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.
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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.
InDesign Exports to XHTML
InDesign CS3 has “true multi-format publishing support” because you can select Export to XHTML in the File menu. But a printed page always has a different layout (or at least, a different look and setup) than a web page. There’s no way you’ll be able to quickly see where your two designs differ, and whether the elements that look good in print also look good on the web. Unless you open another application.
Preflighting is still ridiculous in terms of what it checks for in InDesign CS3. But we do have nice image-like page thumbnails and an icon that shows a low-res thumbnail of the image we’re trying to place in a document.
Photoshop CS3 is yet another example. Why would you want to pay extra for Photoshop CS3 Extended, if you’re not active in the medical, scientific visualisation, CAD, video, or 3D animation business? I couldn’t tell, except for two or three small improvements that are not in the regular edition.
Of course all the new features look great when you’re reviewing the applications individually (and certainly for a first impression), because when you’re reviewing you’re actually trying to assess the new feature by itself. And as each new feature has been properly implemented with a lot of care for detail, it deserves a plus.
Hypeware
But if you look at the software from a distance, the picture becomes slightly different. The detailed view of the feature set makes way for a helicopter view, and you start wondering whether there is any value in the marketing hype.
Well, I can tell you, there is a lot of hype going on with CS3. It’s not the first time it happens, and probably won’t be the last. In the end of course it’s you, the user, who decides whether the features are worth the money, although with Adobe, many of us won’t have a choice. There is little else that can stand up against Photoshop or Illustrator.
