Adobe CS4 Conference - Birmingham New St.
Date Published 19/11/2008 - Click here for more recent news
I travelled up to Birmingham New St. to get a feel for the new Adobe CS4 (the industry standard design suite offering ways to present information). There was a vast gathering of creatives there who had travelled from around the country to see whether the new CS4 justified a purchase.
The first session was aimed at web designers and developers (titled web premium lecture) and showed quite dramatic developments in both Flash and Dreamweaver. One of the first questions we were asked was: "Who here uses adobe Bridge?" The response was an embarrassing show of only a handful of hands! The lecturers were shocked that we did not use Bridge but instead chose to swim across the river! Adobe Bridge CS4 is basically a file organisation tool (working in a similar way to which i-Tunes organises your music, bridge organises all your work files) which allows you to browse your files with visual previews, leave comments etc. Another feature of Bridge CS4 is that you can create Flash galleries of your work and choose which order you would like your work to be viewed in.
After the Bridge CS4 lecture we moved into more relevant territory, with the powerhouse that is Photoshop CS4. The major USP for the new Photoshop was a piece of technology called "Content Aware Scaling". What content aware scaling does is allows you to stretch an image and still keep the key objects in the image to their original scale (see the example to the right):
The lecturers also encouraged us to use Fireworks CS4 when using Photoshop CS4. The big pull with Fireworks CS4 is that it reduces the file size of images. The same file was saved in both Photoshop and Fireworks and the results were staggering. The file size of the Photoshop file was 28kb in comparison to 12kb in Fireworks.
Other key changes to Photoshop were:
- Instantaneous zoom.
- Faster and more responsive.
- Preview hardness for brushes.
- Spin image to any angle you like.
- Work on canvas from any angle.
Illustrator CS4 was next to enter the ring and produced what appeared to be the most dramatic developments of the entire day. The first feature (which so impressed me) was the introduction of multiple art boards in one file. This basically allows you to run a whole project from one file; the benefit being that you can share elements and also make edits to individual elements which alter the appearance of all other instances within the file. A theme that seemed to be omni-present throughout the lectures was, "
Alongside promoting new methods, the lecturers were quick to remind us of existing methods the majority of us tend to overlook in day to day work. One of these was an option called "Save Views". Save Views allows you to save a view you will need to use many times. Once you have labelled this view you can then zoom to it in one click rather than having to pan and zoom to a particular area over and over again.
The final USP for Illustrator CS4 came in the form of "Blob Brush". Blob brush basically allows you to paint in illustrator with vectors. It is another intuitive tool which is intended to rival the pen tool when creating custom shapes.
The next piece of impressive technology on offer was "Share My Screen". This technology allows you to share your screen with someone else over the internet. You can also allow the user to take control of your screen, leave comments etc., which I’m sure will ground-breaking tool for many businesses. Log-on to the acrobat site to try it for yourself.
After a short interval for elevenses, we were then served our main course in the guise of Dreamweaver! Like all the new programmes we were hit early with the product's USP: "Live View". Live View does what it says, whereby allowing the page to render in the DW screen and mimic the actions of a browser. Other new features included code navigator (which take you straight to the relevant bit of CSS code in one click).
Earlier I alluded to "making hard tasks easier in order to open the programme to a wider audience" and the clearest example of this is within Flash CS4. Apparently Flash was intimidating for most new users, so to encourage this vast audience - more entry level elements have been included. The big difference is the simplicity with which you can create a basic animation. This is done with the use of a "Band Animation Path" (See image on the left), which allows you to see on screen the path your animation will take. This effectively makes motion guides redundant and is another of the great timesaving features pioneered by CS4. The introduction of 3D into Flash now opens it up for many more possibilities. Tweening in 3D is now just as easy as tweening in 2D.
The next new feature within Flash CS4 is called "Bones" which allows the user to connect a series of movie clips, link them together (in the same way bones are linked and react) and ultimately allow the user to interact and move the final composition. You will probably get a clearer idea of what I mean by viewing the image to the below /right:
Alongside Flash comes an audio programme which you may already be familiar with, named Adobe Sound Booth. Although this didn’t seem very appealing at first, impressive new technology was then revealed in the form of transcribing voice to text (a service you presently have to pay for). The great thing about this is that it now makes video indexable for search engines and when you search for a key word it will take you to the relevant part of the video.
After an hours lunch break, it was the turn of the design premium lecture to steal the limelight. The majority of this lecture touched upon revelations made in the web premium lecture, but once we had sifted through the earlier material there were some real nuggets to be had. The first of these was to be seen in Adobe Acrobat CS4. Whereas before I viewed Acrobat CS4 as a relatively modest programme with limited capabilities; it, like the majority of CS4 programmes, has grown-up and filled-out. Acrobat CS4 now has a flash engine; meaning flash content can be embedded into a PDF. From a design perspective Acrobat CS4 is now far more appealing as a tool to present your work and deliver interactive PDFs. If for instance you were to present a portfolio of your work you can now display it in an interactive gallery format, which has several flash templates you can call upon that require no flash or action script skills to implement. At present the majority of designers would send over a zipped file of a project in its entirety; now however Acrobat CS4 adds polish with the gallery option, even allowing you to choose the order you wish your work to be viewed in.
We were now on a roll (in terms of fresh content) and In-Design CS4 kept the momentum going. The new In design has several new capabilities including:
- Graphical preview in page layout.
- Direct Hyperlinks to files within links palette.
- Onscreen pre flight – alerts you to mistakes as they are made in real time within the document.
The USP for In design CS4 was (like Acrobat CS4) its increased interactivity. You can now create hyperlinks, create interactive buttons, embed flash video and take advantage of flash effects like page curls /flips to flip to a new page. There really is no excuse to use Power-point for presentations anymore, as In Design CS4 provides a simple / stunning solution in the form of an interactive magazine.
I left the lecture in the evening feeling surprised / impressed at the significant advances CS4 has made. The litmus test will now be to see if all these claims can be backed up when I eventually test the programme for myself….?
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