Adobe has recently released version 5.5 of its Creative Suite packages. Having recently upgraded to CS5 from a mixed CS3/CS4 environment, I had to ask myself if it's worth both the trouble and expense to upgrade at this point.

The short answer is no. I'm not really sure why Adobe felt this was a necessary update that they felt was worthy of charging money for.

The long answer...well, I'm good at the long answer. Hold tight.

The Whole Enchilada: CS5.5

First off, this release is numbered a bit differently than previous releases. It's a point update (CS5.5), so it's not quite a full update warranting an entirely new version number (CS6). Previous Creative Suites have used whole numbers, with the applications themselves updating their revision numbers as patches have been released (Photoshop 10.01, for example).

This fact in itself makes me wonder: is this simply a bugfix release with a ton of marketing and an actual purchase price behind it? The list of updated applications would seem to indicate this is the case. There are numerous improvements across the board to a few of the applications, but others receive no update that I can see.

What Wasn't Updated

Photoshop, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, and Fireworks are still CS5. For most users, this means that there is no reason to upgrade. Adobe should continue to support these versions with patches (as long as they don't start charging for those too) until the next full release comes out.

I'm pretty disappointed in this, because there are still numerous issues with Photoshop alone that haven't been addressed (this problem is ongoing). Adding GPU acceleration is great, except that most artists I know end up turning it off. And we're still stuck with layers not able to be dragged between tabbed windows.

Acrobat

Acrobat X Pro adds improved integration with Microsoft products, including Office 2010 (meaning the icons look like they belong in Office 2010 now) and Sharepoint. It also adds online file sharing, which I'm sure won't be exploited any time soon, and a new fullscreen viewing mode. There's also a wizard for creating PDFs, and an improved toolbar.

InDesign

Admittedly, I don't use InDesign much (or at all), so I won't go into too much detail. It doesn't look like much to me, but feel free to check for yourself (warning: Adobe randomly changes their site around from time-to-time, so, sorry if the link is broken).

Audition

I pay for this thing every time I upgrade, but after the first time, I'll likely never use it again unless I need to mix multichannel audio. Oh yeah, 5.5 adds native multichannel 5.1 support. There is also project exchange with other NLEs. I still think this application falls far short of Cool Edit and Sound Forge, but at least it will visually match your other Creative Suite applications. Dark grey for the win!

Dreamweaver

Now, it's been quite some time since I used Dreamweaver (back when it was a Macromedia product, actually), but it's an application I know pretty well that works in a field I know very well.

In version 5.5, Dreamweaver adds CSS3/HTML5 support, which is interesting since neither of those specs are finalized yet. I'm guessing further patches will make corrections to these specs as they evolve. There is also a multiscreen preview so that you can view your output on multiple devices at once.

Dreamweaver looks like it's as suited for modern web design as it's always been. It's not the way I prefer to do my web work, but if you like Dreamweaver you'll probably be happy with the upgrade overall.

After Effects

It really looks like After Effects got the lion's share of changes this time around. Stereoscopic 3D is far improved for this version, and it looks like anaglyph rendering is no sweat, either. The cameras actually have a true bokeh blurring filter now, so no more multi-layer nightmares for depth-of-field. This pleases me.

The Warp Stabilizer tool is worth its own paragraph, for sure. This thing takes most of the work out of stabilizing footage. It will analyze your scene and automatically smooth out the motion, and can crop and scale the edges to fit your composition to the smallest necessary (or largest possible. if you've done footage stabilization, you know what I'm talking about). It looks like Adobe has put the seam carving (aka content-aware scaling) algorithm to good use here, as After Effects can fill in the now-missing border data from adjacent frames. Pretty impressive stuff (seriously, go check out the videos).

Given the improvements to cameras and lighting, as well as 3D stereoscopy and camera tracking, I'd say After Effects 5.5 is a definite improvement.

Flash Professional

Flash Professional 5.5 shows mostly incremental improvements over CS5. Most changes appear geared toward mobile content development. I have opinions on this, but those are outside the scope of this already lengthy post.

