Adobe Creative Suite 4

One of the most important tools for people in my industry is Adobe's Creative Suite. I probably use Photoshop more than any other product. And today is the day adobe released CS4.

I have just finished watching the special one hour event, and I must admit that I am very excited about the news. The most important feature is, without a doubt, their focus on time-savers and integration. That is, they have made a lot of things many times faster to do, either by speeding up the process - or by reducing the number of step you had to take to do something cool. That alone is worth the money for an upgrade.

They have also made the integration between each product much more flexible and consistent, which is great news for me, because I don't do everything myself. In fact, when it comes to video and flash I turn to my colleagues that are much more skilled at these things.

We also use CS3 to automate a ton of things that we normally had to do manually, and I really hope that Adobe had improved that as well - although I have not been able to find any news about automation, and CS4 scripting.

Of course, the new features are also - always - very exciting, but to me, the workflow is where the gold is.

I must admit that I am super-excited about the new content aware scaling. I very often have to scale images in ways that is usually a nightmare. I have to make a horizontal image fit into a landscape box on the web (almost everything is landscape on the web), or even worse - make a tall image fit into landscape mode on a mobile phone (that is usually a killer).

Another very interesting development is Flash 10, which is going to allow us to do a lot more than what we used to do. Apart from built in 3D (YEAH!), it also has built in hardware acceleration support. One of the biggest issues with Flash these days is that it is insanely slow. If you have ever tried to do multi-layered effects, or handle 200 elements at once, then you will know what I am talking about. Flash 10, supposedly, solves this.

I have not tried out Adobe CS4 yet. But I will be sure to get my hands on it as soon as I can.