Friday, May 04, 2007

CS3 Suite First Impressions

Just got my hands on the Adobe CS3 Suite. I wasn't too impressed with a lot of it but Illustrator is way better with the Flash/Fireworks type features..particularly the Styles and Symbols workflow. They have a dumb name for editing symbols called "Isolation Mode"..that's an attractive name, don't you think? Yeah..it's editing an object oriented graphic by just double clicking on it and they give it the name "isolation-mode"...too funny.

The two things I was disappointed with are the presence of the inferior Info Palette and the range of the Find and Replace tool. I had hoped they would drop the non-interactive Info Panel in favor of the Property Inspector that all Macromedia apps have. When I select something in Flash, Fireworks or Dreamweaver and I want it to to be flushed to the upper left corner of the canvas/stage/page..or whatever, I can select the object, go to the Properties Palette and put the number zero in the x and y coordinates and wham!- the object is is positioned exactly where I want it!

Also, in MM apps like Fireworks I can Find and Replace any property but in Adobe the scope is limited to text-based properties.
I love that kind of control cuz I'm used to dealing with code and I like changing an objects size and position in precise, numeric fashion but sadly, Adobe did not adopt this and the info palette is still just an informative type of feedback rather than an actual interactive control over the properties of an object.


If you want that kind of control, you'll just have to stick with Flash or Fireworks and that's fine with me. I still like Photoshop's brushes and pixel-level controls over Fireworks but for prototyping, Fireworks is still the best with the new Illustrator and any version of Flash coming in a close second.