MacDirectory Magazine

FEA TURE REVIEW actually as good as all the marketing hype you’ve been hearing. One more very cool feature if you’re in a rush: Mini Bridgebrings your Bridge asset management directly into Photoshop. You no longer have to bounce between the two applications. Fireworks CS5, often the overlooked sibling in the suite, has evolved into a real overachiever. It shamelessly absconded with a number of features (advanced typography, greatly improved vector tools, etc.) that would previously have forced you into a session with Illustrator. Another source of celebration is that the program’s traditionally stodgy performance has finally been fixed and it’s now an extremely snappy app. Flash Catalyst CS5was available in public beta through a good part of 2009, so it didn’t come as shocking revelation. What it means is that designers no longer have to be hard-core Flash hacks to take advantage of the program’s potential for glamorous interfaces. Catalyst’s own interface is based on a fairly original design concept and takes some getting used to, but the button-state and timeline paradigms make far more sense to normal people than traditional Flash stages, objects, libraries and ActionScript. For web designers, launching Illustrator CS5is like opening presents on Christmas morning. Aside from the oft-mentioned new tools like perspective drawing and the vector brush, a couple of less-hyped features will make a huge difference. “Align to Pixel Grid” clears up one of the longstanding annoyances of going from vector to raster graphics. It does pixel-level adjustments in positioning to guarantee sharp edges. Secondly, Illustrator inherited 9-slice scaling from Fireworks, offering something like a vector version Photoshop’s content-aware scaling. The Tools Rule If your main concern as a developer is helping others get their content online Dreamweaver CS5debuts two new capabilities that are gifts to webmasters. Even though Adobe would obviously like to you to use Cold Fusionor at least Contribute CS5, it has finally accepted the fact that a lot of folks have crossed over to open source content management systems (CMS) like Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress. These have been incorporated if not seamlessly at least adequately into Dreamweaver CS5. You’re able to work with templates, simulate live data, working with some great code hinting and debugging tools, and test sites thoroughly in a local sandbox. The program has also joined the mainstream with virtually complete integration with Apache’s open source Subversion version control system. There’s an additional payoff here for Flash- intensive shops, as we’ll see later. Dreamweaver now includes a full Webkit rendering engine to preview CSS and JavaScript elements without jumping to a browser. A new online service (initially free but eventually subscription-based) offers browser evaluations for a given page. Code hinting has tracking has been expanded to include CSS and, just before we went to press, Adobe released an update that adds HTML 5 tags to the feature. Flash CS5received some modest but welcome updates. The program now offers typographer-quality text rendering, making your design people quite happy and Flash now can store code snippets (much like the feature Dreamweaver has had for several generations. CS5 allows you to preview and manipulate video on the Stage rather than requiring that it be published and opened in a browser. Considering Flash’s accuracy in positioning and timing video (a particularly cool effect when using video with an alpha channel), this is a feature that is most welcome if not a bit overdue. Flash CS5 marks the debut of a new file format that will have a huge impact on group workflows: XFL. The XFL file is a text, XML-based document that acts as a manager for a bundle/folder of project source files. This makes it far easier for projects materials to be shared through a workgroup with all the source materials available in their original formats. And naturally, these bundles of files can be managed quite handily through Subversion. Adobe’s Flex Builderhas evolved into the new Flash Builderand this once separate (and expensive) tool is now bundled into Web Premium CS5, essentially as a free add-on. (It’s also available separately.) The goal here is to integrate Catalyst projects produced by designers, heavily scripted Flash Pro projects and the complex Flash Professional CS5 - Cue Points - Video Flash Professional CS5 - Text Features enterprise databases that power the sites in a familiar Eclipse development environment. Creative Suite 5, in general, made a spectacular debut, but in our opinion Web Premium was the real star of the show. It is going to make a huge difference in how a lot of people work and have a great impact on what the rest of us see. There’s been a lot of discussion about the future of Flash and the potential of HTML 5. The improved and greatly expanded usability of the Flash development tools in CS5 is a reminder that it may be a while before equally mature design and development environments hit the market for the new standard. Based on our experience with CS5 Web Premium, we wouldn’t be the bit surprised to see Adobe taking the lead in that arena, as well. Product Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Premium Made by Adobe Systems Price $1,799.99 (upgrade pricing starting at $599) Pros Numerous benefits for designers and developers; Addition of Flash Builder and Catalyst; Works with popular content and asset management tools Cons Web Standard no longer available System Requirements OS X 10.5.7 or later, Intel Multi-core CPU Rating ★★★★★ 118 MacDirectory

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