RSSAdobe creates a suite launch with CS4
By Angela Gunn | Published September 23, 2008, 9:56 AM
In what CEO Shantaru Narayan describes as his company's largest-ever product launch, Adobe on Tuesday formally unveiled all six flavors of version 4 of its Creative Suite, ranging in price from $999 to $2499 and slated to ship next month.
In an online presentation that went live this morning, John Loiacano, senior VP for the Creative Solutions Business Unit, divided Adobe Creative Suite 4's improvements into three categories: increased speed and efficiency, better Macromedia integration, and new "wow factor" features. Improved asset management is one of CS4's emphases, as are mobile application development and project collaborations, and Loiacano briefly touched on Adobe's trend toward hosted services such as Acrobat Connect.
The CS4 interface is newly tab-centric, and files and objects can be shared across suite components' various tabs. Behind the curtain, there's improved GPU support for faster rendering. Out in front wowing the crowds, the new Content-Aware Scaling functionality can intelligently re-scale portions of an image without distorting the important parts (e.g., stretching background scenery without distorting the human standing in the foreground). And with an eye toward the upcoming Version 10, Flash developers get new animation capabilities including inverse kinematics -- the ability to animate still images by building jointed, moveable "Bones" skeleton overlays.
The six CS4 flavors range in price and complexity from the $999 Web Standard edition, which comprises Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, Adobe Dreamweaver Professional, Adobe Fireworks CS4, and Adobe Contribute CS4; through a premium Web edition ($1699); standard ($1399) and premium ($1799) design editions; the Production Premium edition ($1699); and to the 13-product, $2499 Master Collection. All versions include Adobe's Bridge media manager and Device Central software for testing mobile apps, and all versions but Production Premium include Adobe's Cue file-management system.
One of the more intriguing special file-management capabilities turns up in the Production Premium edition, which is aimed at video folk. In that edition, Adobe partnered with Autonomy to add that firm's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) -- rich-media management tech familiar to users of such products as SharePoint and the iPhone -- in a new tool called "Speech Search," which transcribes audio (including video audio), making it indexable and quickly searchable.
Beta versions of the bundled Dreamweaver, Soundbooth, and Fireworks software have been available in beta form since late May 2008, and BitTorrent users were reporting allegedly leaked CS4 code as early as March. Anticipation for the product appears to be running moderately high in the blogosphere, though there are scattered concerns that Adobe has yet to clean up various glitches in CS3. In addition, some development partners say they haven't had sufficient time to get CS3 extensions in fighting trim for CS4.
Loiacano responded on Tuesday with a bit of heat to claims that CS4 is merely a dot-release of CS3, saying that he estimates that "over 1700 person-years" went into CS4's development.
CS4 comes relatively hot on the heels of Version 3, which Adobe started shipping in April 2007, releasing final versions of the spendy Production Premium and Master Edition versions just 14 months ago. The relative rush means that only Windows Vista and XP users -- not Mac users -- will be getting 64-bit Photoshop in CS4, since in June 2007 Apple announced that it was stopping support of 64-bit development for the Carbon architecture, switching instead to Cocoa. CS3 was built on Carbon.
In April of this year, John Nack, Adobe's product manager for Photoshop, explained in his blog, "We'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa." 64-bit support for Mac (as illustrated by this PDF available here) is therefore not expected until perhaps CS5, the release date of which is currently unknown. Nack's blog on Tuesday reflected palpable relief at CS4's launch.
I have been searching and I can't find the precise outline of the differences of CS3 versus CS4. Also, what a shock at the release of CS4. I agree that the PR efforts on this were lacking, they were in such a rush to get this out there that they failed to spend some real time marketing it and it's new functions... does it even have any?
I'm really concerned that CS4, is just a copy of CS3, perhaps with a few bugs fixed. And to turn around and launch a new edition just after people have purchased CS3. When they move so quickly it loses people's interest. Give people time to catch up and create free downloadable fixs for the issues. Charging an arm and a leg for "new" software is frustrating and costly, can anyone truly afford to purchase new software every couple years. At least the once nice benefit is that they have kept their upgrade prices moderatly afforable.
