Adobe Systems is offering two-day trials of three beta applications from its next Creative Suite package.
The previews of Dreamweaver for Web design, Fireworks for image editing, and Soundbooth for audio editing became available Monday.
Trials expire after 48 hours for most people, but registered CS3 users get to keep using the CS4 betas until the final applications replace them.
Adobe hasn't publicly confirmed its planned shipping date or the name for the next Creative Suite, which we're nicknaming CS4. Adobe Creative Suite 3 was released in March 2007.
We took a quick test drive of the Dreamweaver trial and liked some of the changes. Among the touted enhancements are a Related Files Toolbar and Code Navigator. The Properties panel integrates HTML and CSS coding, which could save time for those who edit dynamic sites. A new Live View Mode, driven by Webkit open-source rendering, previews pages within Dreamweaver, eliminating the need to open a browser. Adobe intends for this feature to make it easier to debug JavaScript as well as to work with Flash animation.
The interface of Fireworks, originally from Macromedia, finally resembles those of other applications in the Creative Suite. Fireworks features compatibility with Adobe's AIR, Flash, and Flex Builder as well as HTML. And users can export design mockups as high fidelity, interactive, and secure Adobe PDF files.
Soundbooth adds support for multiple track editing as well as volume matching across audio files. Users can preview the compression settings before saving MP3s. Speech recognition is supposed to enable quick, searchable transcripts of dialog content.
There's no word yet on whether the next rough draft of Photoshop will be available for a free trial. However, Photoshop's next iteration may become available in widgets, enabling users to mix and mash up some features with third-party content, according to a blog post last week by Photoshop product manager John Nash. We suspect that there will be more opportunities to blur the lines between the desktop, the Web, and mobile platforms within the next Creative Suite.
System requirements for the Windows trials demand a machine running XP or Vista with at least 512MB of RAM, 1 gigabyte of disk space, and a Pentium 4 processor. Mac users must have OS X version 10.4.11 or later on a PowerPC G5 or Intel-based system. Soundbooth, however, won't run on a PowerPC Mac.
The math is incontrovertible: at $2,500, Adobe's Creative Suite 3 Master Collection non-upgrade is extremely expensive. However, once you start looking at the cost of the individual pieces of the suite, getting more than two of the major components--say, Photoshop and Illustrator--on their own isn't cost effective, either.
Just those two applications together cost $1,600 for their non-upgrade editions, and that same chunk of change will get you the CS3 Web Premium, which contains Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Pro and all the little ancillary apps that Adobe has been giving away.
But let's say you're only interested in editing photos, or you think your copy of Illustrator CS2 will work just fine with Flash CS3, but you need that Flash upgrade? Is there more going on than a new palette layout? Let's break down Adobe's powerhouse gestalt and take a look at the more popular parts that make up the whole: Photoshop for image manipulating and printing, Illustrator for drawing, Flash for animating, and Dreamweaver for designing Web pages.
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(Credit:
CNET Networks)
So, you need to finish up a design project that requires the image-editing capabilities of Photoshop along with the vectorized lines of Illustrator, and it needs to be animated in Flash with documentation in a PDF. However, you blew your budget on bling and a sweet alpaca-skin bongo set.
Take your head out of the microwave. There is indeed a way to save your project and your wallet from the $2,500 price tag of Adobe Creative Suite 3. You just have to be a bit...creative.
Photoshop is arguably the most powerful and certainly the most well-known of the Adobe set. Heck, the term "photoshop" is now a slang verb that describes altering an image. The program's popularity is well-deserved, with an array of features that is mind-boggling. Unfortunately, that incredible feature set comes with associated bloat, and Photoshop is quickly becoming the military tank of image editors: yes, it gets the job done, but no, the job description should not include cruising down Highway 101.
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