The Flash team has always been very involved with the user community, and there are improvements on this front as well. There are TLF (Text Layout Framework) control improvements, streamlined publish window (THANK you, that thing was really starting to show its age), as well as...(drum roll)...autosave. Whooo.

Flash development cycles generally seem to alternate between tools for developers and tools for designers. In CS5 (v10.1), we first received the TLF. In CS4 (v10), we were blessed with rudimentary 3D support (aka flying cards in space).

Of course, I see absolutely no mention of Molehill on the CS5.5 page, so I guess that's a wash for this version. Stick to FlashDevelop or FDT.

Conclusion

Yes, finally, the conclusion. So, is it worth the upgrade? I'd say it depends. This upgrade is probably worth it to you if you:

• Absolutely must have all the latest versions of all your software (usually thieves care more about this than people who spend money on it, but whatever. I'm not judging)
• Have dumptrucks full of cash you must spend
• Need the Twitter cred

So, other than these very limited (and totally plausible!) situations, I'd say CS5.5 is a cash-grab for Adobe, since most of this crap could have been released in a patch (and should have). Alright, with the exception of After Effects, Audition, and Dreamweaver. If you use any of these three regularly, they might be worth the individual upgrade, but certainly not worth upgrading the entire suite.

So, sorry Adobe, all this is doing is making you look greedy.

I actually wrote this last week for a project I'm working on, so imagine my surprise when I see Grant Skinner's post on 9-slice scaling bitmaps in Flash.

His method uses a JSFL script to pre-slice bitmaps into separate MovieClips, which is great, because it's otherwise a complete pain. Mine works on a different principle, and is for runtime use.

My Slice9Bitmap script uses the pixel data from the Bitmap passed into the constructor, then transfers the appropriate pixel data to each slice, ensuring perfect stretching. Attempting to stretch the entire bitmap beforehand is...messy (also, why you can't do 9-slice scaling with pure CSS2/Javascript (outside of canvas)).

Currently, there is no boundary checking (other than for negative values), so it's up to you to implement this. Alternatively, you could wait until I add more features (which could be anywhere from weeks to months, honestly).

View Slice9Bitmap demo
Download Slice9Bitmap.as

Also, if you're not a hardcore Actionscript guy, Grant's method is quite ideal.

Adobe has decided to make more of a commitment to customer support. They are teaming up with a global service provider, so I assume that means outsourced phone support. The best place to take your change requests is the Adobe Feature Request form.

This is a really, really long post. It's long both because the Adobe Creative Suite 4 is vast and encompasses many software packages, but also because I found a great deal of things to complain about. While complaining is nothing new for me, finding this many problems with a mature software product is.

In this post, first I will detail the problems I encountered using the CS4 products, some action items for Adobe, state a few positives, and an overall conclusion. I do not intend to review all of the new features (which are many).

Note that this post is about the Windows version. I believe many of these issues are not present on a Mac system, but I can't make any assumptions, because I do not own a Mac, nor have I used CS4 on a Mac.

Photoshop

We'll start with Photoshop, because I'm guessing that the majority of people experiencing a CS4 product will be using Photoshop CS4.

First, the interface, which was the source of the lion's share of the problems I had with CS4.

Photoshop CS4 changes things up by presenting a mostly familiar interface, but uses custom window chrome. All of the curves have been taken out of panels, which you may remember from CS or CS2. CS3 featured more standard-looking tabs on its panels.

I actually don't have a problem with the panel tabs, as the new look is very clean. I also understand the reasoning behind removing the window chrome, as it presents a bit more usable space with the menubar riding the top edge. I guess it's more Mac-like, but it does break with Windows convention, which is to have a titlebar. Not a huge deal, but it does present additional problems (more on this later).

One thing about the tabs I do have a problem with, however, is the way tabbed documents were implemented. The tabbed interface makes it impossible to drag layers from one document to another. If you drag a layer over a background document's tab, it simply does nothing. Dropping the item there also does nothing.

When I drag an item onto a taskbar button in Windows, Windows warns me that I can't drop an item there. If I hold an item over a taskbar button, after a brief pause, that window will open, allowing me to drag and drop no matter how many windows I have open.

