Adobe Creative Suite 3 - Design Premium - First Impressions...

I know this is probably a little premature considering it's not on general release yet, but I got hold of a copy of CS3 Design Premium today and thought I'd share my first impressions...

First and foremost I'm using an Intel Mac so the speed boost is staggering.
I'd actually taken to avoiding Illustrator and InDesign where possible because I couldn't be bothered with the amount of extra processing and the fan noise.

I've been using the Photoshop CS3 Beta since it was released and immediately it became my default version of PS as it was more than double the speed of the CS2 version for me, since then all the other apps had really been noticeably slow.

Overall I'm impressed with CS3 so far.

Photoshop Extended [PS]

Nice app, much the same as the Beta but importantly the brush size bug has now been fixed which was a MAJOR failing of the Beta version, of course CS3 has dropped ImageReady from the family of applications so much of the functionality from that including animations has now been transplanted in to PS Extended, this has a big impact for those of us who were continually having to switch between ImageReady when editing an image.

Other than that the new features seem like they could be very useful to a lot of people, although for me it's going to be a case of teaching an old dog new tricks and it may be a while before I start remembering they're there and using them fully.

Illustrator [Ai]

I've not played around with this much yet, but so far so good.
The new interface somehow makes it all so much easier without making it harder to use and again, the increase in performance is seriously impressive, I actually feel at home in Illustrator again instead of wanting to get out as fast as possible.

The new colour matching tools are brilliant, I didn't expect them to be just as good as they actually are as there had been much hype about them and I was expecting to be disappointed, but the way it finds complementary colours for anything you select is pretty darn smart.
In my opinion this is the "killer app" for this release of illustrator, although it could potentially lead to a 'design by numbers' epidemic where by people get lazy and a lot of similar colour ways begin to emerge.

However, overall VERY impressed with Illustrator and looking forward to exploring more over the coming Easter weekend.

InDesign [ID]

First impressions are good, again everything is snappy and feels much more intuitive to me, I always felt that ID CS2 was a little clunky when compared to Quark 7, but this version has raced ahead again.

Flash [Fl]

This app is brilliant.
For me it's one of the most improved, I spent 30 minutes designing a quick little banner and compared to Flash 8 it's a breath of fresh air.
I only upgraded to Flash 8 about 8 weeks ago and immediately regretted it as it seemed to have gained a lot of bloat compared to Flash MX and was also backwards in a lot of the default options and interface.

Flash CS3 is a vast improvement over Flash 8 and it seems coming in to the abode family has really made a difference here, I've not yet gone deep enough to report much more but it took me 30 minutes to do what took me about 2 hours in Flash 8, a lot of that was due to the fact that Flash 8 was a PowerPC binary and running in emulation, but there are so many tiny changes that make everything easier in CS3 that the smallest tasks become simple instead of a chore.

Dreamweaver [Dw]

I have to say, Dreamweaver is the only app in the suite that has disappointed me.
I understand that because it's such a widely used critical tool, any interface change could compromise work and slow designers down while they learn the new way for doing things, but this just looks like it's been left behind.
I was never a fan of the macromedia interface on the Mac as it seemed a bit slapdash and untidy, unfortunately here the interface has remained the same and bar the performance gains, there is nothing to me in Dreamweaver that I found to make a major difference to my work.

I'm sure the more time I spend with it the more I'll appreciate the small tweaks that I discover, but I felt disappointed when I opened it as it lust looked like the old version and behaved the same.

However, despite the lack of obvious progress, Dreamweaver is still a competent application that with a universal binary now will allow Mac developers the freedom to embrace the new Intel Mac's without worrying about performance and as part of the Adobe family it's now far more integrated, hence fits the workflow much better than before.

Acrobat Professional 8.0

I'm not in a position to review this fully at the moment as I've not had to really put it through its paces yet but on first impressions the upgrade has been well worth it. Acrobat 7 for me was always a bit unstable and very slow even on a native PPC system, Version 8 looks better and feels smother.

Distiller hasn't undergone any huge changes but again benefits form the general overhaul, that said, Distiller has crashed on me twice so far when closing the application, when you're using the app it's fine, but when you quit occasionally it seems not to quit properly and you get a dialogue box telling you that the app quit unexpectedly.
It's happened twice out of about 50 launched of the app and not for a few weeks now so fingers crossed it's a fluke and doesn't happen more often.

Overall I'm very happy with CS3 and hopefully will stay that way, I've not encountered any problems yet and the upgrade has been worth it for the speed alone, I feel like I've got my groove back now and can get on with design instead of waiting for things to process and listen to my MacBook fans screaming for cool air

The thing lots of people moaned about when the Photoshop CS3 Beta launched was the icons and how ugly and simplistic they were... You know what, I like them. They are much easier to identify and unlike the ild Adobe icons where you had to look to see which white square had the right colour feather on it, you can instantly see what app you're looking for both my colour and letters. I think they made a good choice and it works especially well for me as I always have my dock set quite small with no magnification. It makes hitting the right icon very easy.

:o)