24 September 2008 - 12:11Adobe CS4 Revealed

Yesterday, Adobe revealed to the world what features the, soon to be released, Creative Suite 4 would contain, and it seems pretty good.

While not as exciting as the previous CS3 release perhaps, this release builds strongly on their existing tech and makes some real improvements in work flow and productivity.

Obviously the focus of my interest is on the web aspects of the release, and Flash CS4 in particular. So here’s a few key features that caught my attention:

Flash CS4 & Flash Player 10

• 3D now built in
  It appears to be a 2.5D approach to 3D but super useful to do simple papervison 3D style effects.
• Bones Tool
  Allowing you to add ‘bones’ to a single / collection of movieclips. Basically this means you can connect a series of clips together (arms, bodies, legs etc) with a skeleton, and using Inverse Kinematics, keep all the parts together and moving, not unlike a puppet. This will make character animation soooo much easier now… having created a walking animation just yesterday, I can vouch for this.
• Object-based animation
  You can now adjust individual animation attributes (scale, rotation, alpha etc) independently and they are no longer tied to a single keyframe. So we can say goodbye to complicated nested animations. If you have used after effects, then you will already be familiar with this approach. Again, a really great time saver…
• Publish To Air
  As you can with FlexBuilder, you can now publish directly to Air to create your desktop applications from Flash.
• Player 10, Custom Filters & MP3
  With Flash Player 10 Beta & Adobe Pixel Bender, we can now start creating our own visual fx filters, blends & fills and not just be limited to what is prebuilt into the player, like drop shadow & blur etc. Also, lower level access to the Sound API, means we can manipulate & mix MP3s with more precission (I hope) and also using Adobe Pixel Bender (as above (weird )) we can even create our own audio filters (distortion, reverb etc) … watch out for Cubase / Logic online coming to a browser near you soon .

Dreamweaver CS4

• Ajax & CSS
  Dreamweaver’s upgrade is not quite as exciting, but some useful editing tools for CSS & AKAX have been added to speed up work flow.
• Browser Built In
  You can now preview your work within DW, using the built in browser. This allows you to quickly preview but also step through the code as you are interacting with the page… nice.

Photoshop CS4

• Content aware scaling
  This seems like a really great tool that allows you to easily scale an image, but leave certain areas unscaled. So if you want to scale a landscape, but leave the person in the foreground unscaled, it will do this automatically… again a workflow tool that will save hours of cutting out people from their background etc…
• More 3D Tools
  More 3D tools like 360 panorama tools that allow to edit within the 3D space and the 2D space.
• Faster Processing
  Super fast processing for scaling into and out of images…

There are clearly loads of new features in all of the CS4 products, but these are the ones that grabbed my attention… now we just have to wait for it to be released. I guess I know what’s on my christmas list

Mike