John Wang

Today, Adobe held their web broadcast announcing the 4th version of their Creative Suite. It was an hour long session and definitely did not cover a lot of the new features and changes.

Gizmodo has already written up a brief summary listing PDFs of “What’s New” for each application along with the Press Release from Adobe.

VectorTips and GoMediaZine have taken a quick round-up of the new features of Illustrator.

Some things to note, a slightly cheaper version of the Web Design Suite (Web Standard) is available, which does not include Adobe’s Photoshop. It’s basically Macromedia’s old suite of Dreamweaver + Fireworks. Similarly, there’s also a Desgin Standard edition, which loses Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash, along with the “Extended” version of Photoshop.

Dreamweaver has gotten a new user interface (as have all of the applications.) More importantly, it has now gained support for Subversion. Definitely something useful for developers on the cheap.

Other nice things that were added:

• Live View – Integrated browser-like viewing mode for testing out interaction.
• Code Navigator – Live code highlighting during interactions to see what code is getting executed.
• Javascript framework support for JQuery.

Some things that I would have liked to see:

• Some API support for MoveableType, TypePad and/or WordPress.
• Support for Application Platforms like Google App Engine, Amazon’s S3.

That said, it seems as though Dreamweaver will remain the standard solution for most PHP, ColdFusion, and XHTML/HMTL designers/developers. Pre-ordering is available through Amazon.com with an estimated release date of November 14th. Though, the Press Release states late October.

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