Things I hope are in Adobe Creative Suite 3
The new Intel Core-powered Macs have been very well-received by the buying public: those iMacs and MacBook Pros are just flying off the shelves, by all current indications.
Professional Mac users are taking a wait-and-see approach, though. New Intel Core-based pro workstations probably won’t be out till summer, and most professional apps haven’t been rewritten or recompiled as Universal Binaries.
Among these are some of Apple’s own Pro apps - Final Cut Studio is supposed to ship as Universal this month, and Logic Pro was a little late out of the gate, too. Large audio-visual and music applications like Propellerhead Reason are also delayed, or, like Ableton Live, available in beta form only.[Update, March 30: Apple released Universal versions of its Pro apps the the day I wrote this!]
The biggest barrier to pro adoption is, of course, the 800-lb gorilla of the industry, Adobe.
In a refreshingly candid blog post, Adobe engineer Scott Byer writes about the difficulties of switching programming toolsets. For Macintosh development, they use Metrowerks’ CodeWarrior, which according to most tests, compiles cleaner, faster code than Apple’s native compiler, XCode, particularly for large object-oriented apps like Photoshop or Illustrator.
But for the moment, XCode is the only way to get apps into Universal Binary format. Switching toolsets also means changing debugging and QA practices, which is costly and time-consuming, so it’s quite likely that we’re not going to see a fully native CS3 until 2007. In the meantime, the suite seems to run fine, albeit slower, using OS X’s Rosetta “translator” for PowerPC-compiled applications.
With this extra time before CS3 appears, maybe Adobe can address some interface inconsistencies between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign:
- How about putting that Palette Dock from Photoshop into the other apps?
- How about putting the Glyphs palette from InDesign and Illustrator into Photoshop? For web designers who use special characters or dingbat fonts, this is a godsend.
- In fact, how about InDesign-style type controls in all three apps (paragraphs, character, and user-definable style palettes?)
- Whatever happened to plain old pattern fills, like diagonal lines? I mean, MacPaint had that.
Readers, any other ideas?
March 29, 2006 1:25 PM
Comments
multiple layer opacity and layer style changes (simultaneously)
wrote shawn on March 29, 2006 4:39 PM
Oh yeah. Here’s another one: Swatch palettes in Photoshop.
wrote AJ Kandy on April 10, 2006 10:18 AM
So with you on the glyph- and type-palettes…
And one other thing I’d like to see is the ability to use Cmd+1, Cmd+2 and Cmd+0 to zoom to 100%, 200% and fit-on-screen, in Photoshop, like in InDesign…
Also; I’d like to see a more intuitive and powerful system for pagenumbering in InDesign (“Page A of B in Chapter X, and of C total pages”)
Also; I would personally like to see a tighter integration between all the programs… The ability to edit levels on an imported photo in InDesign, or to tweak a path from Illustrator, as you’re editing the image in Photoshop, for instance… I’m dreaming, I know…
AND - Lightroom ought to be part of the next CS… Just my two cents…
wrote John on March 29, 2006 3:00 PM