Adobe has unwrapped Creative Suite 3 on March 27. The next generation of the Creative Suite has become a pile of products that covers almost every creative need. The product range that can be yours when you buy the most complete package covers everything from layout over drawing, image editing, web design, web development, Flash authoring, editorial, video, and sound editing, all the way up to compositing.

With so many different needs covered, Adobe has split up the Creative Suite into about half a dozen creative suites. The most complete is the Master Collection, which contains InDesign, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Contribute, Fireworks, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, Encore, Acrobat professional 8, OnLocation, Bridge, Acrobat Connect, Version Cue, and Device Central. It’s an impressive array of tools for 2500 Euros.

InDesign: All Creative Power

With all Creative Suite packages come Bridge and Version Cue. Bridge has been improved by a large margin, but overlaps a bit with Photoshop Lightroom --which is not part of any CS package deal. Version Cue CS3 looks promising but if the late beta that was handed to the press is anything to go by, there are a couple of options missing that were there in the previous version. If I didn’t overlook it, saving your documents locally in a directory you choose, for example.

InDesign CS3, which I’m going to cover in this first impression, was one of the tools that I in particular was very curious about. With Quark loading QuarkXPress for free with all kinds of extras like the Xpert Toolbox, and the productivity features that QuarkXPress has and InDesign CS2 misses (job jackets, JDF integration...), I was really curious about what Adobe would be doing. Also, with Quark having taken over ALAP, Adobe was cut off from being able to offer users any sort of imposition tool, no matter how skimmed.

Well, InDesign CS3 sure has an imposition feature --it’s the same “Print Booklet...” command that has been there for a couple of years. But of course, it wouldn’t be fair to Adobe to criticise their impositioning feature, when they’ve added so much else. Let’s start with the interface.

The InDesign CS3 interface looks clean and nice. The vertical toolbar at left has been reduced to a one column affair that you can set up as the traditional two-column thing of the past. However, the most significant changes have been applied to the palettes and the upper, horizontal toolbar. First the palettes. I don’t quite know how I should feel about them. They look great, they are cleverly engineered in order to take up as little space as possible, but I’m not convinced --at least not on Mac OS X.

Palettes Windows-style

For starters, the palettes have a close button that’s on the wrong side for Mac users. You’re clicking thoughtlessly at left to close the thing, and nothing happens, because the closing “cross” is where Windows users have found it for years: at right.

What I also find less than optimal is the palette “icon bar” itself. I can live with the closing button on the wrong side, but I find it hard to open a palette with an icon that barely changes colour when I hover over it, only to find that the palette I’m opening contains the three to four palettes that are shown in the icon bar. In terms of screen real estate, I think Adobe could have done better.

On the other hand, as you can see in one of the screenshots in the gallery, InDesign has a “Search with Spotlight” item in its context menu. The item appears when you select some text --very handy if you are filling up a frame with address data, for example.

One of the features most people had already heard of and were apparently thrilled about, are the image effects. I’ve tried them and they look wonderful. The Effects dialogue works much as in Photoshop, i.e. you can turn on and off any effect you want to apply. You can have different effects on three levels: the box, the content, and the borders.