Rob Huddleston

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.

Adobe is going to official unveil CS4 on Sept. 23. Specific details – including things such as which products exactly will be included in CS4 and when exactly it will be released – are still not available, and are in fact exactly what will be announced on the 23rd.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay area, you can attend a special joint meeting of the bay area Adobe user groups on Sept. 30 to get your fill of CS4 goodness. Stay tuned here for more details on that.

My user group in the Sacramento area will also be holding a CS4 announcement event the following day – Oct. 1. Again, check back here or take a look at our website for details in the coming weeks.

If you aren’t in either of those areas, then I’d urge you to find a local user group. Most user groups around the world will be holding events in the week or so following the 23rd, so don’t miss out!

Adobe has (rather quietly) announced the release of Creative Suite 3.3. Primarily, the release is merely adding the new version of Acrobat – version 9 – to the suite, replacing the now-outdated version 8. However, in a very surprising move that I don’t think is getting nearly enough attention, they have also reconfigured the Design Premium package so that it includes Fireworks.

Personally, I never quite understood the original configuration, where Design Premium included Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, InDesign, Flash and Dreamweaver, while Web Premium removed InDesign and replaced it with Fireworks and Contribute. I can see the start of the logic there: the Design Premium was targeted at print designers, while web was for, obviously, web designers. Actually the Web Premium package was a great set of tools for web designers. But Design Premium, if it was truly for print professionals, should not have included Dreamweaver and Flash, both of which are strictly for web use. More important, however, was the fact that there aren’t too many folks out there these days that wear just a “print designer” or “web designer” hat, so many folks needed both InDesign and Fireworks, and the only package that included both was the very expensive Master Collection.

There’s another issue with excluding Fireworks, and unfortunately including it now isn’t going to help, but so far every one of the training centers I work for have decided to purchase Design Premium. That means that if they are looking at the suite and deciding what classes to offer, they might not even remember that Fireworks exists, and will be much less likely to want to offer it if it means an additional software package. So overall, I think that its original exclusion has probably had a very detrimental effect on the product, but Adobe’s decision to make it part of Design Premium now should help that a lot, and may get some folks to upgrade if they haven’t already because they couldn’t get both of the tools they wanted. I only hope that this decision carries through to CS4 – in fact, I hope that with CS4 they do away with the Web Premium package altogether.

Early this morning, Adobe released public betas of the next versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth. All three are available for free download from the Adobe Labs site.

The betas will work for 2 days, unless you have a valid serial number for one of the CS3 packages, in which case the beta will function until the final version ships, most likely sometime later this year.

The Adobe Labs site provides details of many of the new features of these products. The site also provides a link to the public forums where you can share feedback and report bugs.