Impressions of the New Adobe Creative Suite 3
Category: Web Design, Web Standards
This past Friday, I spent the afternoon at an Adobe sponsored event to showcase their latest design suite. Basically, it was a 3 hour marketing event, but it was cool to see the new features and there are definitely some interesting new bits.
Accessibility and CSS
Not to say that Adobe is jumping on the bandwagon…but…Adobe is jumping on the bandwagon when it comes to accessibility and CSS. In fact, the first thing the Adobe rep did when showing us Dreamweaver was to explain how an “alt tag” can make an image accessible in a web page. Yep, pretty basic stuff. He obviously wanted to make that point early to show Adobe’s dedication to Web Standards.
He then went on to show the latest CSS features. In this version they seem to rely heavily on the community. Dreamweaver provides basic CSS page templates that were created by “CSS experts” outside of Adobe. And if you need further info, they have the community section on their website ready to take on comments and tips from the public. All seems like good stuff.
AJAX
Another very popular buzz word, AJAX, was also one of the main selling points of Dreamweaver. They have built in their own AJAX platform called Spry. This enables drag-and-drop functionality so you can easily bring in things like expanding/collapsing menus. This bit looked very cool. Although, I’m not sure how their version of AJAX stands up against others and how well it performs with cross browser compatibility yet. This is the feature I’m most excited to try out though.
Photoshop Tricks
Photoshop has some very powerful new features like the ability to sync up multiple photos of the same scene. For an example, he showed several photos taken of a public fountain. All of these photos had tourists walking about, getting in the way of the picture. So, he synced them up with a click of a button and the tourists magically disappeared, leaving only a nice photo of the fountain left. Apparently, the program takes the average of all the photos and knows that the only thing constant is the fountain itself. Therefore, it removes the random tourists for you. Sweet.
Fireworks
Very useful new feature here is the abilty to add “hotspots” to your mock-ups. For instance, you can draw a quick Site Map with flow chart boxes. Later on in the project, you can take that Site Map and and hot spot links to each box. Then your client can open your work in a browser, click on a box (e.g., Home Page) and the the corresponding visual appears. Good to see they are really positioning Fireworks as a prototype tool - sine that’s exactly how I use it today.
Ready to Upgrade
Good presentation and I’m ready to get my hands on the real version. I should be upgrading sometime this month and looks like I’ll be able to see some benefits right away. Here I come Spry!