The workaround to this tabbing problem is to either arrange your document windows into actual windows, which sucks if you have more than a few documents open, or drag the tab of the document away from the dock, which results in its own floating window, which you can then drag layers into. This is a pain in the ass, because the default behavior is to open documents in tabs. You can change this behavior by opening Edit > Preferences > Interface, and deselecting the "Open Documents as Tabs" checkbox.

Many times, when using the Polygonal Lasso tool, my screen would go white with only the top toolbar visible until I closed the lasso. I could not see the canvas or previous lasso selection, despite it still being there once the problem corrected itself. This all happened on my home office machine, which has hardware acceleration turned off. I haven't encountered the issue at my office office, but I don't do a whole lot of lassoing there. Sorry, don't have screenshots of this.

Speaking of hardware acceleration (which is a really cool feature, and I'm sure works flawlessly on Macs), there is no software fallback for canvas rotation. On my home machine, the embedded Intel chip is not up to snuff for hardware (using shared graphics RAM), so I have no hope of ever using this feature there. A bit lame, since that's where I would use it the most (where I color comics). The obvious solution is to upgrade my machine, but I don't understand why even a crappy-performing software rotation couldn't have been included. Given that these guys are graphics programmers working on an image editing tool, I can't think of a good excuse for not including it.

At the office, I had to hack my driver files just to be able to upgrade them so that hardware acceleration would work at all. Now that it works, I still get strange visual artifacts from time to time that tells me maybe this feature wasn't as ironed-out as Adobe would have you believe.

There is a drop shadow around every document by default, unless you're in fullscreen mode. This drives me crazy for buttons and the like, especially ones that already have drop shadows. For full-size canvases, it's a nice effect, but rather pointless. You can disable this by going to Edit > Preferences > Interface, and changing all "Border" dropdowns to "None."

Photoshop still has limited PNG support, which is strange for two reasons: 1. Adobe owns Fireworks, which has far more PNG features included. The code is already in Adobe's codebase, somewhere. 2. This is around the fifth or six major version to Photoshop.

Update (8-26-2009): Many plugins still don't give visual feedback on what they're doing, and don't present a uniform interface. Radial blur doesn't offer a preview, so you just have to guess where it's going to apply, or center your artwork on the point you want it to be applied. This interface hasn't changed since I've started using Photoshop, since version 6.

Illustrator

I actually had nothing to complain about in Illustrator, and encountered no problems. Its UI highly resembles Photoshop and Flash.

Audition

I did not get a chance to review Audition CS4, but CS3 seemed way too bloated for normal use. I ended up using Sound Forge for my needs, which starts in 1/3 the time and I don't need to wait on the interface to load.

Bridge

In Adobe Bridge, you can't specify UNC paths. I'll take a shot in the dark and say this is because of Adobe's Mac roots. To load anything from a network, I have to have a location mapped to a drive letter. In this era, with multiple NASes and large networks, this isn't a very feasible option. I already have some 10 locations mapped to drives because of our domain policy, so I don't get a choice. It becomes a bit inconvenient to dedicate more drive letters solely for Bridge.

Flash

Flash is my specialty, so I use this software quite a bit. The CS4 version has shown huge improvements in stability and features, and I had no issues using it so far, other than its really slow startup time (starting Flash 8 and CS4 at the same time was an interesting experiment). Like Photoshop, it uses custom window chrome. Actually, Flash and Photoshop are the only two applications in CS4 that have any sort of consistency.

Update (8-25-2009):Ah, yes. How could I have forgotten? Flash still has the problem that if you delete things from your library and re-save the file, the filesize stays the same, forcing you to use the clunky "Save and Compact" command (which is a hack on Macromedia/Adobe's part for the process of "save as a different filename, then copy this newly compacted file over the old file"). This sometimes causes problems on network drives, as the temporary intermediate file won't delete automatically.

Flash still has the odd unexplainable issue, such as certain movies not displaying bitmaps because "one or more items in the scene could not be displayed because of insufficient memory." I have a machine with 2 GB of ram, and it's a 30 MB file, so I assume it's a different error with really undescriptive text. It's the same error that Flash 7 displayed on the same file. Whoo, progress!

