I spent the whole day today (with teh Corsair) at the official launch of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3, which was held at the Rizal Ballroom of Shangri-la Hotel Makati. I didn’t take notes but here’s the gist of it: oohhs, ahhs, and applause.
Seeing the new features in each standalone program was delightful already (especially the impressive little details that gets the job done faster), but CS3 took things to the next level with tight integration from one product to the other. And I mean tight. All their presentations revolved around an imaginary product, Aquo, for which they created different advertising campaigns from print to web to video. Each presentation moved back and forth to at least two products (e.g. Premiere, After Effects, Sound Booth). Most memorable points:
- Photoshop plays well with 3D and animations!
- After Effects is so powerful with its puppet effects and brainstorming!
- Dreamweaver reports CSS browser bugs! (Who cares about the IE6 double float bug, anyway? I do.)
- The CS3 program icons were sort of distracting. I still don’t think they’re as refined as the previous looks of Adobe/Macromedia products, or even the current product packaging and the whole Creative License campaign.
Adobe is also aggressively pushing Flash as a mobile platform—not only with games but as the interface itself—with the help of Device Central. It’s an extremely intuitive development environment for mobile phones and a far cry from, say, the J2ME tools we used just two years ago in our mobile computing elective. (They have complete specs for the latest and unannounced phones!) Web tools Kuler (color tool) and Spry (JavaScript framework for AJAX) from Adobe Labs were mentioned.
Finally, we discovered the key difference between Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended: the latter had specialized features catering to medical, architectural, and engineering industries. Geeky and somewhat gory stuff, but we enjoyed it!
Of course the biggest highlight of the day was the goodie bag! It was gratifying enough going home with an Adobe CS3 paper bag with a glossy brochure in it! Yes, even if we didn’t win any raffle prize—we had no business cards to drop in the first place. (Regnard won an HP LaserJet though!)
Do I wish I had my hands on my CS3 already? Yes. Do I wish it were Premium instead of Standard? Yes. Do I wish it were the Master Collection instead? Hell yeah!