Brian by Starlight

My First Impressions of Adobe Creative Suite 3

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 — 10:12pm (PDT)

My Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium upgrade arrived today and I wanted to maximize the likelihood of a successful installation, so I first uninstalled all of my other Adobe and Macromedia software except for the ancient and neglected yet still useful Macromedia FreeHand MX, which was not even updated for Macromedia Studio MX 2004, was left out of Macromedia Studio 8 entirely, and is now largely ignored by Adobe as though it were an unwanted stepchild. After that, I restarted my workstation to encourage Windows to release whatever resources, data, or applications it may have been holding onto after the installations. In 2007. In Windows Vista. In 2007 AD, that is. Or 2007 CE, if you prefer.

One of the first things I noticed on the packaging was a sticker declaring that "Acrobat 8 Professional installs and runs on Microsoft Windows Vista with some known issues"—a warning that does not seem to appear anywhere on the corresponding item page on Amazon.com. Also absent from that page is the "certified for 32-bit editions" disclaimer. In 2007. When most personal computers ship with 64-bit processors and many computer-savvy computer users who build at least some of their own systems—including me—have embraced 64-bit hardware by pairing it with 64-bit operating systems. These warnings were not encouraging, but I opened the package anyway and installed the entire suite.

The installation process took a very long time to complete, but it was mostly uneventful, so it gave me plenty of time to notice Adobe's curiously poor text in the installation window. Most people probably wouldn't even notice, but in my experience, most people do not seem to have very good communication skills, so that is not saying much and poor quality is poor quality regardless of how many people do or do not notice. To be more specific, there were plurality issues both on the CD label and in the title and body text within the installation window, there was inconsistent capitalization and punctuation in the latter, and there were even different names for the same product in various places.

Yes, Adobe refers to its own products by different names. The installer itself referred to my suite as "Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium"—the same name that appears on the box—but the folder it created in my Start menu is "Adobe Web Premium CS3" and the name used by the activation system is "Adobe Web Suite Premium CS3". I recall reading a blog article or comment (unfortunately, I don't recall the site or the author) from a Macromedia or Adobe employee (the merger may have been in progress, but not yet completed at that point) about people referring to Flash Professional 8 as "Flash 8 Professional"—or was it the other way around? If Adobe's employees cannot even get their own product names straight, why should they expect anyone else to?

I wrote that the installation process was mostly uneventful, but mostly is not completely. I was prompted with a "Files Needed" window that "The file 'AdobePDF.dll' on Windows Vista CD-ROM is needed" and even if I overlook the conflicting plurality, the omission of an article before "Windows Vista CD-ROM", the fact that Windows Vista is not even available on CD-ROM (that would be DVD-ROM), and the fact that I cannot insert anything into my DVD drive while it is already in use, I remain puzzled about why an Adobe installer would require a library file named after its own company and file-format from a different company's installation medium to install its own software. Whether that requirement is erroneous or merely odd, I may never know, but I clicked on the "Cancel" button in the "Files Needed" window, after which installation eventually continued (for a while, I thought it might have hung) and eventually completed with the installer reporting success for the installation of every individual application, including Adobe Acrobat.

I have thus far spent little time with the applications themselves, but through my brief exposure thus far, it seems that Fireworks CS3, Illustrator CS3, and Photoshop CS3 all still offer extensive yet accessible functionality, but with some compelling interface changes that may, upon growing accustomed to them, actually improve workspace organization and efficiency. I am very much looking forward to working with all three of them and exploring their new features.

Dreamweaver, unfortunately, still seems to be the same glorified text editor with decent FTP capabilities and half-ass project management capabilities that it has been for years, but now it features a less attractive logo and a different company name. It is still too stupid to open a .htaccess file upon double-clicking one and it still hides its function links instead of offering a proper function menu of any kind as any decent IDE should. Historically, Dreamweaver has sucked slightly less with each version, going from being unusable garbage with Dreamweaver MX to being tolerable yet still highly unpleasant garbage with Dreamweaver MX 2004 to being more tolerable yet still stinking, bug-infested garbage with Dreamweaver 8. Perhaps Dreamweaver CS3 is similarly more tolerable; through time and my nearly daily curse of using Dreamweaver, I should soon know. From what I have read of it—invalid markup generated by the Spry framework it now includes, for example—the outlook is not rosy. I may be forced to seek daily refuge with my beloved Illustrator (probably my favorite Adobe application) to recover from the horror of working with Dreamweaver.

I have barely touched Flash CS3 Professional yet, but from what I have seen of it so far and from all of my previous Flash experience, I fully expect to simultaneously love and hate it. Such is the way of Flash.

I haven't gotten to the other applications in the suite yet, but I may develop this entry into a longer, more detailed article in the near future and if so, I may be able to share my impressions of them then.