Premiere Pro

Like previous versions, Premiere Pro uses standard window chrome. It looks nearly the same as previous versions, save for darker UI. It uses dockable panels like the rest of the CS4 products, but unlike Flash and Photoshop, the panel titles are not in uppercase, and use a different font. It's clear the UX guys for the web and video product teams aren't communicating.

Also true to the Premiere Pro legacy, CS4 leaves files scattered all over my various drives. On each export, Premiere Pro copies the .prproj file to my Temp folder, renaming each subsequent save. I found files named Project_Name_25.prproj (with all previous versions there too). Normally, this isn't a problem, but at the office we work with .prproj files that are 15MB and more. It adds up.

Add to this, there are numerous files cached in Documents and Settings/[user]/Application
Data/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files, and also Documents and Settings/[user]/Application
Data/Adobe/Common/Media Cache. After wondering why I kept running out disk space on C:, I have my answer (before you accuse my disk of being too small, we use C: as an OS/programs drive, and D: as our working drive).

Not only does it cache these media files in multiple locations, conformed audio files (.cfa) are cached in (depending on your version) Documents and Settings\[user]\My Documents\Adobe\Premiere Pro\[1.5|2.0|4.0]\Adobe Premiere Pro Preview Files. These files are stored in addition to your actual working folder (where you saved the .prproj file), autosave, and preview folders. That makes...what, five different locations that Premiere Pro uses to store files?

Like previous versions, you still cannot defer conforming audio when loading new media into the project. It runs in the background, which is nice, but when you have on the order of several hundred media files, it would be nice to defer a large chunk of them later if I'm not working on those files. Additionally, every time Premiere Pro conforms audio, it cracks and pops my headphones enough to be painful. So I get to either wait for conforming to finish, or disable my audio.

In CS4 (and I don't know if this was the case in CS3 or not), there is no keyboard shortcut for Export, which is the new replacement for Export [Video|Audio|Image|etc]. I now see it has Ctrl+M as a shortcut, so maybe this was addressed in the 4.1.0 update. To export any media, you use the same command: File > Export > Media..., which opens Adobe Media Encoder. Even for a still image.

After Effects

Now, on to After Effects. After Effects is like the Photoshop of video. At least, that's what I tell laypeople. Actually, the only issue I had with After Effects was having it crash numerous times when I taxed it too hard. At the time, I think I was using Trapcode's Particular, so can't conclusively lay the blame at Adobe's feet.

Like Premiere Pro, it uses standard chrome and non-caps font for panel titles, along with orange outlining of active panels.

Media Encoder

So, speaking of Media Encoder, I had numerous problems with it on my first go-round, mostly relating to crashes and freezes. Whenever I would lock my workstation to step away while files were encoding, I would come back to a crash error in "PProHeadless.exe" relating to "[..\..\Src\AudioRender\StackAudioBuffer.cpp-58]" and my media would not be exported in the queue. Updating to 4.0.1 fixed the issue.

Because of the aforementioned crashes, I noticed that if output fails for any reason, duplicated files append "_1" even when no file of that name already exists. I guess it's keeping an internal counter? Not a big deal, but was annoying to rename output files numerous times.

Media Player

Adobe Media Player was a package I had not seen before, but am glad it was included. It is a bit heavy for what is essentially an .flv player. I know it plays other media, but I have other players (Media Player Classic, Quicktime, etc) for that. To play .flv files quickly, you'd be better off using an .flv codec, or downloading a free, lightweight, standalone player.

I noticed on our subtitled .flv files that Adobe Media Player does not show embedded cue point information. I found that fact strange for a player included in a media development suite developed by the same company.

Soundbooth

One application I was completely underwhelmed with was Soundbooth. Wow, this application is sluggish, and no longer resembles CoolEdit at all, in that it is slow and bloated, and CoolEdit was a lean, mean, audio editing machine. I actually wasn't going to make this comparison, as I know Syntrillium and Adobe have differing goals, but honestly, Adobe started it.

I found that Soundbooth was paged out of memory very quickly, even with a generous amount of RAM. This was noticeable because after leaving it minimized for a bit, dragging a file in from Explorer took quite some time.

