This morning, Adobe officially announced the CS4 product line. There's a ton of information online about it, but I'm going to try to coalesce the most important bits here.

First off, the actual editions. Just as with CS3, there are six packages of CS4 you can get: Design Premium & Standard, Web Premium & Standard, Production Premium, and Master Collection. Design Premium (the one that I suspect the majority of folks will want) includes InDesign, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Acrobat 9. The Standard edition includes only the regular version of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and Acrobat. Web Premium contains the new versions of Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 9, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute, and (in a change from CS3) Soundbooth. Web Standard is basically the old Macromedia suite: Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Contribute. Production Premium has Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Flash, After Effects, Premiere, Soundbooth, OnLocation, and Encore. And the Master Collection has everything. All of the suites also include Bridge and Device Central, and all except the Production Premium include Version Cue.

Pricing seems similar to CS3: Design Premium is $1,799, Web Premium and Production Premium are $1,699 each, and Master Collection is $2,499. (All of the above are US prices. Yes, overseas prices are higher. No, I don't want to get into why.) Adobe is introducing a new two-tier upgrade policy, whereby it will be cheaper to upgrade from CS3 than from older versions. Also, they have a three-versions-back policy, so if you have Illustrator CS, CS2, or CS3 you can upgrade, but if yours is older than that, you can't. You can upgrade from your Mac edition to a Windows edition if you've switched since your last purchase and you can switch to another language if you need to. You can upgrade to Dreamweaver CS4 from GoLive, Illustrator from Freehand, and InDesign from PageMaker. And yes, the educational pricing is still available. Oh, and yes, there is a policy in place that will provide a free upgrade to CS4 if you have recently purchased CS3, but unfortunately the page that details that policy doesn't state the exact date after which you have to have purchase CS3 in order to qualify. I'm trying to get that date from my Adobe contacts and will post a note here when I do.

As for details of the new features ... they are for the most part huge. Over the next few months, I will be doing a series of demos and user group meetings and possibly even video trainings of what's new in the products about which I'm most familiar (Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop will be first up), so stay tuned. You can of course visit the individual product pages (simply go to www.adobe.com/go/product_name) to see a list of some of the key features.

And then the last question I know everyone has: when can you get your hands on these? Adobe is mum as to an exact release date - all they are saying now is "mid-October." And trail versions should be out about a month later, so around mid-November.