Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web - worth the upgrade?
Adobe's Creative Suite now includes all of the previous Adobe and Macromedia Offerings - for Web design and print design - but is it worth the substantial upgrade fee?
27 May 2007
Let's get the price out of the way right away. For us in the UK, Adobe Creative Suite is expensive: either to buy, or to upgrade. Just as an example, the UK upgrade to the Web Premium suite costs £534.62; the USA price for the same software is just $499.00 (just over £250 or so pounds). Adobe says that the price difference is because of the different trading costs in different counties, but this is clearly stretching reality. It might cost £20 per box to localise a product, or even twice that - but charging over twice the price? And they wonder why piracy is rife.
Further bad news is that the visual integration between the Macromedia and Adobe products is far from complete. Applications such as Dreamweaver and Fireworks still sport the old Macromedia interface, while Adobe's applications now feature a new palette management system, leaving the suite looking like a job half-done.
And even more bad news is that the suite hasn't changed that much - it's an evolution, not a revolution, so you're really paying for just a few new features.
But there the bad news ends - because the new features are worth the upgrade price, at least if you buy in the USA!
Dreamweaver CS3
At the heart of the Web suite is Dreamweaver, which has long been the leading Web design and development tool. With Expression Web dealing Microsoft strongly back in the game, Adobe had better keep on its toes. The killer feature in Dreamweaver CS3 is a good one - the HTML and CSS validation tool which is linked to an on-line database, called the CCS Advisor.
If all browsers were standards-compliant, we wouldn't need this tool - but as every Web developer knows, that's not the case. Around the world, Web developers waste thousands of hours trying to debug CSS-based designs. Why does that menu look different in Safari? Why is everything three pixels to the left in Internet Explorer? The majority of most Web design jobs is hunting down and fixing these kind of display glitches.
Dreamweaver CS3 changes all of that. Just as Dreamweaver can check pages for validation issues or accessibility problems, so it can now check for CSS display problems. And it does a very, very good job of it.
Potential issues are highlighted in the code. Hovering over the highlight gives you a tip as to what the problem might be. There's also a link to the Adobe CSS Advisor Web site which shows the various methods for resolving the issues. CSS Advisor is community-based, so you're tapping into solutions from the world's leading Web developers.
Make no mistake - this feature is worth its weight in gold and will save hours of hair-pulling frustration.
The second great new Dreamweaver feature are the Spry widgets - little 'Web 2' combinations of HTML and JavaScript that you can easily integrate into a site and then style using CSS. These are well-coded, compatible with all leading browsers and can be quickly styled to give them a look of your own. The code used is nice and clean - and integrating them is just a matter of drag and drop, change the design, then tweak the JavaScript if you need to (in most cases you won't).
Fireworks CS3
Thankfully, despite the rumours, Fireworks has survived - a good thing because as a Web design tool, it's quite simply unsurpassed. Adobe's ImageReady has been dropped, to remove duplication from the suite.
With such a strong tool, it's clearly hard to deliver ground-breaking updates, but (as with Dreamweaver) there's one feature which is simple but stunning. Fireworks now supports multiple pages, so you can keep all pages of a Web design job in the same file. OK, that doesn't sound amazing - but there's a little more to it.
You can now make certain items appear on all pages - as 'master items' - which is a real timesaver when designing pages with common menus and search boxes etc. You update these once, and all pages are automatically updated. It's such an obvious and simple new feature, but one which will be in instant daily use - unlike many bells and whistles which are often added as product upgrades.
Fireworks' layers are now fully hierarchical, so you can create layers within layers within layers - again, great for management of assess or for creating different versions of the same design.
Integration is now excellent - with Fireworks finally being able to properly import and edit native Illustrator and Photoshop files.
Flash CS3 Professional
This new-found integration is perhaps of most benefit in Flash, which has long struggled to properly import objects from other applications without degrading them. Now, files can come directly from Illustrator and Photoshop - with their layers intact. This is where the acquisition of Macromedia is really paying off - it's such a simple thing, but it makes a real difference.
Flash's drawing tools are also vastly improved, not exactly as good as Illustrator, but now much more capable, giving finer control over Bezier curves. They also include shape primitives, which provide good control over shapes, allowing you to (for example) more easily round off rectangle corners and so on.
Flash CS3 features the latest version of ActionScript (which is shared with Adobe Flex) and an improved environment for writing and debugging scripts.
There are other changes too, with improvements in managing both audio and video - all keeping Flash at the top of its game.
Device Central
This is a new part of the Adobe suite - and a very useful one. Device Central lets you accurately test your Web content on a wide range of devices, including mobile phones, without having access to the device. You can use this new tool from anywhere in Creative Suite.
If you opt for the Premium edition of the Web Studio, you'll also get Photoshop extended and Illustrator, along with the current version of Acrobat. This makes for a powerful and well-integrated (though still not perfect, with Acrobat adding yet another user interface to the two already competing for attention) toolset which should be on the desk of any Web developer.
It's too expensive in the UK, but, that aside, it's well worth the upgrade.
