome improvements I saw were Adobe Illustrator CS3, Version Cue 3 and Bridge.

It is said that software is a consumer-driven market. Software developers claim they are listening to what users want and then upgrade their software on a regular basis to reflect those desires, called “needs” in the industry. But as far as I can remember, there has never been a software upgrade that fulfilled most users’ needs, and it seems the larger the company, the more it does what it well pleases without listening to customers at all.

Adobe is such a large company --it’s huge-- and while it has some geniuses working for them as software engineers and project managers (Thomas Knoll comes to mind, but they are plenty), it doesn’t manage to listen to its customers well. With little competition left, it’s easy to just do as you please. And Adobe is doing just that. Take for example, the (once again) re-designed interface palettes. I don’t recall users craving for newly designed palettes.

Three-mode Palettes

The 3-mode palettes are touted as the best thing since sliced bread, but after having worked with the two “new modes” which they offer (icon-only and half-collapsed), I’ve come to the conclusion that most users who want to work as fast as they can will soon revert to palettes old style. The reason is that you will be clicking endlessly on icons while you’re switching between palettes to re-open them. Especially in Photoshop CS3 this quickly becomes nerve-wrecking.

And if you had a good look at these palettes, it is clear that Adobe wants you to migrate to Windows as soon as possible, too. On Mac OS X, the close and resize buttons are of the wrong type and on the wrong side. Oh, and once opened, they take up a lot more space, the new palettes. But they look good.

CS3 looks good overall, but some of its applications that needed a feature upgrade the most don’t even have the good looks. Dreamweaver CS3 looks like the old Dreamweaver. You would think Adobe has had plenty of time to unify that program’s interface with the rest of CS3, but it apparently hasn’t. Dreamweaver CS3 looks like it has come straight from the first version of Aqua.

Anything new in there? Yes, browser compatibility checking that is tightly integrated with Adobe’s online resources. You don’t want to be online all the time you’re coding? No access to the new checking feature then.

A Spry Framework, of which www.webstandards.org in May 2006 said: “Sadly, at this initial stage it seems that the goal of ease-of-use has been held higher than even the most basic principles of valid markup and accessibility best practices. Opting to make implementation as simple as possible, Spry uses custom attributes and old-school obtrusive JavaScript techniques, welding the behaviour layer firmly to the content.”, is another new feature.

Spry Framework

The Spry Framework allows you to build all kinds of “Web 2.0” stuff, but the custom code means your pages are likely to break in some browsers that only support the standards. Sorry about that.

There are more templates in Dreamweaver CS3 and some better support for developing web sites in general but if you have Dreamweaver 8, I don’t believe you should hurry to buy that upgrade. Fireworks and Flash are about on the same level. Except when you insist that direct editing of Photoshop files from within these web applications is a necessity, the web suite is a bit on the skinny side in terms of improvements.

Even InDesign CS3 was a disappointment to me. Yes, you can do some spectacular stuff with effects, blending, etc. But couldn’t you do this before --perhaps not as easy? Will layouts become more inspired because of yet other flashy effects?

On the production side, InDesign CS3 impresses less. Booklet is still the only way you’re going to imposition your layouts, JDF is still tied to PDF export. In terms of productivity enhancement, I could only see some tweaks in Find/Change and some better interface customisation.