But seriously, where are the specs on the new features.... why such a mystery adobe?
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|It is linked in the freaking article above you:
http://blogs.adobe.com/j...eating_the_details.html
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|Unreal Abode, they really are, sheer greed.. whilst peeps are just getting over the cost of CS3 they relaise another massive price buster..
What a PR disaster
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|So...you want adobe to just stop development for a few years to get people to "get over the cost" of an older version of their app?? You know...if you can't get over the cost of CS3, you can wait until you do get over the cost before you buy CS4. I know that logic might be hard for you to grasp...but, I figured I'd throw it out there anyway. Also... I BELIEVE that upgrade price is $199 from CS3 to CS4.
Yea....PR disaster, sure.
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|So....what? I can't just buy Photoshop anymore? I have to pay $999 and get a bunch of apps I don't want?
More and more I have been using Paint.NET for my photo edit needs simply because it.
1. Loads faster
2. Performs faster
3. Installs/Uninstalls faster
4. Does 90% of what I'd need
5. 64bit (I know CS4 is now 64b finally)
6. Is FREE
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|Hey I love paint.net as much as the next guy, but if you are using paint.net as a drop-in replacement for photoshop, then you actually never needed photoshop in the first place.
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|Exactly.
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|Yes, you can just buy Photoshop on it's own,
or just pretty much any of the other apps in the various suite packages (AE, I, Dreamweaver, Flash etc)
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|It's disappointing to hear that Adobe is essentially turning it's back on the Mac. And what is with reduced time between release dates? CS1 (Oct 2003) also had a short life (CS2 hit the market just 18 months later, April 2005). Time is money, I guess.
I'm sure it's economy driven. All the hype about Wall Street and "bailouts" had Adobe working overtime to get a product out before the economy gets worse. Hopefully, it's worth it.
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|LOL...are you seriously complaining that there is a product coming out with more features "too soon"?? That's awesome...I will let you in on a little known secret though. You don't HAVE to upgrade to CS4, you can keep on using CS3 if you think it's "too soon"...
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|Yeah, you can always skip a version. I skipped CS3 until last week when I would be given CS4 as well.
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|Hi Infinite! Not to get myself in the middle of the eternal Adobe-and-Apple questions (are the two squabbling? is Apple withholding vital info from developers? is Adobe being obtuse? does anyone have some aspirin?), but "abandoned" is pretty strong. They're slow on this, yes, but the switch from Carbon to Cocoa... that's a lot of reworking for Adobe to tackle. (Think of it this way -- it's 2008 and we are *just* seeing them get really serious about GPU.) I'll admit I thought it would ship in CS4, but then I thought CS4 would ship closer to the end of the usual 18-24 month period between releases -- perhaps just after the beginning of 2009. When January became October, well, no.
But abandoned altogether? Unlikely. The community of graphics professionals, video editors, Web developers and artists would rise up like the Bonus Army and descend on San Jose with flaming mice, sharpened paintbrushes, and other implements of destruction. Which -- hey, I'd love to see the video of that!
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|"essentially turning it's back on the Mac"
are you slow or thick?
Apple dropped support for the 64 bit environment that Adobe were using, Adobe didn't have the time to convert it to the new format so they told users like yourself that Apple are control-freaks and have no concept of phasing out properly.
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|Photoshop CS3 still doesn't act like a proper Mac OS X application and go idle (0.0 % CPU), so it's likely that much of it is still written for System 6, as if it were still 1990.
I doubt John Nack and his team are up to doing much more than adding a feature or two.
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|"I doubt John Nack and his team are up to doing much more than adding a feature or two."
I suggest taking a look at some of the new features before making such uninformed claims. Even maybe reading this article that you commented on might shed some light for you.
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|I did read the article and I've read John Nack's blog from time-to-time. It's exactly why I say such things.
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