My biggest problem was the interface. There is a tab that shows the currently opened file, but it contains a stupid dropdown on the tab for switching files instead of, say, using more tabs. This design choice has the benefit of closing all open documents when you try to close a single one using the "Close" icon in the tab, which directly opposed to tabbing behavior in Adobe's two flagship components of CS4, Flash and Photoshop. Oh, and every other tab in the universe.

There is also a "Search Help" box at the top-right. This seems to be the only application in the suite to have this feature. Using this box opens up Adobe search results. On testing, I found faster results with Google, as I could find things actually relevant to my search terms.

An issue I thought was horrible QA turns out to be simply weird font kerning. I don't know if it's my machine or poor font choice, but it looks awkward.

Action Items

1. Either put the regular chrome back onto Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator, like Premiere Pro, or use the custom chrome for all apps. Pick one. This suite feels like it was developed by three different companies (which it was, but now several versions have passed since these acquisitions).
2. Get the UI guys from each of your app groups together, and talk. Aside from "grey or dark grey buttons" there's little consistency between apps in the same suite. After Effects chrome is darker than Flash/Photoshop chrome, but matches Premiere Pro and the audio editors. All of the video applications use orange outlines, while the web and design applications use 3D-ish shading.
3. Allow users to choose which audio items NOT to conform in Premiere Pro. On our projects (approx. 6-hour videos), I sometimes have to wait almost an hour for all the audio to conform. It would be nice to disable conforming for an entire subset of my audio (maybe per-sequence?), or at the very least defer that subset until last, so I am free to export relevant portions of projects.
4. Create a setting to allow Premiere Pro to clean up after itself on exit, possibly with options for which items to clean up (cached media, Project_Name_25.prproj, and so on).
5. Change the name of Flash from "Flash CS4 Professional" to either "Flash CS4" or "Flash Professional CS4." It's the only app in the suite that doesn't end in "CS4" (Acrobat, Pixel Bender, and Device Central excluded). Premiere Pro is missing the CS4, so I'm not sure if they're going with the "4" or "CS4" on this one. Come on, Adobe. Don't you have a marketing and QA department for this? Please note that I would be happy to accept money from Adobe, having done this for you.
6. Allow items to be hovered over tabs in Photoshop if you must use this style of interface. Sometimes layers gotta get moved from one document to another.

Good Stuff

Now, onto a few positives, so you don't think that I just hate CS4 and change (get off my lawn).

If you are able to use the hardware acceleration that Photoshop provides, it's a pretty amazing experience. The canvas slides when using the hand tool, zooms are smooth, and of course you get the canvas rotation tool.

When I managed to crash After Effects (several times), it recognized a crash was "in progress," and immediately popped up the save project dialog. The crash warning is not modal, which allowed me to save my project before losing anything.

Routing every media export from Premiere Pro did annoy me slightly, but it does provide a huge productivity boost. While media is exporting, you can continue to work in Premiere Pro while Media Encoder does its thing. After Effects still uses its same Render Queue, strangely enough.

The features for photographers are too numerous for this already long post, but suffice it to say they are worth the upgrade cost.

Conclusion

Most of the problems I have with the CS4 suite are UI-related. For some reason, Adobe decided to completely throw away any semblance of using the native OS user interface (except, of course, those times they didn't). I do understand the need to have smaller dropdowns, trees, and buttons. I'd be fine with most of the custom UI if it were: 1. applied consistently, and 2. loaded quickly and was responsive. At the office, I'm not exactly on a slow machine, but many of these applications load their interfaces slowly. I can actually see various parts of the UI loading into memory. Isn't the point of the splash screen to do all this loading in the background first?

If you're a heavy Photoshop or Premiere Pro user, the CS4 package will most definitely serve you well. If you've got a top-end machine, Photoshop and After Effects will provide the most benefit to your workflow.

This is a script I wrote to batch publish an entire folder of .fla files. The script we use is far longer, as our version is for our courseware folders. In ours, we parse the filename of each to a CSV file with the chapter, section, sub-section, and duration of each .swf.

JSFL rocks.