Adobe Creative Suite 3 rumors and reflections

Rumor site Think Secret has reported that Adobe Creative Suite 3 may be ready this year, working very closely with Apple and pushing to have the new software package into customer hands in mid-to-late fourth quarter of 2006. The big feature that Think Secret draws attention to is that Creative Suite 3 will be Universal Binary, meaning it will run natively on both Macs with PowerPC-based processors (G4 / G5 chips) and the new "Mactel" systems featuring Intel Core Duo processors without the need for emulation under Rosetta, however there is much more to love about CS3, should the rumors be true.

In addition to be Universal Binary, a significant change to the Creative Suite in version 3 is the operating system requirements; support for OS 10.2 and 10.3 are being dropped in favor of 10.4 and 10.5 being required to run the applications. There may be some who are upset about this, but it's a very, very good thing. In order to properly illustrate the benefits, let me call a personal testimonial to attention: The entire Creative Suite 2 was very slow in comparison with the original Creative Suite, yet there really weren't enough new features to it to justify such poor performance. My PowerMac G5 with dual 2.5gHz processors and 1 gb of RAM can take up to 10 minutes to perform an operation as basic as "Save" if it's been in use for a little while, or especially if you're running multiple CS2 apps at once. Having Photoshop CS2 and InDesign CS2 running simultaneously can slow your system to a crawl, prompting many situations featuring the appearance of the spinning beach ball of doom. It is because of this that I tend to use my CS1 version software as often as I can before being in need of the new features of CS2, otherwise it's more of a waste of time than anything else, there is just too much time spent waiting for something to complete. InDesign CS2 was the first instance I'd ever seen a status bar on screen while saving a document, and at work I use a second generation PowerMac G4 with dual 1gHz processors and 1 gig of RAM and runs CS1. If my personal system that leaves my work computer in the dust is seeing save status bars, you know that there's a significant amount of bulk to these applications.

Basically, what the system requirements of 10.4 means for you the designer is that CS3 should fly in comparison with CS2 or even CS1. A brief history of OSX: with each .x build, things changed dramatically and it was very evident with both use and by looking at all the applications and versions of recurring applications that were exclusive to each .x build. For example, Safari was debuted under OS 10.3, but was never available for OS 10.2, simply because the operating system couldn't support it. It wasn't just a cheap ploy to get people to upgrade to the next version of OSX every year, the operating system literally changed so much between versions that a previous version wouldn't support it. This caused lots of headaches for third part software developers, as they found themselves having to do a fair amount of work, sometimes a great amount of work, every year in order to make their applications for 10.2 be able to run on 10.3 and then on 10.4. With CS2, Adobe had to make all the applications be able to run on OS 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4 and with the aforementioned changes in each OS version, you can see how that would make for a great deal of excess code bogging down the application. For comparison, CS1 (previously stated as being noticeably faster than CS2) was created for OS 10.2 and 10.3 and simply worked under 10.4. With CS3 being only compatible with OS 10.4 (and reportedly 10.5, however at this point OSX has come to the point it will more likely than not stay at and simply work on polish, bug fixes and new features), the Adobe developers will be able to dump any excess code that is giving support to previous builds of OSX. As a side note, however very notable, CS3 is also rumored to take advantage of features that are built-in to OS 10.5, codenamed "Leopard". In addition to the trimming of code contributing to an increase of speed, Photoshop CS3 is said to take advantage of video card acceleration to take some of the load off of both the processor and the system RAM, which will greatly help with multitasking and being able to run the whole Creative Suite at once with less system / application slowdown. In pure speculation on my part, I'm personally hoping that Photoshop CS3 will also take advantage of Apple's Core Image technology, allowing developers to leverage the system GPUs for much faster image processing, forfeiting the need for pixel-level programming for this image processing. This would make a Mactel tower (rumored to me called the Mac Pro) process filters extremely quickly, cutting down on downtime and optimizing design time. It's a very exciting prospect that I really hope will be a reality.

Speaking of filters, Photoshop CS3 is said to contain new Live Filters, which provide non-destructive editing to photos, meaning if you apply a filter to an image and the next day decide you don't like it or there is a better filter to use, you can un-apply the old filter and apply a new one to the same image, without a need to have the filter be permanent or the need for a hidden layer with an original version of the photo that hasn't been tampered with at all. Photoshop is also supposed to be inheriting the InDesign palette system, where they can be docked to the side and can be slid in and out from the left and right sides of your screen. Photoshop may also be released in 2 different versions, a standard and a premium version, as the complete Creative Suite has offered from it's inception. There will be little difference between the two from what is said in the article, however the standard version will be without Video I/O and rotoscoping tools. Features such as Live Filters will be appearing in the standard version, so if it brings a cheaper price tag, it could be quite helpful for those looking to buy Photoshop but don't need the more advanced, specialized features.

With Illustrator CS3, the developers are hoping to reach a level of Illustrator 8-like performance, it will be including video setups like Photoshop currently has and an eraser that is supposed to mimic the behavior of the eraser of Photoshop, which will be interesting to say the least. Probably the most exciting feature aside from the increased performance that's known of now is the new Live Color palette that will function as a "color picker on steroids," automatically selecting complement colors and creating an appropriate color palette when a user selects a single color. A significant amount of effort is also being made to enhance the software's integration and compatibility with Flash, which Adobe gained through the purchase of Macromedia.

At this current point in time, very little is known of Acrobat 8, GoLive CS3 and InDesign CS3, so hopefully more information about those will surface very soon. With Quark making (or claiming to make) significant leaps forward with their Quark XPress 7 page layout and design application and promising that it's a whole new Quark. Adobe needs to keep well ahead of Quark with InDesign CS3 and match and surpass Quark 7 features if they hope to continue to gain market share, or especially to prevent any loss of market share if Quark 7 turns out to be a very quality product. Personally, I'm skeptical, especially since Quark 7 doesn't feature any hotkeys for simple tools such as the selection tool, text tool, etc. For that reason alone, InDesign stands in my mind as the superior product simple from a time efficiency standpoint. InDesign also features transparency and much better support for PDF creation, things like that. Quark 7 is supposed to feature an accelerated transparency support, allowing for individual colors to be manipulated in certain ways by the same drop shadow and things like that. Sounds impressive, but at the same time it sounds like it could be ridiculous and create more problems than creative solutions. Only time and release will tell. Quark 7 is slated to be released fourth quarter 2006, which is no doubt another reason why Adobe wants to release CS3 at that time as well.

More information on the latest Creative Suite will be posted as it comes across my field of view.

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