The focus of the Adobe Shortcut to Brilliant Tour was Creative Suite 4 – this time held in Birmingham at the Odeon, just a few minute walk from New Street Station. I don’t use the train very often but always find train journeys interesting – there was no seating space so many of us had to stand and I felt a little left out as I didn’t have a portable music player with me.

Adobe always insist on us printing out and taking our barcodes for various sessions, but these were all scanned up front much to my surprise meaning there was very little way of knowing who actually attended which sessions; in addition the venues appear to have swapped around which meant I ended up in the wrong session (although there was an initial hot drink and a biscuit early on the lack of refreshments are often disappointing at Adobe events – best to take something with you). I stayed in the wrong first session as I found the Web Premium session interesting and the two speakers Steve Newberry and Matt Wicks were friendly and engaging.

The main pitch of the day we were told was “Adobe revolutionises how the world engages with ideas and information” and this involves tracking, managing, automating and deriving value from our assets. We were also told it was “time to step out of our comfort zones and consider embracing video, the web and other technologies after print”. The four main areas the tour would focus on were Video, Rich Internet Applications, Web sites and Cross-Media Publishing all based on CS4. In Summary CS4 consists of 16 products, 14 technologies, 7 services, 6 suites, 19 languages across 178 countries.

The application keynote did “quit unexpectedly” which made an interesting start to the morning – the whole thing was run off Apple Macs much to the delight of the presenters who couldn’t resist a bit of Microsoft bashing. The session was slightly marred by the lack of an Internet connection which meant some of the new features could not be demonstrated as intended.

The new starting point, and the starting point for the session, is Bridge which provides a visual cue of the workspace to make sense of information and it certainly seems to have undergone some work. Anyone familiar with Microsoft MMC may well be at home in Bridge and a few new features have been added (as well as tidied up) including a new breadcrumb trail and a carousel selection view (Ctrl-B) which allows you to view images in a now familiar carousel format – pressing the down arrow ditches images – when carousel view is closed all the carousel images left are automatically selected.

This led to Photoshop and one of the major advances in Photoshop is the hardware acceleration providing by the graphical processing unit (GPU) and this did appear to provide a huge performance improvement when manipulating images, in particular zooming, and rotating the canvas (another new feature). Images can be zoomed to 3200% with a pixel grid. This was demonstrated using Apple’s new gesture track pad though from what I saw the technology, whilst playful, must still be in its infancy. As well as the hardware acceleration, the wow factor was brought about by a new content aware scaling feature which allows images to be stretched out of aspect but somehow attempts to maintain aspect of essential image features (there are caveats to this feature and a number of options to get the best out of it such as protecting flesh tones and using masks may need be applied). New 3D features including live painting and performance improvements were only briefly touched on.

When the session moved onto Illustrator we were asked what the single biggest asked for feature might be – I suggested AutoSave only to be told “Most people do not like auto save as it takes away their choice” – strange, it is quite useful in InDesign, but I guess Adobe have done their homework on this. In fact the biggest asked for feature apparently is multiple art boards (rather than multiple pages) – each art board can have its own dimensions. On-art gradient controls have also been added, together with an opacity control to allow transparent gradients; which fixes the disjointed nature of gradients. The Blob brush was also demonstrated allowing vector images to be manipulated in a similar way that the brush is used to draw in Photoshop.

Flash gets the hardware acceleration feature and can manipulate 3D and use bones – bones can be assigned to shapes (multiple bones within a shape) which can manipulate a shape in extremely interesting ways. H.264 high definition movie files can now also be imported extending the video facilities.

Fireworks and Dreamweaver were also demonstrated but as I do not actively use these two products it would be difficult to put the new features into any real context. We were told that the saving for web algorithms of fireworks were more sophisticated than those in Photoshop – the demonstration shows a file saved in Photoshop as 28Kb but the same save in Fireworks leading to 12Kb. A feature that did appeal to me in Dreamweaver was the new Live View and Live Code features. The Live View uses a built in browser renderer to live preview a file and the live code shows the result of the code as it is rewritten (due to hover over’s, etc). The Code Navigator also shows what styles are currently affecting a particular area at a particular moment. A Live Update feature was demonstrated but for some unexplained reason this did not work in the demonstration.

Time ran short towards the end of the session but brief introductions of a few new features of Acrobat were demonstrated. If like us you often need to zip up a bunch of files to send to a customer then find you need to include a detailed explanation of how these things relate then you may find the new Portfolio feature useful. Portfolio allows Acrobat to deliver a bunch of disparate files into a container with a customisable layout and header page – current options include a grid, sliding row, on a backdrop or revolve (carousel). The process seems simple enough: choose a layout, add a welcome message/header, select a colour scheme, specify the file defaults then publish the portfolio. The portfolio can then be saved as a file, emailed or shared on acrobat.com.

Reasons I could see to upgrade:

• Hardware Acceleration
• Improvements to Bridge
• Content aware scaling
• Multiple Art boards in Illustrator
• Blob Brush in Illustrator for manipulating Vectors
• Motion Editor and Easers in Flash
• Bones in Flash
• H.264 Import in Flash
• Live View, Live Code and Code Navigator in Dreamweaver
• Acrobat Portfolio Builder

Final Note: The demonstrations at these seminars are always too simple which is a shame. We were told about the new hardware acceleration features, the transparent gradients, zooming in and a myriad of other functions. How was this demonstrated? They drew a square on the screen and spun it around a few times – which did not exactly light my fire. Had I just watched a professional designer do something impressive for the two hours I might have been tempted to upgrade on the spot. There was clearly the material available to provide an outstanding experience seemingly based on some movie: Double Identity but this wasn’t really delved into (unless I missed that session).

Related

• Notes on the Adobe Creative License Tour
• PHP: Session Variables
• Photoshop Shortcut Poster
• Acrobat Roadshow
• Notes on MSDN: Developing on the Windows Live Platform