The Fifth Creative Suite

Monday morning, Adobe unleashed upon a grateful nation Creative Suite 5, forcing Web professionals the world over to ponder once again whether or not they needed to upgrade.

Adobe, of course, actually released five versions of Creative Suite, for the many and various needs of the thinker-upper set. Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium and the Master Collection, which I have always thought should be pronounced "Mahhh•stuh" in the style of the late John Houseman.

For our purposes, we are really only concerned with three of those boxes, the Design Premium, Web Premium and Master Collection are the only ones with the new Dreamweaver CS5 included. Design Premium also includes Photoshop CS5 Extended, Illustrator CSS, InDesign CSS, Flash Catalyst, Flash Professional CSS, Dreamweaver CSS and Fireworks CSS. This is nice for a couple of reasons. Adobe used to devilishly carve up the market so Web professionals couldn't easily buy Dreamweaver and Photoshop or Dreamweaver and Flash without going to the high-bucks box. And also, early money said that Fireworks would not live long after the sale of Macromedia to Adobe, which would kill the program in favor of their own in-house Photoshop. So, yay.

The Web Premium box includes all that and Flash Builder 4 and Adobe Contribute. That's it.

Flash is having a tough time in the media, as Steve Jobs and Apple have once again passed it by with the new iPad, causing a bunch of Very Public Questions to be raised in the media, followed by some Very Public Answers and much chin-stroking. Some sites have very publicly abandoned Flash for other techniques (notably HTML5) that will work on iPhones and iPads. So you may wonder why and how Adobe have now filled out three product lines with Flash?

Flash Catalyst is Flash with another user interface. You can build (simple) Flash apps now, without knowing how to code or a lot of the in's and out's of the full program. You can more easily start with a Photoshop or Fireworks document and turn its constituent elements into buttons or scrollbars. The resulting output can then be handed off to real, hairy-chested Flash developers for further enhancing, or used as-is. Flash Catalyst is probably Adobe's way of making it harder for developers to decide to use HTML5 or JQuery.

Photoshop CSS is tuned-up again. CS4 brought content-aware resizing, where you could designate areas on the image that would keep their aspect ratios (wheels on a bus, for example, that was being stretched, would not appear egg-shaped). Content-aware Fill comes to Photoshop CSS. Select a background and paint-over page elements like trees, parking meters or power lines and Photoshop will stitch together a background intelligently, based on what it thinks you're looking for. You can remove tree branches and still keep that sky gradient behind them. Clip out an irregular sky from another image and square it up before placing it behind the foreground. Complex selections are made easier, too. Guy in red flannel standing in front of red brick wall? Lots of reds, lots of blacks, lots of lines. Photoshop can select just this lumberjack, or grunge singer, and paste him wherever you need, without fear of leaving sleeves behind, or packing along extra bricks. Puppet Warp lets you bend arms and legs around user-defined elbows and knees and a new Lens Correction Filter lets you compensate more easily for the effects of bending light through glass—an awful lot of attention has been paid to the needs of electronic photographers in the new Photoshop.

Dreamweaver gets new CSS layout templates, simplified Site setup (yay!) and support for php-based Content Management Systems. Code Hints can now be customized, beyond selecting which tips you want to see. CSS support is improved and BrowserLab approximates the view of your page in various browsers on various operating systems.

No, it's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of the line. The crew that brings us Adobe Creative Suite CS5? They still have jobs. I would bet we see a Creative Suite CS6 in a couple of years. It's now up to each of us to look into these updates, and decide if they are worth the price and the learning curve. Good luck!